The Creation (Haydn) of tone painting, perhaps an inspiration to Haydn's own pervasive use of this device in "The Creation". The text of "The Creation" has a long history. The three sources are Genesis, the Biblical book of Psalms, and John Milton's "Paradise Lost". In 1795, when Haydn was leaving England, the impresario Johann Peter Salomon (1745–1815) who had arranged his concerts there handed him a new poem entitled "The Creation of the World". This original had been offered to Handel, but the old master had not worked on it, as its wordiness meant that it would have been 4 hours in length
The Seasons (Haydn) was based on extracts from the long English poem "The Seasons" by James Thomson (1700–1748), which had been published in 1730. Whereas in "The Creation" Swieten was able to limit himself to rendering an existing (anonymous) libretto into German, for "The Seasons" he had a much more demanding task. Olleson writes, "Even when Thomson's images were retained, they required abbreviation and adaptation to such an extent that usually no more than faint echoes of them can be discerned, and the libretto often loses all touch with the poem which was its starting point. Increasingly during the course of the oratorio,