Born at Ednam manse Kelso, 11th Sept. 1700, but brought up at Southdean, Jedburgh. He had studied for the ministry at Edinburgh, when in 1725 he removed to London, and in 1726 published “Winter,” the first of his poems on the “Seasons;” it was immediately successful. “Summer” and “Spring” followed in 1727–28, and in 1730 “Autumn” completed the work. In 1729 his “Sophonisba” was produced. One luckless line, “O Sophonisba, Sophonisba O,” is still remembered for the parody, “O Jemmy Thomson, Jemmy Thomson O,” which killed what little life the piece possessed. His other tragedies were “Agememnon” (1738), “Edward and Eleonora” (1739), “Trancred and Sigismunda” (1745), and “Cariolanus” (1748). In 1731 Thomson was chosen to accompany the son of Lord Chancellor Talbot on the Grand Tour. The poem of “Liberty” (1732), inspired by his travels, was dedicated to the Prince of Wales, who in 1737 gave the poet a pension of £100 a year. He also obtained the sinecure post, worth £300 more, of surveyor-general of the Leeward Islands. In 1740 the “Masque of Alfred” was produced before the Prince and Princess of Wales. It contains “Rule Britannia” (claimed also for Mallet.) Thomson’s finest work, “The Castle of Indolence,” was published in May 1748. He died at Richmond, 27th August following.

Personal

  Dear S^r.
  I promised my Friend Mr. Tompson who is now finishing his Subscription in Oxford, all the advantages I could give him; for w^ch reason I beg leave to introduce him to so valuable an acquaintance as Y^rs. W^ch freedom I hope You will pardon in Dear Sir Y^r most obedient and faithful Serv^t.

  Thomson came at last, and disappointed me both by his appearance and conversation. Armstrong bore him down, having got into his sarcastical vein by the wine he had drunk before Thomson joined us.

	A bard here dwelt, more fat than bard beseems;
	Who, void of envy, guile, and lust of gain,
	On virtue still, and nature’s pleasing themes,
	Pour’d forth his unpremeditated strain;
	The world forsaking with a calm disdain,
	Here laugh’d he careless in his easy seat;
	Here quaff’d, encircled with the joyous train,
	Oft moralizing sage: his ditty sweet
	He loathed much to write, ne car’d to repeat.

  The loss of such an agreeable friend as poor Thomson is so much the more shocking that it was unexpected by everybody. He died of a malignant nervous fever, that came upon the back of a tertian; and I had no notice of his being in any danger till I saw it in the most formidable shapes. It is certain nature was oppressed in him with a great load of materials for a disease, not to be easily thrown off by a constitution so much worn as his was; and if he had struggled through that fever, there are many reasons to believe that it must almost unavoidably have been followed by some lingering disease, much worse than a speedy death. This is the most comfortable light in which I can view this shocking loss.

  Mr. Thomson was at the Leasowes in the summer of 1745, and in the autumn of 1746, and promised when he came again into the country to make a longer visit; but at the time he was expected came an account of his death. It seems he waited too long for the return of his friend, Dr. Armstrong, and did not choose to employ any other physician. He had nothing of the gentleman in his person or address; but he made amends for the deficiency by his refined sense, spirited expressions, and a manner of speaking not unlike his friend Quin. He did not talk a great deal, but after a pause of reflection produced something or other that accounted for his delay. The “Seasons” would make a fine poem in Latin. Its turgid phrases would lose their stiffness, and its vulgar idioms acquire a proper majesty; its propriety and description shine the same.

	Meek Nature’s Child, again adieu!
	The genial meads, assign’d to bless
	Thy life, shall mourn thy early doom;
	Their hinds and shepherd-girls shall dress,
	With simple hands, thy rural tomb.
	Long, long, thy stone and pointed clay
	Shall melt the musing Briton’s eyes:
	“O! vales and wild woods, shall he say,
	In yonder grave your Druid lies!”

	No party his benevolence confined,
	No sect—alike it flow’d to all mankind.
	He loved his friends,—forgive this gushing tear,
	Alas! I feel I am no actor here,—
	He loved his friends with such a warmth of heart,
	So clear of interest, so devoid of art,
	Such generous friendship, such unshaken zeal,
	No words can speak it, but our tears may tell.
	O candid truth, O faith without a stain,
	O manners gently firm, and nobly plain,
	O sympathizing love of others’ bliss,
	Where will you find another breast like his?

  The most benevolent heart that ever warmed the human breast.

  The Rev. Mr. Riccarton, a man of uncommon penetration and good taste, had very early discovered through the rudeness of young Thomson’s puerile essays a fund of genius well deserving culture and encouragement. He undertook therefore, with the father’s approbation, the chief direction of his studies, furnished him with the proper books, corrected his performances, and was daily rewarded with the pleasure of seeing his labour so happily employed.

  Thomson was of stature above the middle size, and “more fat than bard beseems,” of a dull countenance, and a gross, unanimated, uninviting appearance; silent in mingled company, but cheerful among select friends, and by his friends very tenderly and warmly beloved…. Among his peculiarities was a very unskilful and inarticulate manner of pronouncing any lofty or solemn composition.

  So charming Thomson wrote from his lodgings, a milliner’s in Bond Street, where he seldom rose early enough to see the sun do more than glisten on the opposite windows of the street.

  I was acquainted with the author when I stayed in England. I discovered in him a great genius, and a great simplicity: I liked in him the poet and the true philosopher, I mean the lover of mankind. I think that without a good stock of such a philosophy a poet is just above the fidler, who amuses our ears and cannot go to our soul.

  Thomson, the poet, was so extremely indolent, that half his mornings were spent in bed. Dr. Burney having called on him one day at two o’clock, expressed surprise at finding him still there, and asked how he came to lie so long?—“Ecod, mon, because I had no mot-tive to rise,” was his sole answer. (From Dr. Burney).

