A FEW WORDS ON THOMSON.

"Then view the Lord of the unerring bow,The God of life, and poesy, and light,The Sun in human arms array'd, and browAll radiant from his triumph in the fight.The shaft hath just been shot—the arrow brightWith an immortal vengeance; in his eyeAnd nostril beautiful disdain, and mightAnd majesty flash their full lightnings by,Developing in that one glance the Deity."

Up four flight of stairs we fly—for the bath is in the double-sunk story—ten steps at a bound—and in five minutes have devoured one quartern loaf, six eggs, and a rizzar, washing all over with a punch-bowl of congou and a tea-bowl of coffee.

"Enormous breakfast,Wild without rule or art! Where nature playsHer virgin fancies."

And then, leaning back on our Easy-chair, we perform an exploit beyond the reach of Euclid—why,we Square the Circle, and to the utter demolition of our admirable friend Sir David Brewster's diatribe, in a late number of theQuarterly Review, on the indifference of Government to men of science, chuckle over our nobly-won order K.C.C.B., Knight Companion of the Cold Bath.

Many analogies between the seasons of the year and the seasons of life, being natural, have been a frequent theme of poetry in all countries. Had the gods made us poetical, weshould now have poured forth, a few exquisite illustrations of some that are very affecting and impressive. It has, however, often been felt by us, that not a few of those one meets with in the lamentations of whey-faced sentimentalists, are false or fantastic, and do equal violence to all the seasons, both of the year and of life. These gentry have been especially silly upon the similitude of Old Age to Winter. Winter, in external nature, is not the season of decay. An old tree, for example, in the verydeadof winter, as it is figuratively called, though bare of leaves, is full of life. The sap, indeed, has sunk down from his bole and branches—down into his toes or roots. But there it is, ready, in due time, to reascend. Not so with an old man—the present company always excepted;—his sap is not sunk down to his toes, but much of it is gone clean out of the system—therefore, individual natural objects in Winter are not analogically emblematical of people stricken in years. Far less does the Winter itself of the year, considered as a season, resemble the old age of life considered as a season. To what peculiarities, pray, in the character and conduct of aged gentlemen in general, do rain, sleet, hail, frost, ice, snow, winds, blasts, storms, hurricanes, and occasional thunder and lightning, bear analogy? We pause for a reply. Old men's heads, it is true, are frequently white, though more frequently bald, and their blood is not so hot as when they were springalds. But though there be no great harm in likening a sprinkling of white hair on mine ancient's temples to the appearance of the surface of the earth, flat or mountainous, after a slight fall of snow—and indeed, in an impassioned state of mind, we feel a moral beauty in such poetical expression as "sorrow shedding on the head of youth its untimely snows"—yet the natural propriety of such an image, so far from justifying the assertion of a general analogy between Winter and Old Age, proves that the analogies between them are in fact very few, and felt to be analogies at all, only when touched upon very seldom, and very slightly, and, for the most part, very vaguely—the truth being, that they scarcely exist at all in reality, but have an existence given to them by the power of creative passion, which often works like genius. Shakespeare knew this well—as he knew everything else; and, accordingly, he gives us Seven Ages of Life—not Four Seasons. But how finely does he sometimes, by the mere use of the names of theSeasons of the Year, intensify to our imagination the mental state to which they are for the moment felt to be analogous?—

"Now is the winter of our discontentMade glorious summer by the sun of York!"

That will do. The feeling he wished to inspire, is inspired; and the further analogical images which follow add nothing toourfeeling, though they show the strength and depth ofhisinto whose lips they are put. A bungler would have bored us with ever so many ramifications of the same idea, on one of which, in our weariness, we might have wished him hanged by the neck till he was dead.

We are an Old Man, and though single not singular; yet, without vanity, we think ourselves entitled to say, that we are no more like Winter, in particular, than we are like Spring, Summer, or Autumn. The truth is, that we are much less like any one of the Seasons, than we are like the whole Set. Is not Spring sharp? So are we. Is not Spring snappish? So are we. Is not Spring boisterous? So are we. Is not Spring "beautiful exceedingly?" So are we. Is not Spring capricious? So are we. Is not Spring, at times, the gladdest, gayest, gentlest, mildest, meekest, modestest, softest, sweetest, and sunniest of all God's creatures that steal along the face of the earth? So are we. So much for our similitude—a staring and striking one—to Spring. But were you to stop there, what an inadequate idea would you have of our character! For only ask your senses, and they will tell you that we are much liker Summer. Is not Summer often infernally hot? So are we. Is not Summer sometimes cool as its own cucumbers? So are we. Does not Summer love the shade? So do we. Is not Summer, nevertheless, somewhat "too much i' the sun?" So are we. Is not Summer famous for its thunder and lightning? So are we. Is not Summer, when he chooses, still, silent, and serene as a sleeping seraph? And so too—when Christopher chooses—are not we? Though, with keen remorse we confess it, that, when suddenly wakened, we are too often more like a fury or a fiend—and that completes the likeness; for all who know a Scottish Summer, with one voice exclaim—"So is he!" But our portrait is but half-drawn; you know but a moiety of our character. Is Autumn jovial?—ask Thomson—so are we. Is Autumn melancholy?—ask Alison and Gillespie—so are we. Is Autumn bright?—ask the woods and groves—so are we. Is Autumn rich?—ask the whole world—so are we. Does Autumn rejoice in the yellow grain and the golden vintage, that, stored up in his great Magazine of Nature, are lavishly thence dispensed to all that hunger, and quench the thirst of the nations? So do we. After that, no one can be so pur-and-bat-blind as not see that North is, in very truth, Autumn's gracious self, rather than his Likeness or Eidolon. But—

"Lo, Winter comes to rule th' inverted year!"