  He was buried in Richmond Church, under a plain stone without any inscription, and his works formed his only memorial until the erection of the monument in Westminster Abbey, which was opened to public view on the 10th of May, 1762. The cost of it was defrayed by an edition of his works printed, under the superintendence of Murdoch, in two quarto volumes, and published by subscription. It is situated between those of Shakespeare and Rowe; and Thomson appears sitting, leaning his left arm upon a pedestal, and holding a book, with a cap of Liberty, in his right hand. Upon the pedestal is carved a bas-relief of “The Seasons,” to which a boy points, offering him a laurel crown. At the feet of the figure is a tragic mask and ancient harp. The whole is supported by a projecting pedestal; and on a panel is inscribed his name, age, and the date of his death, with the lines which are inserted at the commencement of this Memoir, taken from his “Summer.” The monument was designed by Adam, and executed by Michael Henry Spang…. In person Thomson was rather stout and above the middle size; his countenance was not remarkable for expression, though, in his youth, he was considered handsome, but in conversation his face became animated, and his eye fiery and intellectual. Silent in mixed company, his wit and vivacity seemed reserved for his friends, and in their society he was communicative, playful, and entertaining. Few men possessed in a greater degree the art of creating firm and affectionate friendships. Those with whom he became acquainted at the commencement of his career loved him till its close; and the individuals who had given to his life its sweetest enjoyments watched over his death-bed, and became the guardians of his fame, by superintending the only monuments of which genius ought to be ambitious, a complete edition of his works, and a tablet in Westminster Abbey.

  As far as the restless and rapid change of property would permit so near London, the residence of Thomson has been kept from destruction: changed it is, it is true, but that change has been made with a veneration for the Muse in the heart of the new inhabitant. The house of Thomson, in what is called Kew-foot Lane, at Richmond, as shown in the wood-cut in the head of this article, was a simple cottage; behind this lay his garden, and in front he looked down to the Thames, and on the fine landscape beyond. The cottage now appears to be gone, and in the place stands the goodly villa of the earl of Shaftesbury; the cottage, however, is not really gone, it is only swallowed up in the larger house of the present time. After Thomson’s death, his cottage was purchased by George Ross, Esq., who, out of veneration for his memory, forbore to pull it down, but enlarged and improved it at the expense of £9000. The walls of the cottage were left, though its roof was taken off, and the walls continued upward to their present height. Thus, what was Thomson’s cottage forms now the entrance hall to Lord Shaftesbury’s house…. The garden of Thomson, which lay behind the house has been preserved in the same manner and to the same extent as his house; the garden and its trees remain, but these now form only part of the present grounds, as the cottage forms only part of the present house.

  Placid and good-natured in disposition Thomson undoubtedly always was; sluggish and prone to unconventional habits in later years he must have been, or his friends would not have twitted him so excessively on the matter; but a writer who could put to his credit so much admirable and polished poetical work in a somewhat brief career, could not, on the face of it, have been a trifler once upon a day. The storied peach which he so leisurely plucked from his garden-tree at Richmond has enjoyed a celebrity much exceeding its due; in addition, a man who did his writing chiefly at midnight could not with any sort of fairness be expected to be astir at dawn. Thomson has surely borne undeserved reproach, if not libel, on the score of general inertia…. A writer who could put so much bright, wholesome, and spiritual thinking into his poetry has inevitably drawn there for himself a character with dominant traits of the best and finest; and, upon the whole, there is no significant reason to conclude that he was materially untrue to the ideal which he thus upheld. Men like Lyttelton and Rundle, moral purists not only in sentiment but in practice, delighted in him. And if a man’s letters to his friends are not cunningly devised pieces of deception, then Thomson must be deemed to have been possessed of uncommon goodness of heart.

The Seasons, 1726–30

  Mr. Thomson’s poetical diction in the “Seasons” is very peculiar to him: His manner of writing is entirely his own: He has introduced a number of compound words; converted substantives into verbs, and in short has created a kind of new language for himself. His stile has been blamed for its singularity and stiffness; but with submission to superior judges, we cannot but be of opinion, that though this observation is true, yet is it admirably fitted for description. The object he paints stands full before the eye, we admire it in all its lustre, and who would not rather enjoy a perfect inspection into a natural curiosity through a microscope capable of discovering all the minute beauties, though its exterior form should not be comely, than perceive an object but faintly, through a microscope ill adapted for the purpose, however its outside may be decorated. Thomson has a stiffness in his manner, but then his manner is new; and there never yet arose a distinguished genius, who had not an air peculiarly his own. ’Tis true indeed, the tow’ring sublimity of Mr. Thomson’s stile is ill adapted for the tender passions, which will appear more fully when we consider him as a dramatic writer, a sphere in which he is not so excellent as in other species of poetry.

  Of all professed descriptive compositions, the largest and fullest that I am acquainted with, in any language, is Mr. Thomson’s “Seasons;” a work which possesses very uncommon merit. The style, in the midst of much splendour and strength, is sometimes harsh, and may be censured as deficient in ease and distinctness. But notwithstanding this defect, Thomson is a strong and a beautiful describer; for he had a feeling heart, and a warm imagination. He had studied and copied nature with care. Enamoured of her beauties, he not only described them properly, but felt their impression with strong sensibility. The impression which he felt, he transmits to his readers; and no person of taste can peruse any one of his “Seasons,” without having the ideas and feelings, which belong to that season, recalled and rendered present to his mind.

  Of any works which have obtained considerable applause, Thomson’s poem of “The Seasons” is the most incorrect. Any reader who understands grammar and classic composition, is disgusted in every page of that poem by faults, which, tho in themselves minute, yet to a refined eye hide and obscure every beauty however great, as a very small intervening object will intercept the view of the sun. This reason makes me very much suspect the fame of the “Seasons” will not be of very long existence; for I know of no work that has inherited long reputation which is deficient in style, as the “Seasons” undoubtedly are to a most remarkable degree. The fact is, that the poem on which the future celebrity of Thomson will be founded is, by a strange fatality, almost totally neglected at this day. That is, his “Castle of Indolence:” a poem which has higher beauties than the “Seasons,” without any of the faults which disgrace that work; tho the conclusion even of this is most absurd, and unhappy; and could never have occurred to a writer of taste except in a frightful dream.

	While virgin Spring, by Eden’s flood,
	Unfolds her tender mantle green,
	Or pranks the sod in frolic mood,
	Or tunes the Æolian strains between;
	While Summer, with a matron grace,
	Retreats to Dryburgh’s cooling shade,
	Yet, oft delighted, stops to trace
	The progress of the spikey blade;
	While Autumn, benefactor kind,
	By Tweed erects his aged head,
	And sees, with self-approving mind,
	Each creature on her bounty fed;
	While maniac Winter rages o’er
	The hills whence classic Yarrow flows,
	Rousing the turbid torrent’s roar,
	Or sweeping, wild! a waste of snows;
	So long, sweet Poet of the year!
	Shall bloom that wreath thou well hast won,
	While Scotia, with exulting tear,
	Proclaims that Thomson was her son.

  Can there be a more charming picture of love in marriage, than that which terminates the first ode of Thomson upon Spring?

  It is almost stale to remark the beauties of a poem so universally felt; the truth and genial interest with which he carries us through the life of the year; the harmony of succession, which he gives to the casual phenomena of nature; his pleasing transition from native to foreign scenery; and the soul of exalted and unfeigned benevolence which accompanies his prospects of the creation. It is but equal justice to say, that amidst the feeling and fancy of the Seasons, we meet with interruptions of declamation, heavy narrative, and unhappy digression—with a parhelion eloquence that throws a counterfeit glow of expression on common-place ideas—as when he treats us to the solemnly ridiculous bathing of Musidora; or draws from the classics instead of nature; or, after invoking Inspiration from her hermit-seat, makes his dedicatory bow to a patronizing Countess, or Speaker of the House of Commons. As long as he dwells in the pure contemplation of nature, and appeals to the universal poetry of the human breast, his redundant style comes to us as something venial and adventitious—it is the flowing vesture of the druid; and perhaps to the general experience is rather imposing; but when he returns to the familiar narrations or courtesies of life, the same diction ceases to seem the mantle of inspiration, and only strikes us by its unwieldy difference from the common costume of expression.

  That Thomson’s “Seasons” is the original whence our modern descriptive poets have derived that more elegant and correct style of painting natural objects which distinguishes them from their immediate predecessors, will, I think, appear evident to one who examines their several casts and manners. That none of them, however, have yet equalled their master; and that his performance is an exquisite piece, replete with beauties of the most engaging and delightful kind; will be sensibly felt by all of congenial taste:—and perhaps no poem was ever composed which addressed itself to the feelings of a greater number of readers.

  Are then “The Seasons” and “The Task” Great Poems? Yes.—Why? We shall tell you in two separate articles. But we presume you do not need to be told that that poem must be great, which was the first to paint the rolling mystery of the year, and to shew that all Seasons were but the varied God? The idea was original and sublime; and the fulfilment thereof so complete, that some six thousand years having elapsed between the creation of the world and of that poem, some sixty thousand, we prophesy, will elapse between the appearance of that poem and the publication of another, equally great, on a subject external to the mind, equally magnificent.

  In the whole range of British poetry, Thomson’s “Seasons” are, perhaps, the earliest read, and most generally admired. He was the Poet of Nature, and, studying her deeply, his mind acquired that placidity of thought and feeling which an abstraction from public life is sure to produce…. His pictures of scenery and of rural life are the productions of a master, and render him the Claude of Poets. “The Seasons” are the first book from which we are taught to worship the goddess to whose service the bard of Ednam devoted himself; and who is there that has reflected on the magnificence of an external landscape, viewed the sun as he emerges from the horizon, or witnessed the setting of that glorious orb when he leaves the world to reflection and repose, and does not feel his descriptions rush upon the mind, and heighten the enjoyment?

  No one can read Thomson’s “Seasons” with pleasure, and not be the better for it.

  The finest descriptive poem in the English or perhaps in any language…. The work is animated throughout with so gentle yet so genial a glow of philanthropy and religious gratitude, that its parts are, so to say, fused naturally together; the ever-changing landscape is harmonised by this calm and elevated, and tender spirit, which throws over the whole a soft and all-pervading glow, like the tint of an Italian heaven.

	… as sweet a bard
	(Theocritus and Maro blent in one)
	As ever graced the name….
	The truthful, soul-subduing lays of him
	Whose fame is with his country’s being blent,
	And cannot die;…
	Of him who sang the Seasons as they roll,
	With all a Hesiod’s truth, a Homer’s power,
	And the pure feeling of Simonides.

  While it is not devoid of sentiment, genial and refined, its more striking characteristic is the large extent and compass of knowledge which it displays. I have looked upon it as pre-eminently valuable, from the fulness and beauty of its teachings in all the prominent departments of Natural History, and have thought, that, by a somewhat ample explanation of those subjects in the notes, a taste may be formed, or matured, in this interesting branch of study, and a foundation laid for prosecuting it with happy success.

  The English poet, from the midst of the luxury and the philosophy of the capital, seeks the country,… and though he dedicates his work to a great lady, his feelings are with the people—a people rich and proud of a free fatherland. Like them, he loves its pastures, its forest, and its fields. Thence springs his glowing manner; thence, under a gloomy sky, and in a period of cold philosophy, is his poetry so full of freshness and color.

  It described the scenery and country life of Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter. He wrote with his eye upon their scenery, and even when he wrote of it in his room, it was with a “recollected love.” The descriptions were too much like catalogues, the very fault of the previous Scotch poets, and his style was always heavy and often cold, but he was the first poet who led the English people into that new world of nature in poetry, which has moved and enchanted us in the work of Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats and Tennyson, but which was entirely impossible for Pope to understand. The impulse he gave was soon followed. Men left the town to visit the country and record their feelings.

  In choosing his subject, therefore, and in the minute loving way in which he dwells upon it, Thomson would seem to have been working in the spirit of his country. But there the Scottish element in him begins and ends. Neither in the kind of landscape he pictures, in the rural customs he selects, nor in the language or versification of his poem, is there much savor of Scottish habits or scenery. His blank verse cannot be said to be a garment that fits well to its subject. It is heavy, cumbrous, oratorical, overloaded with epithets, full of artificial invocations, “personified abstractions,” and insipid classicalities. It is a composite style of language formed from the recollection partly of Milton, partly of Virgil’s Georgics. Yet in spite of all these obstructions which repel pure taste and natural feeling, no one can read the four books of the “Seasons” through, without seeing that Thomson, for all his false style, wrote with his eye upon Nature, and laid his finger on many a fact and image never before touched in poetry.