So do we,

"Sullen and sad, with all his rising train—Vapours, and clouds, and storms!"

So are we. The great author of the "Seasons" says, that Winter and his train

"Exalt the soul to solemn thought,And heavenly musing!"

So do we. And, "lest aught less great should stamp us mortal," here we conclude the comparison, dashed off in few lines by the hand of a great master, and ask, Is not North, Winter? Thus, listener after our own heart! thou feelest that we are imaged aright in all our attributes neither by Spring, nor Summer, nor Autumn, nor Winter; but that the character of Christopher is shadowed forth and reflected by the Entire Year.

Poetry, one might imagine, must be full of Snow-scenes. If so, they have almost all dissolved—melted away from our memory—as the transiencies in nature do which they coldly pictured. Thomson's "Winter," of course, we do not include in our obliviousness—and from Cowper's "Task" we might quote many a most picturesque Snow-piece. But have frost and snow been done full justice to by them or any other of our poets? They have been well spoken of by two—Southey and Coleridge—of whose most poetical compositions respectively, "Thalaba" and the "Ancient Mariner," in some future volume we may dissert. Thomson's genius does not so often delight us by exquisite minute touches in the description of nature as that of Cowper. It loves to paint on a great scale, and to dash objects off sweepingly by bold strokes—such, indeed, as have almost always distinguished the mighty masters of the lyre and the rainbow. Cowper sets nature before your eyes—Thomson before your imagination. Which do you prefer? Both. Be assured that both poets had pored night and day upon her—in all her aspects—and that she had revealed herself fully to both. But they, in their religion, elected different modes of worship—and both were worthy of the mighty mother. In one mood of mind we love Cowper best, in another Thomson. Sometimes the Seasons are almost a Task—and sometimes the Task is out of Season. There is delightful distinctness in all the pictures of the Bard of Olney—glorious gloom or glimmer in most of those of the Bard of Ednam. Cowper paints trees—Thomson woods. Thomson paints, in a few wondrous lines, rivers from source to sea, like the mighty Burrampooter—Cowper, in many no very wondrous lines, brightens up one bend of a stream, or awakens our fancy to the murmur of some single waterfall. But a truce to antithesis—a deceptive style of criticism—and see how Thomson sings of Snow. Why, in the following lines, as well as Christopher North in his Soliloquy on the Seasons—

"The cherish'd fieldsPut on their winter-robe of purest white.'Tis brightness all; save where the new snow meltsAlong the mazy current."

Nothing can be more vivid. 'Tis of the nature of an ocular spectrum.

Here is a touch like one of Cowper's. Note the beauty of the epithet "brown," where all that is motionless is white—

"The foodless wildsPour forth theirbrowninhabitants."

That one word proves the poet. Does it not?

The entire description from which these two sentences are selected by memory—a critic you may always trust to—is admirable; except in one or two places where Thomson seems to have striven to be strongly pathetic, and where he seems to us to have overshot his mark, and to have ceased to be perfectly natural. Thus—

"Drooping, the oxStands cover'd o'er with snow, and then demandsThe fruit of all his toil."

The image of the ox is as good as possible. We see him, and could paint him in oils. But, to our mind, the notion of his "demanding the fruit of all his toils"—to which we freely acknowledge the worthy animal was well entitled—sounds, as it is here expressed, rather fantastical. Call it doubtful—for Jemmy was never utterly in the wrong in any sentiment. Again—

"The bleating kindEye the bleak heaven, and next the glistening earth,With looks of dumb despair."

The second line is perfect; but the Ettrick Shepherd agreed with us—one night at Ambrose's—that the third was not quite right. Sheep, he agreed with us, do not deliver themselves up to despair under any circumstances; and here Thomson transferred what would have been his own feelingin a corresponding condition, to animals who dreadlessly follow their instincts. Thomson redeems himself in what immediately succeeds—

"Then, sad dispersed,Dig for the wither'd herb through heaps of snow."

For, as they disperse, they do look very sad—and no doubt are so; but had they been in despair, they would not so readily, and constantly, and uniformly, and successfully, have taken to the digging, but whole flocks had perished.

You will not, we are confident, be angry with us for quoting a few lines that occur soon after, and which are a noble example of the sweeping style of description which, we said above, characterises the genius of this sublime poet:—

"From the bellowing east,In this dire season, oft the whirlwind's wingSweeps up the burden of whole wintry plainsAt one wide waft, and o'er the hapless flocks,Hid in the hollow of two neighbouring hills,The billowy tempest whelms; till, upward urged,The valley to a shining mountain swells,Tipp'd with a wreath high-curling in the sky."