  Thomson’s descriptions are not always due to the colors thrown upon them by his own hopes and fears for himself; it is only passages here and there that have a direct biographical interest. The gloomy notes of the opening of his poem on Winter are only significant of the mood in which he began the poem; once fairly absorbed in his subject, he seems, as it were, to have been carried on the wings of imagination far above and away from the anxieties of his own life, up into sublime contemplation of the great forces of Nature, and into warm sympathy with the human hardships and enjoyments, horrors and amusements, peculiar to the season.

  The “Seasons” was at one time, and for many years the most popular volume of poetry in the country. It was to be found in every cottage, and passages from the poem were familiar to every schoolboy. The appreciation of the work was more affectionate than critical, and Thomson’s faults were sometimes mistaken for beauties; but the popularity of the “Seasons” was a healthy sign, and the poem, a forerunner of Cowper’s “Task,” brought into vigorous life, feelings and sympathies that had been long dormant.

  This Scotch poet is wordy; he draws long breaths; he is sometimes tiresome; but you will catch good honest glimpses of the country in his verse without going there—not true to our American seasons in detail, but always true to Nature. The sun never rises in the west in his poems; the jonquils and the daisies are not confounded; the roses never forget to blush as roses should; the oaks are sturdy; the hazels are lithe; the brooks murmur; the torrents roar a song; the winds carry waves across the grainfields; the clouds plant shadows on the mountains.

  “The Seasons” shows that as far as intrinsic worth is concerned the poems are marked with a strange mingling of merits and defects, but that, considered in their historical place in the development of the poetry of nature, their importance and striking originality can hardly be overstated. Though Thomson talked the language of his day, his thought was a new one. He taught clearly, though without emphasis, the power of nature to quiet the passions and elevate the mind of man, and he intimated a deeper thought of divine immanence in the phenomena of nature. But his great service, to the men of his day was that he shut up their books, led them out of their parks, and taught them to look on nature with enthusiasm.

  Between the ages of Pope and Scott, Thomson continued the most popular poet in the English language, and it would be difficult to set a limit to the extent of his influence. His plays, cold and undramatic, were of no great moment; and his political pieces, dreary diatribes and citations, might have remained unwritten. Even his “Castle of Indolence,” with its rich archaic setting and its sensuous and languid splendour, must have exercised a charm always only upon the inner few. But his “Seasons” were a new voice on the earth; their imagery, fresh and exuberant, carried men back to the natural wells of delight—the simple enjoyments of sense, the glory of valley and woodland, and the magic and the majesty of the sea. The verse, moreover, in which they were written was the first blank verse of the modern kind.

  His style is indeed deeply marked by the artificiality of the time; the blank verse moves heavily; warmth and enthusiasm for his great subject are seldom shown. But he has much small, close, and true observation, in which the lines move with a fresh or spontaneous movement—fine but rare genuine touches of Nature.

  Hazlitt called Thomson “the best of our descriptive poets,” and the title, in its exact sense, will not with justice be denied him. His claim springs first from the completeness of his devotion to the treatment of external nature; no British poet rivals him in absolute absorption in this subject. No work in the range of British literature approaches “The Seasons” in dealing with Nature in a manner so apt and strenuous. Again, he excels in the expansiveness of his power in transcribing from Nature; his imagination ranges afar, while it depicts with precision; he can treat broad and striking areas with force as well as picturesqueness. A third eminent characteristic is the freshness with which he invests his portrayal. In this he is second to none of the most original of his Scottish precursors.

  We have grown so accustomed to a more intimate treatment and a more spiritual interpretation of nature, that we are perhaps too apt to undervalue Thomson’s simple descriptive or pictorial method. Compared with Wordsworth’s mysticism, with Shelley’s passionate pantheism, with Byron’s romantic gloom in presence of the mountains and the sea, with Keats’ joyous re-creation of mythology, with Thoreau’s Indian-like approach to the innermost arcana—with a dozen other moods familiar to the modern mind—it seems to us unimaginative. Thomson has been likened, as a colorist, to Rubens; and possibly the glow, the breadth, and the vital energy of his best passages, as of Rubens’ great canvases, leave our finer perceptions untouched, and we ask for something more esoteric, more intense. Still there are permanent and solid qualities in Thomson’s landscape art, which can give delight even now to an unspoiled taste. To a reader of his own generation, “The Seasons” must have come as the revelation of a fresh world of beauty. Such passages as those which describe the first spring showers, the thunderstorm in summer, the trout-fishing, the sheep-washing, and the terrors of the winter night, were not only strange to the public of that day, but were new in English poetry.

MS. Corrections of the Seasons

  It has long been accepted as a fact among scholars that Pope assisted Thomson in the composition of the “Seasons.” Our original authority for the statement is, I suppose, Joseph Warton. Johnson who had heard, through Savage, a great deal about Thomson, does not mention this…. But if the best authorities at the Museum many years ago were positive that this handwriting is Pope’s, their successors at the present time are equally positive that it is not. On this point the opinion of Mr. Warner, whom Mr. W. Y. Fletcher kindly consulted for me, is very decided. Nor does Mr. Courthope, to whom I have shown the volume, recognize the hand as bearing much resemblance to Pope’s. Without pretending to an independent judgment upon such matters, I must say that it has all along been perplexing to me how the opinion that this was Pope’s handwriting could ever have been confidently entertained…. At present I am inclined to believe these notes to be the work of a very intimate and even devoted friend. If space permitted, I think I could show that they were written by a man of finer taste—perhaps of greater poetic gift—than Thomson himself.

  “Through the black night that sits immense around.” Indeed, throughout “The Seasons” Thomson’s indebtedness to his corrector is incalculable; many of the most felicitous touches are due to him. Now, who was his corrector?… What has long therefore been represented and circulated as an undisputed fact—namely, that Pope assisted Thomson in the revision of “The Seasons”—rests not, as all Thomson’s modern editors, have supposed, on the traditions of the eighteenth century, and on the testimony of authenticated handwriting, but on a mere assumption of Mitford. That the volume in question really belonged to Thomson, and that the corrections are originals, hardly admits of doubt, though Mitford gives neither the pedigree nor the history of this most interesting literary relic. It is of course possible that the corrections are Thomson’s own, and that the differences in the handwriting are attributable to the fact that in some cases he was his own scribe, in others he employed an amanuensis; but the intrinsic unlikeness of the corrections made in the strange hand to his characteristic style renders this improbable. In any case there is nothing to warrant the assumption that the corrector was Pope.