Well might the Bard, with such a snow-storm in his imagination, when telling the shepherds to be kind to their helpless charge, addressed them in language which, in an ordinary mood, would have been bombast. "Shepherds," says he, "baffle the raging year!" How? Why merely by filling their pens with food. But the whirlwind was up—

"Far off its cominggroan'd,"

and the poet was inspired. Had he not been so, he had not cried, "Baffle the raging year;" and if you be not so, you will think it a most absurd expression.

Did you ever see water beginning to change itself into ice? Yes. Then try to describe the sight. Success in that trial will prove you a poet. People do not prove themselves poets only by writing long poems. A line—two words—may show that they are the Muse's sons. How exquisitely does Burns picture to our eyes moonlight water undergoing an ice-change!

"The chilly frost beneath the silver beam,Crept, gently crusting o'er the glittering stream!"

Thomson does it with an almost finer spirit of perception—or conception—or memory—or whatever else you choose to call it; for our part, we call it genius—

"An icy gale, oft shifting, o'er the poolBreathes a blue film, and in its mid careerArrests the bickering stream."

And afterwards, having frozen the entire stream into a "crystal pavement," how strongly doth he conclude thus—

"The whole imprison'd river growls below."

Here, again, 'tis pleasant to see the peculiar genius of Cowper contrasted with that of Thomson. The gentle Cowper delighting, for the most part, in tranquil images—for his life was passed amidst tranquil nature; the enthusiastic Thomson, more pleased with images of power. Cowper says—

"On the flood,Indurated and fixed, the snowy weightLies undissolved,while silently beneath,And unperceived, the current steals away."

How many thousand times the lines we are now going to quote have been quoted, nobody can tell; but we quote them once more for the purpose of asking you, if you think that any one poet of this age could have written them—could have chilled one's very blood with such intense feeling of cold! Not one.

"In these fell regions, in Arzina caught,And to the stony deep his idle shipImmediate seal'd, he with his hapless crew,Each full exerted at his several task,Froze into statues; to the cordage gluedThe sailor, and the pilot to the helm!"

The oftener—the more we read the "Winter"—especially the last two or three hundred lines—the angrier is our wonder with Wordsworth for asserting that Thomson owed the national popularity that his "Winter" immediately won, to his "commonplace sentimentalities, and his vicious style!" Yet true it is, that he was sometimes guilty of both; and, but for his transcendent genius, they might have obscured the lustre of hisfame. But such sins are not very frequent in the "Seasons," and were all committed in the glow of that fine and bold enthusiasm, which to his imagination arrayed all things, and all words, in a light that seemed to him at the time to be poetry—though sometimes it was but "false glitter." Admitting, then, that sometimes the style of the "Seasons" is somewhat too florid, we must not criticise single and separate passages, without holding in mind the character of the poet's genius and his inspirations. He luxuriates—he revels—he wantons—at once with an imaginative and a sensuous delight in nature. Besides, he was but young; and his great work was his first. He had not philosophised his poetical language, as Wordsworth himself has done, after long years of profoundest study of the laws of thought and speech. But in such study, while much is gained, may not something be lost? And is there not a charm in the free, flowing, chartered libertinism of the diction and versification of the "Seasons"—above all, in the closing strains of the "Winter," and in the whole of the "Hymn," which inspires a delight and wonder seldom breathed upon us—glorious poem, on the whole, as it is—from the more measured march of the "Excursion?"

All those children of the Pensive Public who have been much at school, know Thomson's description of the wolves among the Alps, Apennines, and Pyrenees,

"Cruel as death, and hungry as the grave!Burning for blood, bony and gaunt and grim!" &c.

The first fifteen lines are equal to anything in the whole range of English descriptive poetry; but the last ten are positively bad. Here they are:—

"The godlike face of man avails him nought!Even beauty, force divine! at whose bright glanceThe generous lion stands in soften'd gaze,Now bleeds, a hapless undistinguish'd prey.But if, apprised of the severe attack,The country be shut up, lured by the scent,On churchyard drear (inhuman to relate!)The disappointed prowlers fall, and digThe shrouded body from the grave; o'er which,Mix'd with foul shades and frighted ghosts, they howl."

Wild beasts do not like the look of the human eye—theythink us ugly customers—and sometimes stand shilly-shallying in our presence, in an awkward but alarming attitude, of hunger mixed with fear. A single wolf seldom or never attacks a man. He cannot stand the face. But a person would need to have a godlike face indeed to terrify therewith an army of wolves some thousand strong. It would be the height of presumption in any man, though beautiful as Moore thought Byron, to attempt it. If so, then

"The godlike face of man avails him nought,"

is, under the circumstances, ludicrous. Still more so is the trash about "beauty, force divine!" It is too much to expect of an army of wolves some thousand strong, "and hungry as the grave," that they should all fall down on their knees before a sweet morsel of flesh and blood, merely because the young lady was so beautiful that she might have sat to Sir Thomas Lawrence for a frontispiece to Mr Watts's "Souvenir." 'Tis all stuff, too, about the generous lion standing in softened gaze at beauty's bright glance. True, he has been known to look with a certain sort of soft surliness upon a pretty Caffre girl, and to walk past without eating her—but simply because, an hour or two before, he had dined on a Hottentot Venus. The secret lay not in his heart, but in his stomach. Still the notion is a popular one, and how exquisitely has Spenser changed it into the divinest poetry in the character of the attendant lion of

"Heavenly Una, with her milk-white lamb!"

But Thomson, so far from making poetry of it in this passage, has vulgarised and blurred by it the natural and inevitable emotion of terror and pity. Famished wolveshowkingup the dead is a dreadful image—but "inhuman to relate," is not an expression heavily laden with meaning; and the sudden, abrupt, violent, and, as we feel, unnatural introduction of ideas purely superstitious, at the close, is revolting, and miserably mars the terribletruth.

"Mix'd with foul shades and frighted ghosts, they howl."

Why, pray, are the shades foul, and the ghosts only frightened? And wherein lies the specific difference between a shade and a ghost? Besides, if the ghosts were frightened, whichthey had good reason to be, why were not they off? We have frequently read of their wandering far from home, on occasions when they had no such excellent excuse to offer. This line, therefore, we have taken the liberty to erase from our pocket-copy of the "Seasons"—and to draw a few keelavine strokes over the rest of the passage—beginning with "man's godlike face."

Go read, then, the opening of "Winter," and acknowledge that, of all climates and all countries, there are none within any of the zones of the earth that will bear a moment's comparison with those of Scotland. Forget the people if you can, and think only of the region. The lovely Lowlands undulating away into the glorious Highlands—the spirit of sublimity and the spirit of beauty one and the same, as it blends them in indissoluble union. Bury us alive in the dungeon's gloom—incommunicable with the light of day as the grave—it could not seal our eyes to the sight of Scotland. We should see it still by rising or by setting suns. Whatever blessed scene we chose to call on would become an instant apparition. Nor in that thick-ribbed vault would our eyes be deaf to her rivers and her seas. We should say our prayers to their music, and to the voice of the thunder on a hundred hills. We stand now in no need of senses. They are waxing dim—but our spirit may continue to brighten long as the light of love is allowed to dwell therein, thence proceeding over nature like a victorious morn.

There are many beautiful passages in the poets aboutRain; but who ever sang its advent so passionately as in these strains?—

"The effusive southWarms the wide air, and o'er the void of heavenBreathes the big clouds with vernal showers distent.At first a dusky wreath they seem to rise,Scarce staining ether; but by swift degrees,In heaps on heaps, the doubling vapour sailsAlong the loaded sky, and mingling deepSits on th' horizon round a settled gloom:Not such as wintry storms on mortals shed,Oppressing life; but lovely, gentle, kind,And full of every hope and every joy,The wish of nature. Gradual sinks the breezeInto a perfect calm, that not a breathIs heard to quiver through the closing woods,Or rustling turn the many-twinkling leavesOf aspen tall. Th' uncurling floods diffusedIn glassy breadth, seem through delusive lapseForgetful of their course. 'Tis silence allAnd pleasing expectation. Herds and flocksDrop the dry sprig, and, mute-imploring, eyeThe falling verdure!"

All that follows is, you know, as good—better it cannot be—till we come to the close, the perfection of poetry, and then sally out into the shower, and join the hymn of earth to heaven—

"The stealing shower is scarce to patter heardBy such as wander through the forest walks,Beneath th' umbrageous multitude of leaves.But who can hold the shade, while heaven descendsIn universal bounty, shedding herbs,And fruits, and flowers, on Nature's ample lap?Swift Fancy fired anticipates their growth;And, while the milky nutriment distils,Beholds the kindling country colour round."

Thomson, they say, was too fond of epithets. Not he, indeed. Strike out one of the many there—and your sconce shall feel the crutch. A poet less conversant with nature would have feared to say, "sits on the horizon rounda settled gloom," or rather, he would not have seen or thought it was a settled gloom; and, therefore, he could not have said—

——"But lovely, gentle, kind,And full of every hope and every joy,The wish of Nature."

Leigh Hunt—most vivid of poets, and most cordial of critics—somewhere finely speaks of a ghastly line in a poem of Keats'—

"Riding to Florence with the murder'd man;"

that is, the man about to be murdered—imagination conceiving as one, doom and death. Equally great are the words—

"Herds and flocksDrop the dry sprig, and, mute-imploring, eyeThe falling verdure."

The verdure is seen in the shower—to be the very shower—by the poet at least—perhaps by the cattle, in their thirsty hunger forgetful of the brown ground, and swallowing the dropping herbage. The birds had not been so sorely distressed by the drought as the beasts, and therefore the poet speaks of them, not as relieved from misery, but as visited with gladness—

"Hush'd in short suspense,The plumy people streak their wings with oil,To throw the lucid moisture trickling off,And wait th' approaching sign, to strike, at once,Into the general choir."