  (1) There is no one to whom Thomson would have, between 1738 and 1744, so likely applied for criticism and suggestions as his friend and neighbour, the great Mr. Pope. (2) There is no one but Pope who could, at that time, have written verse equal or nearly equal to that of Thomson. (3) If the writing be certainly not that of Pope, as it is not either that of any other known writer who could be supposed to have been the author of such emendations and additions, there remains only to conclude that the real author used an amanuensis. But instead of Mr. Churton Collins’s suggestion (which he himself declares to be improbable, and which seems to me utterly untenable) that the notes are Thomson’s while employing an amanuensis, I hold by the notion that, whoever the amanuensis, the notes were dictated by Pope.

Liberty, 1732

  I do not know a pleasure I should enjoy with more pride than that of filling up the leisure of a well employed year in exerting the critic of your poem; in considering it first, with a view to the vastness of its conception, in the general plan, secondly, to the grandeur, the depth, the unleaning, self-supported richness of the sentiments; and thirdly, to the strength, the elegance, the music, the comprehensive living energy, and close propriety of your expression. I look upon this mighty work as the last stretched blaze of our expiring genius. It is the dying effort of despairing and indignant virtue, and will stand, like one of those immortal pyramids, which carry their magnificence through times that wonder to see nothing round them but uncomfortable desert.

  Liberty called in vain upon her votaries to read her praises, and reward her encomiast: her praises were condemned to harbour spiders, and to gather dust: none of Thomson’s performances were so little regarded.

  His poem on Liberty is not equally good: his Muse was too easy and good-natured for the subject, which required as much indignation against unjust and arbitrary power, as complacency in the constitutional monarchy, under which, just after the expulsion of the Stuarts and the establishment of the House of Hanover, in contempt of the claims of hereditary pretenders to the throne, Thomson lived. Thomson was but an indifferent hater; and the most indispensable part of the love of liberty has unfortunately hitherto been the hatred of tyranny. Spleen is the soul of patriotism, and of public good: but you would not expect a man who has been seen eating peaches off a tree with both hands in his waistcoat pockets, to be “overrun with spleen,” or to heat himself needlessly about an abstract proposition.

  Though the most laboured, and in its author’s opinion the best of his productions, “Liberty” was never popular; and perhaps most persons have found it as difficult to read to an end as Dr. Johnson did, who eagerly avails himself of the neglect with which it was treated to indulge in one of those sneers with which his account of Thomson abounds.

  The English poet Thomson wrote a very good poem on the Seasons, but a very bad one on Liberty, and that not from want of poetry in the poet, but from want of poetry in the subject.

  The early productions of Thomson are inferior to the beginnings of most poets, and “Liberty” is a composition which has been seldom perused save by editors and proof-readers.

  His poem upon “Liberty,” which Johnson confesses that he had never read, appears—so far as I have inspected it—to be a series of such sounding commonplaces as Bolingbroke was in the habit of embodying in his political essays. Doubtless, there was some sincerity in such declamation, but clearly there was little passion. It implied contempt for priestcraft, and dislike to the absolute rule of a despot; but not the least desire to upheave and reconstruct society. It is the sentiment of a British Whig, not of Rousseau or Voltaire. The poem on “Liberty” and the plays, in which he indulged the same vein, are as dead as Blackmore.

  Every one who has really endeavoured to read his favourite “Liberty” must endorse Johnson’s contemptuous verdict on it. It is not only not good as a whole, but (which is more remarkable) it is scarcely even good in parts. It is with considerable difficulty that one is able to pick out a few lines here and there where the admirable descriptive faculty of the writer has had room to make itself felt.

  The idea at the root of “Liberty” oppressed him from Paris to Rome, and from Rome back to London. And, after all, the sum and substance of his foreign experience produced no worthy result. The poem proved that constitutional freedom was a theme on which his imagination could not range freely, though it could do so intensely, as in “Rule Britannia.” A rationalised social philosophy was not the kind of work for which he was fitted, though he himself did not yet, if he ever did, perceive this; but it was decisively demonstrated by the common verdict pronounced upon this one deliberate philosophical poem…. The opinion of every succeeding age of readers has reversed the judgment of Thomson on what he considered to be his “noblest work.” No other conclusion is possible. In “Liberty” he attempted a task that both in material and scope was not adapted to his powers.

The Castle of Indolence, 1748

  There is a poem by Thomson, the “Castle of Indolence,” with some good stanzas.

  I conclude you will read Mr. Thomson’s “Castle of Indolence:” it is after the manner of Spenser; but I think he does not always keep so close to his style as the author of the “School-Mistress,” whose name I never knew until you were so good as to inform me of it,—I believe the “Castle of Indolence” will afford you much entertainment; there are many pretty paintings in it; but I think the wizard’s song deserves a preference:

“He needs no muse who dictates from the heart.”

  To the “Castle of Indolence” he brought not only the full nature, but the perfect art, of a poet. The materials of that exquisite poem are derived originally from Tasso; but he was more immediately indebted for them to the “Fairy Queen:” and in meeting with the paternal spirit of Spenser he seems as if he were admitted more intimately to the home of inspiration.

  A structure of genuine talent, certainly not piled when that “bard, more fat than bard beseems,” was, where he delighted to be, on the spot itself, though so witchingly framed for voluptuous ease, that the reader is ready to lie down under its influence,—not, however, to sleep.

  Not only is the best imitation ever made of the great author of “The Faerie Queen,” but one of the most delightful works in the English language.

  “The Castle of Indolence,” more thoroughly complete, more delicately finished, and aspiring to a certain plot and story, displays more of the artist, with very little less of the poet, than the “Seasons.” It is, certainly, the sweetest piece of poetic seduction in the world. No hymn to Sleep ever was so soft—no “dream within a dream,” of rest beyond the dreaming land, was ever so subtle.

  No man or boy need hope to be lured into early rising by the study of this poem.

  The beauty and purity of imagination, also, diffused over the melodious stanzas of the “Castle of Indolence,” make that poem one of the gems of the language.