Then, and not till then, thehumanepoet bethinks him of the insensate earth—insensate not; for beast and bird being satisfied, and lowing and singing in their gratitude, so do the places of their habitation yearn for the blessing—

"E'en mountains, vales,And forests, seem impatient, to demandThe promised sweetness."

ThereligiousPoet then speaks for his kind—and says devoutly—

"Man superior walksAmid the glad creation, musing praise,And looking lively gratitude."

In that mood he is justified to feast his fancy with images of the beauty as well as the bounty of nature; and genius in one line has concentrated them all—

"Beholds the kindling country colour round."

'Tis "an a' day's rain"—and "the well-showered earth is deep-enriched with vegetable life." And what kind of an evening? We have seen many such—and every succeeding one more beautiful, more glorious to our eyes than another—because of these words in which the beauty and the glory of one and all are enshrined—

"Till, in the western sky, the downward sunLooks out, effulgent, from amid the flushOf broken clouds, gay-shifting to his beam.The rapid radiance, instantaneous, strikesTh' illumined mountain, through the forest streams,Shakes on the floods, and in a yellow mist,Far smoking o'er th' interminable plain,In twinkling myriads lights the dewy gems.Moist, bright, and green, the landscape laughs around.Full swell the woods; their every music wakes,Mix'd in wild concert with the warbling brooksIncreased, the distant bleatings of the hills,And hollow lows responsive from the vales,Whence, blending all, the sweeten'd zephyr springs.Meantime, refracted from yon eastern cloud,Bestriding earth, the grand ethereal bowShoots up immense; and every hue unfoldsIn fair proportion, running from the redTo where the violet fades into the sky."

How do you like our recitation of that surpassing strain? Every shade of feeling should have its shade of sound—every pause its silence. But these must all come and go, untaught, unbidden, from the fulness of the heart. Then indeed, and not till then, can words be said to be set to music—to a celestial sing-song.

The mighty Minstrel recited old Ballads with a warlike march of sound that made one's heart leap, while his usually sweet smile was drawn in, and disappeared among the glooms that sternly gathered about his lowering brows, and gave his whole aspect a most heroic character. Rude verses, that from ordinary lips would have been almost meaningless, from his came inspired with passion. Sir Philip Sidney, who said that "Chevy Chase" roused him like the sound of a trumpet, had he heard Sir Walter Scott recite it, would have gone distracted. Yet the "best judges" said he murdered his own poetry—we say about as much as Homer. Wordsworth recites his own Poetry (catch him reciting any other) magnificently—while his eyes seem blind to all outward objects, like those of a somnambulist. Coleridge was the sweetest of sing-songers—and his silver voice "warbled melody." Next to theirs, we believe our own recitation of Poetry to be the most impressive heard in modern times, though we cannot deny that the leathern-eared have pronounced it detestable, and the long-eared ludicrous; their delight being in what is called Elocution, as it is taught by player-folk.

O friendly reader of these our Recreations! thou needst notto be told—yet in love let us tell thee—that there are a thousand ways of dealing in description with Nature, so as to make her poetical; but sentiment there always must be, else it is stark nought. You may infuse the sentiment by a single touch—by a ray of light no thicker, nor one thousandth part so thick, as the finest needle ever silk-threaded by lady's finger; or you may dance it in with a flutter of sunbeams; or you may splash it in as with a gorgeous cloud-stain stolen from sunset; or you may bathe it in with a shred of the rainbow. Perhaps the highest power of all possessed by the sons of song, is to breathe it in with the breath, to let it slip in with the light of the common day!

Then some poets there are, who show you a scene all of a sudden, by means of a few magical words—just as if you opened your eyes at their bidding—and in place of a blank, a world. Others, again, as good and as great, create their world gradually before your eyes, for the delight of your soul, that loves to gaze on the growing glory; but delight is lost in wonder, and you know that they, too, are warlocks. Some heap image upon image, piles of imagery on piles of imagery, as if they were ransacking and robbing, and red-reavering earth, sea, and sky; yet all things there are consentaneous with one grand design, which, when consummated, is a Whole that seems to typify the universe. Others give you but fragments—but such as awaken imaginations of beauty and of power transcendent, like that famous Torso. And some show you Nature glimmering beneath a veil which, nunlike, she has religiously taken; and then call not Nature ideal only in that holy twilight, for then it is that she is spiritual, and we who belong to her feel that we shall live for ever.

Thus—and in other wondrous ways—the great poets are the great painters, and so are they the great musicians. But how they are so, some other time may we tell; suffice it now to say, that as we listen to the mighty masters—"sole or responsive to each other's voice"—

"Now, 'tis like all instruments,Now like a lonely lute;And now 'tis like an angel's songThat bids the heavens be mute!"

Why will so many myriads of men and women, denied bynature "the vision and the faculty divine," persist in the delusion that they are poetising, while they are but versifying "this bright and breathing world?" They see truly not even the outward objects of sight. But of all the rare affinities and relationships in Nature, visible or audible to Fine-ear-and-Far-eye the Poet, not a whisper—not a glimpse have they ever heard or seen, any more than had they been born deaf-blind.

They paint a landscape, but nothing "prates of their whereabouts," while they were sitting on a tripod, with their paper on their knees, drawing—their breath. For, in the front ground is a castle, against which, if you offer to stir a step, you infallibly break your head, unless providentially stopped by that extraordinary vegetable-looking substance, perhaps a tree, growing bolt upright out of an intermediate stone, that has wedged itself in long after there had ceased to be even standing-room in that strange theatre of nature. But down from "the swelling instep of a mountain's foot," that has protruded itself through a wood, while the body of the mountain prudently remains in the extreme distance, descends on you, ere you have recovered from your unexpected encounter with the old Roman cement, an unconscionable cataract. There stands a deer or goat, or rather some beast with horns, "strictly anonymous," placed for effect, contrary to all cause, in a place where it seems as uncertain how he got in as it is certain that he never can get out till he becomes a hippogriff.

The true poet, again, has such potent eyes, that when he lets down the lids, he sees just as well, perhaps better than when they were up; for in that deep, earnest, inward gaze, the fluctuating sea of scenery subsides into a settled calm, where all is harmony as well as beauty—order as well as peace. What though he have been fated, through youth and manhood, to dwell in city smoke? His childhood—his boyhood—were overhung with trees, and through its heart went the murmur of waters. Then it is, we verily believe, that in all poets, is filled with images up to the brim, Imagination's treasury. Genius, growing, and grown up to maturity, is still a prodigal. But he draws on the Bank of Youth. His bills, whether at a short or long date, are never dishonoured; nay, made payable at sight, they are as good as gold. Nor cares that Bank for a run, made even in a panic, for besides bars and billets, andwedges and blocks of gold, there are, unappreciable beyond the riches which against a time of trouble

"The Sultaun hides in his ancestral tombs,"

jewels and diamonds sufficient

"To ransom great kings from captivity."

We sometimes think that the power of painting Nature to the life, whether in her real or ideal beauty (both belong tolife,) is seldom evolved to its utmost, until the mind possessing it is withdrawn in the body from all ruralenvironment. It has not been so with Wordsworth, but it was so with Milton. The descriptive poetry in "Comus" is indeed rich as rich may be, but certainly not so great, perhaps not so beautiful, as that in "Paradise Lost."

It would seem to be so with all of us, small as well as great; and werewe—Christopher North—to compose a poem on Loch Skene, two thousand feet or so above the level of the sea, and some miles from a house, we should desire to do so in a metropolitan cellar. Desire springs from separation. The spirit seeks to unite itself to the beauty it loves, the grandeur it admires, the sublimity it almost fears; and all these being o'er the hills and far away, or on the hills cloud-hidden, why it—the spirit—makes itself wings—or rather wings grow up of themselves in its passion, and naturewards it flies like a dove or an eagle. People looking at us believe us present, but they never were so far mistaken in their lives; for in the Seamew are we sailing with the tide through the moonshine on Loch Etive—or hanging o'er that gulf of peril on the bosom of Skyroura.

We are sitting now in a dusky den—with our eyes shut—but we see the whole Highlands. Our Highland Mountains are of the best possible magnitude—ranging between two and four thousand feet high—and then in what multitudes! The more familiar you become with them, the mightier they appear—and you feel that it is all sheer folly to seek to dwindle or dwarf them, by comparing them as they rise before your eyes with your imagination of Mont Blanc and those eternal glaciers. If you can bring them under your command, you are indeed a sovereign—and have a noble set of subjects. In some weather they are of any height you choose to put them—say thirtythousand feet—in other states of the atmosphere you think you could walk over their summits and down into the region beyond in an hour. Try. We have seen Cruachan, during a whole black day, swollen into such enormous bulk, that Loch Awe looked like but a sullen river at his base, her woods bushes, and Kilchurn no bigger than a cottage. The whole visible scene was but he and his shadow. They seemed to make the day black, rather than the day to make them so—and at nightfall he took wider and loftier possession of the sky—the clouds congregated round without hiding his summit, on which seemed to twinkle, like earth-lighted fires, a few uncertain stars. Rain drives you into a shieling—and you sit there for an hour or two in eloquent confabulation with the herdsman, your English against his Gaelic. Out of the door you creep—and gaze in astonishment on a new world. The mist is slowly rolling up and away in long lines of clouds, preserving, perhaps, a beautiful regularity on their ascension and evanescence, and between them

"Tier above tier, a wooded theatreOf stateliest view,"

or cliff galleries with strange stone-images sitting up aloft; and yet your eyes have not reached the summits, nor will they reach them, till all that vapoury ten-mile-long mass dissolve, or be scattered, and then you start to see them, as if therein had been but their bases,$1, with here and there a peak illumined, reposing in the blue serene that smiles as if all the while it had been above reach of the storm.