  Is an exquisite masterpiece, with not a grain of perishable matter in it. Completely free from all of Thomson’s usual faults and less pleasing peculiarities, it is fresh, terse, and natural, perfectly melodious, and has a charming humour rarely displayed by the author in his other pieces, though indicated elsewhere, as, for instance, in the hunters’ drinking-bout in “Autumn.”

  One of the most highly-finished and one of the most imaginative of the productions of the eighteenth century.

  The best poem written between Dryden and Blake…. He has penetrated the secret of the verse-paragraph; he has borrowed many of the minor mannerisms; he has adopted (subject to the influence of two generations of reformed English) the classicalised vocabularies. But he has done more than this. He has put the je ne sais quoi of personality into his rhythm: so that Thomsonian blank verse is a kind in itself, and stands out among the non-dramatic kinds of the English unrhymed decasyllable as no others do but Milton’s own and Tennyson’s.

  No work of poetry between the time of Spenser and Thomson is so marked by this absolutely delicate idealising tendency; nothing like it appears again till the time of Keats. We do not hear much about the significance of Thomson’s part in setting forth anew the “sweet-slipping movement” and charm of the Spenserian manner as a model for the poets of the nineteenth century literary renaissance; but there can be no doubt about the validity of his right in this matter. In the romantic method, so excellently represented by Thomson, Keats may be taken as the most direct successor who understood the extraordinary richness of the note that was struck in “The Castle of Indolence;” for though there is its mystic glamour in the poetry of Coleridge, Keats, in his work, combines in a more general way, the main aims in the literary design of Thomson.

Alfred, 1740

  The music of this noble “ode in honour of Great Britain,” which, according to Southey, “will be the political hymn of this country as long as she maintains her poetical power,” was composed by Dr. Arne for his masque of “Alfred,” and first performed at Cliefden House, near Maidenhead, on August 1, 1740. Cliefden was then the residence of Frederick, Prince of Wales, and the occasion was to commemorate the accession of George I., and in honour of the birthday of the young Princess Augusta. The masque gave so much satisfaction that it was repeated on the following night. Dr. Arne afterwards altered it into an opera, and it was so performed at Drury Lane Theatre, on March, 20, 1745, for the benefit of Mrs. Arne. In the advertisements of that performance, and in another of the following month, Dr. Arne entitles “Rule, Britannia,” “a celebrated ode;” from which it may be inferred that (although the entire masque had not been performed in public), “Rule, Britannia,” had then attained popularity. Some detached pieces of the masque had been sung in Dublin, on the occasion of Arne’s visit with his wife, but no record of any other public performance has hitherto been discovered. The words of the masque were by Thomson and Mallet, but Thomson seems to have taken the lead in the affair, since, in the newspapers of the day, he alone is mentioned as the author. In the book, the names of Thomson and Mallet are both given.

  The utmost appropriateness accompanies this assignment of the authorship of “Rule Britannia.” No more fitting lyrist than he who sang so admirably and so unremittingly of Nature and of man, and the social and industrial glory of his country, could have composed the unchallenged pæan of the nation’s greatness.

  There is no evidence that during their lifetime either Thomson or Mallet claimed the authorship; but this is certain, it was printed at Edinburgh during Mallet’s lifetime in the second edition of a well-known song-book entitled “The Charmer,” with Thomson’s initials appended to it. It is certain that Mallet had friends in Edinburgh, and it is equally certain that he nor any of his friends raised any objection to its assignment to Thomson. In 1743, in 1759 and in 1762 Mallet published collections of poems, but in none of these collections does he lay claim to “Rule Britannia,” and though it was printed in song-books in 1749, 1750, and 1761, it is in no case assigned to Mallet. None of his contemporaries, so far as we know, attributed it to him, and it is remarkable that in a brief obituary notice of him which appeared in the “Scots Magazine” in 1765, he is spoken of as the author of the famous ballad “William and Margaret,” but not a word is said about this lyric.

Dramas

  The town flocks to a new play of Thomson’s, called “Tancred and Sigismunda:” it is very dull; I have read it. I cannot bear modern poetry; these refiners of the purity of the stage and of the incorrectness of English verse are most wofully insipid. I had rather have written the most absurd lines in Lee, than “Leonidas” or “The Seasons;” as I had rather be put into the round-house for a wrong-headed quarrel than sup quietly at eight o’clock with my grandmother.

  Mr. Thomson’s tragedies seem to me wisely intricated and elegantly writ; they want perhaps some fire, and it may be that his heroes are neither moving nor busy enough, but taking him all in all, methinks he has the highest claim to the greatest esteem.

  Though “Agamemnon” is not a capital play on the whole, and abounds in languid and long declamatory speeches, yet parts of it are striking, particularly Melisander’s account of the desert island to which he was banished, copied from the “Philoctetes” of Sophocles; and the prophetic speeches of Cassandra during the moment of Agamemnon’s being murdered, well calculated to fill the audience with alarm, astonishment, and suspense at an awful event, obscurely hinted at in very strong imagery. These speeches are closely copied from the “Agamemnon” of Eschylus, as is a striking scene in his “Eleonora” from the “Alcestis” of Euripides. Thomson was well acquainted with the Greek tragedies, on which I heard him talk learnedly when I was once introduced to him by my friend Mr. W. Collins.

  The beautiful fancy, the gorgeous diction, and generous affections of Thomson, were chilled and withered as soon as he touched the verge of the Drama; where his name is associated with a mass of verbose puerility, which it is difficult to conceive could ever have proceeded from the author of the “Seasons” and the “Castle of Indolence.”

  “Tancred and Sigismunda” (founded on a story in “Gil Blas”) was the most successful of Thomson’s pieces on the stage; Garrick and Mrs. Cibber appeared in it, and it continued as an acting piece up to 1788, if not later.

  It can only be matter for regret that Thomson wasted so much of his life over compositions in which he was so little qualified to excel. He had not the dramatic faculty. His plays are cold, lifeless, and uninteresting. They are equal in bulk to all his other poetry combined, yet there is hardly a line in the whole for the loss of which the world would be poorer.

  It [“Sophonisba”] was a poor imitation of Otway, and there was little opportunity in it for the display of the poet’s characteristic excellencies; it was nevertheless sold to Millar for 130 guineas, and went through four editions during the year (several translations appeared, a Russian one in 1786). One line of “Sophonisba” at least has defied oblivion. Nat Lee had written “O Sophonisba, Oh!” Thomson expanded the sentiment in the verse

Oh! Sophonisba, Sophonisba, Oh!

the inanity of which was pointed out, not at the theatre, as has generally been assumed, but in an envious little squib, called “A Criticism of the New Sophonisba” (1730). The quick eye of Fielding soon detected the absurdity, which was paraded in his “Tom Thumb the Great,” the line “Oh! Huncamunca, Huncamunca, Oh!” appearing as a kind of refrain. It is noticeable that the line “O Sophonisba, I am wholly thine,” was not substituted by Thomson until after 1738.

General

	Poets, like you, their own protectors stand,
	Plac’d above aid from pride’s inferior hand.
	Time, that devours a lord’s unlasting name,
	Shall land her soundest depth to float your fame….

	… Thomson, in this praise, thy merit see;
	The tongue that praises merit, praises thee.

	Tho’ Thomson, sweet descriptive bard!
	Inspiring Autumn sung;
	Yet how should we the months regard,
	That stopp’d his flowing tongue?
	Ah luckless months, of all the rest,
	To whose hard share it fell!
	For sure his was the gentlest breast
	That ever sung so well….
	He! he is gone, whose mortal strain
	Could wit and mirth refine;
	He! he is gone, whose social vein
	Surpass’d the power of wine.

	… The Poet well you know:
	Oft has he touch’d your hearts with tender woe:
	Oft in this crowded house, with just applause
	You heard him teach fair Virtue’s purest laws;
	For his chaste Muse employ’d her heaven-taught lyre
	None but the noblest passions to inspire,
	Not one immoral, one corrupted thought,
	One line, which, dying, he could wish to blot.

  Thomson was blessed with a strong and copious fancy; he has enriched poetry with a variety of new and original images, which he painted from nature itself, and from his own actual observations; his descriptions have, therefore, a distinctness and truth which are utterly wanting to those of poets who have only copied from each other, and have never looked abroad on the subjects themselves. Thomson was accustomed to wander away into the country for days and for weeks, attentive to each rural sight, each rural sound; while many a poet who has dwelt for years in the Strand has attempted to describe fields and rivers, and has generally succeeded accordingly.

  Mr. Thomson, though, in general, a verbose and affected poet, has told this [“Palemon and Lavinia”] story with simplicity; it is rather given here for being much esteemed by the public than by the editor.

  As a writer, he is entitled to one praise of the highest kind: his mode of thinking, and of expressing his thoughts, is original. His blank verse is no more the blank verse of Milton, or of any other poet, than the rhymes of Prior are the rhymes of Cowley. His numbers, his pauses, his diction, are of his own growth, without transcription, without imitation. He thinks in a peculiar train, and he thinks always as a man of genius; he looks round on nature and on life with the eye which nature bestows only on the poet; the eye which distinguishes, in every thing presented to its view, whatever there is on which imagination can delight to be detained, and with a mind that at once comprehends the vast and attends to minute.

  Thomson was admirable in description; but it always seemed to me that there was somewhat of affectation in his style, and that his numbers are sometimes not well harmonized. I could wish too, with Dr. Johnson, that he had confined himself to this country; for when he describes what he never saw, one is forced to read him with some allowance for possible misrepresentation. He was, however, a true poet, and his lasting fame has proved it.

  Lord Buchan is screwing out a little ephemeral fame from instituting a jubilee for Thomson. I fear I shall not make my court to Mr. Berry by owning I would not give him this last week’s fine weather for all the four “Seasons” in blank verse. There is more nature in six lines of “L’Allegro” and “Penseroso” than in all the laboured imitations of Milton. What is there in Thomson’s of original?

  In his poems, those who are able to taste and relish that divine art which raises the man of clay from the soil on which he vegetates to the heaven of sentiment,… will delight in seeing the beautiful features of Nature presented to the eyes as spectators and not readers, and after these delightful impressions are over, they will find themselves happier and better than they were before.

  Thomson, though dear to my heart, was too florid.

  With the wits of Queen Anne this foreign school attained the summit of its reputation; and has ever since, we think, been declining, though by slow and almost imperceptible graduations. Thomson was the first writer of any eminence who seceded from it, and made some steps back to the force and animation of our original poetry. Thomson, however, was educated in Scotland, where the new style, we believe, had not yet become familiar; and lived, for a long time, a retired and unambitious life, with very little intercourse with those who gave the tone in literature at the period of his first appearance. Thomson, accordingly, has always been popular with the much wider circle of readers, than either Pope or Addison; and, in spite of considerable vulgarity and signal cumbrousness of diction, has drawn, even from the fastidious, a much deeper and more constant admiration.

	… the strain my Thomson sung,
	Delicious dreams inspiring by his note,
	What time to Indolence his harp he strung;
	*        *        *        *        *

  He is frequently pedantic and ostentatious in his style, because he had no consciousness of these vices in himself. He mounts upon stilts, not out of vanity, but indolence. He seldom writes a good line but he makes up for it by a bad one. He takes advantage of all the most trite and mechanical common-places of imagery and diction as a kindly relief to his Muse, and as if he thought them quite as good, and likely to be quite as acceptable to the reader, as his own poetry. He did not think the difference worth putting himself to the trouble of accomplishing. He had too little art to conceal his art: or did not even seem to know that there was any occasion for it. His art is as naked and undisguised as his nature; the one is as pure and genuine as the other is gross, gaudy, and meretricious…. Thomson is the best of our descriptive poets; for he gives most of the poetry of natural description. Others have been quite equal to him, or have surpassed him, as Cowper for instance, in the picturesque part of his art, in marking the peculiar features and curious details of objects;—no one has yet come up to him in giving the sum total of their effects, their varying influences on the mind.

The sweet-souled Poet of the Seasons….

  Thomson is the first of our Descriptive Poets; I had almost said, the first in the world. He is one of the best Poets, and the worst versifiers, that ever existed. To begin with the least pleasing part of our subject, his versification, it is artificial and elaborate; timid and pompous; deserting simplicity, without attaining dignity. It scorns the earth, without being able to soar into the air.