The power of Egoism accompanies us into solitude; nay, is even more life-pervading there than in the hum of men. There the stocks and stones are more impressible than those we sometimes stumble on in human society, and, moulded at our will, take what shape we choose to give them; the trees follow our footsteps, though our lips be mute, and we may have left at home our fiddle—more potent we in our actuality than the fabled Orpheus. Be hushed, ye streams, and listen unto Christopher! Be chained, ye clouds, and attentive unto North! And at our bidding silent the cataract on the cliff—the thunder on the sky. The sea beholds us on the shore—and his one huge frown transformed into a multitudinous smile, he turns flowing affections towards us along the goldensands—and in a fluctuating hindrance of lovely foam-wreaths envelopes our feet!

To return to Thomson. Wordsworth labours to prove, in one of his "postliminious prefaces," that the true spirit of "The Seasons," till long after their publication, was neither felt nor understood. In the conduct of his argument he does not shine. That the poem was at once admired he is forced to admit; but then, according to him, the admiration was false and hollow—it was regarded but with that wonder which is the "natural product of ignorance." After having observed that, excepting the "Nocturnal Reverie" of Lady Winchilsea, and a passage or two in the "Windsor Forest" of Pope, the poetry of the period intervening between the publication of the "Paradise Lost" and "The Seasons" does not contain a single new image of external nature, he proceeds to call the once well-known verses of Dryden in the "Indian Emperor," descriptive of the hush of night, "vague, bombastic, and senseless," and Pope's celebrated translation of the moonlight scene in the "Iliad," altogether "absurd,"—and then, without ever once dreaming of any necessity of showing them to be so, or even, if he had succeeded in doing so, of the utter illogicality of any argument drawn from their failure to establish the point he is hammering at, he all at once says, with the most astounding assumption, "having shownthat much of what his [Thomson's] biographer deemed genuine admiration, must, in fact, have been blind wonderment—how is the rest to be accounted for?""Having shown"!!!Why, he has shown nothing but his own arrogance in supposing that his mereipse dixitwill be taken by the whole world as proof that Dryden and Pope had not the use of their eyes. "Strange to think of an enthusiast," he says (alluding to the passage in Pope's translation of the "Iliad"), "as may have been the case with thousands, reciting those verses under the cope of a moonlight sky, without having his raptures in the least disturbed by a suspicion of theirabsurdity!" We are no enthusiasts—we are far too old for that folly; but we have eyes in our head, though sometimes rather dim and motey, and as good eyes, too, as Mr Wordsworth, and we often have recited—and hope often will recite them again—Pope's exquisite lines, not only without any "suspicion of their absurdity," but with the conviction of a most devout belief that, with somelittle vagueness perhaps, and repetition, and a word here and there that might be altered for the better, the description is most beautiful. But grant it miserable—grant all Mr Wordsworth has so dictatorially uttered—and what then? Though descriptive poetry did not flourish during the period between "Paradise Lost" and "The Seasons," nevertheless, did not mankind enjoy the use of their seven senses? Could they not see and hear without the aid of those oculists and aurists, the poets? Were all the shepherds and agriculturists of England and Scotland blind and deaf to all the sights and sounds of nature, and all the gentlemen and ladies too, from the king and queen upon the throne, to the lowest of their subjects? Very like a whale! Causes there were why poetry flowed during that era in another channel than that of the description of natural scenery; and if it flowed too little in that channel then—which is true—equally is it true that it flows now in it too much—especially among the poets of the Lake School, to the neglect, not of sentiments and affections—for there they excel—but of strong direct human passion applied to the stir and tumult—of which the interest is profound and eternal—of all the great affairs of human life. But though the descriptive poets during the period between Milton and Thomson were few and indifferent, no reason is there in this world for imagining, with Mr Wordsworth, that men had forgotten both the heavens and the earth. They had not—nor was the wonder with which they must have regarded the great shows of nature, the "natural product of ignorance," then, any more than it is now, or ever was during a civilised age. If we be right in saying so—then neither could the admiration which "The Seasons," on the first appearance of that glorious poem, excited, be said, with any truth, to have been but a "wonder, the natural product of ignorance."

Mr Wordsworth having thus signally failed in his attempt to show that "much of what Thomson's biographer deemed genuine admiration, must, in fact, have been blind wonderment," let us accompany him in his equally futile efforts to show "how the rest is to be accounted for." He attempts to do so after this fashion: "Thomson was fortunate in the very title of his poem, which seemed to bring it home to the prepared sympathies of every one; in the next place, notwithstanding his high powers, he writes a vicious style; and his false ornaments are exactly of that kind which would be mostlikely to strike the undiscerning. He likewise abounds with sentimental commonplaces, that, from the manner in which they were brought forward, bore an imposing air of novelty. In any well-used copy of 'The Seasons,' the book generally opens of itself with the Rhapsody on Love, or with one of the stories, perhaps of Damon and Musidora. These also are prominent in our Collections of Extracts, and are the parts of his work which, after all, were probably most efficient in first recommending the author to general notice."

Thomson, in one sense,was fortunatein thetitleof his poem. But a great poet like Wordsworth might—nay, ought to have chosen another word—or have given of that word a loftier explanation, when applied to Thomson'schoiceof the Seasons for the subject of his immortal poem. Genius made that choice—not fortune. The "Seasons" are not merely the "title" of his poem—they are his poem, and his poem is the Seasons. But how, pray, can Thomson be said to have beenfortunatein thetitleor the subject either of his poem, in the sense that Mr Wordsworth means? Why, according to him, people knew little, and cared less, about the Seasons. "The art of seeing had in some measure been learned!" That he allows—but that was all—and that all is but little—and surely far from being enough to have disposed people in general to listen to the strains of a poet who painted nature in all her moods, and under all her aspects. Thomson, then, we say, was either mostunfortunatein the title of his poem, or there was not with the many that indifference to, and ignorance of natural scenery, on which Mr Wordsworth so strenuously insists as part, or rather whole, of his preceding argument.

The title, Mr Wordsworth says, seemed "to bring the poem home to theprepared sympathiesof every one!" What! to the prepared sympathies of those who had merely, in some measure, learned the "art of seeing," and who had "paid," as he says in another sentence, "little accurate attention to the appearances of nature!" Never did the weakest mind ever fall into grosser contradictions than does here one of the strongest, in vainly labouring to bolster up a silly assertion, which he has desperately ventured on from a most mistaken conceit that it was necessary to account for the kind of reception which his own poetry had met with from the present age. The truth is, that had Mr Wordsworth known, when he inditedthese luckless and helpless sentences, that his own poetry was, in the best sense of the word, a thousand times more popular than he supposed it to be—and Heaven be praised, for the honour of the age, it was and is so!—never had they been written, nor had he here and elsewhere laboured to prove that in proportion as poetry is bad, or rather as it is no poetry at all, is it, has been, and always will be, more and more popular in the age contemporary with the writer. That Thomson, in "The Seasons,"sometimeswrites avicious style, may be true; but it is not true that heoftendoes so. His style has its faults, no doubt, and some of them inextricably interwoven with the web of his composition. It is a dangerous style to imitate—especially to dunces. But itsvirtue is divine; and thatdivine virtue, even in this low world of ours, wins admiration more surely and widely thanearthly vice—be it in words, thoughts, feelings, or actions—is a creed that we will not relinquish at the beck or bidding even of the great author of "The Excursion."

That many did—do—and will admire the bad or indifferent passages in "The Seasons"—won by their false glitter or commonplace sentimentalism, is no doubt true: but the delight, though as intense as perhaps it may be foolish, with which boys and virgins, woman-mantuamakers and man-milliners, and "the rest," peruse the Rhapsody on Love—one passage of which we ventured to be facetious on in our Soliloquy on the Seasons—and hang over the picture of Musidora undressing, while Damon watches the process of disrobement, panting behind a tree, will never account for the admiration with which the whole world hailed the "Winter," the first published of "The Seasons;" during which, Thomson had not the barbarity to plunge any young lady naked into the cold bath, nor the ignorance to represent, during such cold weather, any young lady turning her lover sick by the ardour of her looks, and the vehemence of her whole enamoured deportment. The time never was—nor could have been—when such passages were generally esteemed the glory of the poem. Indeed, independently of its own gross absurdity, the assertion is at total variance with that other assertion, equally absurd, that people admired most in the poem what they least understood; for the Rhapsody on Love is certainly very intelligible, nor does there seem much mystery in Musidora going into the water to wash and cool herself on a hot day. Is it notmelancholy, then, to hear such a man as Mr Wordsworth, earnestly, and even somewhat angrily, trying to prove that "these are the parts of the work which, after all, were probably most efficient in first recommending the author to general notice?"

With respect to the "sentimental commonplaces with which Thomson abounds," no doubt they were and are popular; and many of them deserve to be so, for they are on a level with the usual current of human feeling, and many of them are eminently beautiful. Thomson had not the philosophical genius of Wordsworth, but he had a warm human heart, and its generous feelings overflow all his poem. These are not the most poetical parts of "The Seasons," certainly, where such effusions prevail; but still, so far from being eitherviciousorworthless, they have often a virtue and a worth that must be felt by all the children of men. There is something not very credible in the situation of the parties in the story of the "lovely young Lavinia," for example, and much of the sentiment is commonplace enough; but will Mr Wordsworth say—in support of his theory, that the worst poetry is always at first (and at last too, it would seem, from the pleasure with which that tale is still read by all simple minds) the most popular—that that story is a bad one? It is a very beautiful one.

Mr Wordsworth, in all his argumentation, is so blinded by his determination to see everything in but one light, and that a most mistaken one, that he is insensible to the conclusion to which it all leads, or rather, which is involved in it. Why, according to him,even now, when people have not only learned the "art of seeing"—a blessing for which they can never be too thankful—but when descriptive poetry has long flourished far beyond its palmiest state in any other era of our literature, still are we poor common mortals who admire "The Seasons," just as deaf and blind now, or nearly so, to their real merits—allowed to be transcendent—as our unhappy forefathers were when that poem first appeared, "a glorious apparition." The Rhapsody on Love, and Damon and Musidora, are still, according to him, its chief attraction—its false ornaments—and its sentimental commonplaces—such as those, we presume, on the benefits of early rising, and,

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