  Byron and Scott, brilliant as are the pictures which they exhibit, have too exclusively occupied public attention; and there may be an admixture of aristocratic fashion in this over ardent display of homage. Thomson, with loftier themes, is the poet of all times, and of every class of readers. I allude more especially to the “Seasons.” His “Castle of Indolence,” to be fairly appreciated, should be in the hands of those who are accustomed to the refinements of composition—by whom it will ever be esteemed as one of the most impressive and exquisite pieces within the circle of true poesy.

  The entire prospect,—one of the finest in England, and eminently characteristic of what is best in English scenery,—enabled me to understand what I had used to deem a peculiarity,—in some measure a defect,—in the landscapes of the poet Thomson. It must have often struck the Scotch reader that in dealing with very extended prospects, he rather enumerates than describes. His pictures are often mere catalogues, in which single words stand for classes of objects, and in which the entire poetry seems to consist in an overmastering sense of vast extant, occupied by amazing multiplicity…. Now the prospect from the hill at Hagley furnished me with the true explanation of this enumerative style. Measured along the horizon, it must, on the lowest estimate, be at least fifty miles in longitudinal extent; measured laterally, from the spectator forwards, at least twenty…. The real area however must rather exceed than fall short of a thousand square miles: the fields into which it is laid out are small, scarcely averaging a square furlong in superficies…. With these there are commixed innumerable cottages, manor-houses, villages, towns. Here the surface is dimpled by unreckoned hollows; there fretted by uncounted mounds; all is amazing, overpowering multiplicity,—a multiplicity which neither the pen nor the pencil can adequately express; and so description, in even the hands of a master, sinks into mere enumeration. The picture becomes a catalogue.

  Thomson writes like a poet who made what he went to find.

  A certain careless greatness is the principal element of his genius. He was, as Coleridge truly said, “rather a great than a good poet.” Except in passages of the “Castle of Indolence,” there is little finish or true polish about his poetry. He did, indeed, labour much at the file, but it was seldom under the presence of a high ideal of Art; and his alterations, like those of John Foster, were often anything but improvement. His great power lay in his deep, glowing, childlike enthusiasm for nature, and in the fulness with which he retained this on to mature manhood; so that, while in understanding he was thirty, in freshness of feeling he was only thirteen. He excelled more in the wide landscape view, than in the cabinet picture or the miniature. He was better at describing the Torrid Zone than a lady bathing—coping with the aggregate terrors of Winter than telling a tale of individual woe. He is more a sublime and sensuous, than he is a refined, spiritualized, or beautiful poet. He resembles rather Byron in all but his elasticity, and the fierce and savage nature that burned in him than such poets as Shelley, who seem half abstracted from earth, and to converse more with its hovering shadows than with its solid substance.

  Dismissing the ideal shepherds and shepherdesses who formerly trailed their silks, like the ladies in the portraits of the Restoration, over imaginary plains, and rejecting altogether the machinery of the heathen mythology, Thomson addressed himself directly to Nature, and transferred the landscape to his canvas with truthfulness and simplicity.

  No poet has ever been more inspired by the love of external nature, or felt with more keenness and delicacy those analogies between the mind and the things it looks upon, which are the fountains of poetic feeling. The faults of Thomson are triteness of thought when he becomes argumentative, and a prevalent pomposity and pedantry of diction; though his later work, “The Castle of Indolence,” is surprisingly free from these blemishes.

  If Young is all art and effort, Thomson is all negligence and nature; so negligent, indeed, that he pours forth his unpremeditated song apparently without the thought ever occurring to him that he could improve it by any study or elaboration, any more than if he were some winged warbler of the woodlands, seeking and caring for no other listener except the universal air which the strain made vocal. As he is the poet of nature, so his poetry has all the intermingled rudeness and luxuriance of its theme. There is no writer who has drunk in more of the inmost soul of his subject. If it be the object of descriptive poetry to present us with pictures and visions the effect of which shall vie with that of the originals from which they are drawn, then Thomson is the greatest of all descriptive poets; for there is no other who surrounds us with so much of the truth of Nature, or makes us feel so intimately the actual presence and companionship of all her hues and fragrances.

  He is the leading priest in a solemn procession to find God—not in the laws by which he has ordered his creation, but in the beauty which is the outcome of those laws. I do not say there is much of the relation of man to nature in his writing; but thitherward it tends. He is true about the outsides of God; and in Thomson we begin to feel that the revelation of God as meaning and therefore being the loveliness of nature, is about to be recognized. I do not say—to change my simile—that he is the first visible root in our literature whence we can follow the outburst of the flowers and foliage of our delight in nature: I could show a hundred fibres leading from the depths of our old literature up to the great root. Nor is it surprising that, with his age about him, he too should be found tending to magnify, not God’s Word, but his works, above all his name.

  Thomson’s blank verse, however, is often swollen and bladdery to a painful degree. He seems to have imagined, like many other writers of his time, that blank verse could not support itself without the aid of a stilted phraseology, for that fine poem of his, in the Spenserian stanza, the “Castle of Indolence,” shows that when he wrote in rhyme he did not think it necessary to depart from a natural style.

  He was turgid, no good metrist, and his English is like a translation from one of those poets who wrote in Latin after it was dead; but he was a man of sincere genius, and not only English, but European literature is largely in his debt. He was the inventor of cheap amusement for the million, to be had of All-outdoors for the asking. It was his impulse which unconsciously gave direction to Rousseau, and it is to the school of Jean Jacques that we owe St. Pierre, Cowper, Chateaubriand, Wordsworth, Byron, Lamartine, George Sand, Ruskin,—the great painters of ideal landscape.

  He paints all the little things, without being ashamed, for they interest him; takes pleasure in “the smell of the dairy;” you hear him speak of the “insect armies,” and “when the envenomed leaf begins to curl,” and of the birds which, foreseeing the approaching rain, “streak their wings with oil, to throw the lucid moisture trickling off.” He perceives objects so clearly that he makes them visible: we recognise the English landscape, green and moist, half drowned in floating vapours, blotted here and there by violet clouds, which burst in showers at the horizon, which they darken…. Thirty years before Rousseau, Thomson had expressed all Rousseau’s sentiments, almost in the same style…. Like Rousseau, he praised gravity, patriotism, liberty, virtue; rose from the spectacle of nature to the contemplation of God, and showed to man glimpses of immortal life beyond the tomb. Like him, in fine, he marred the sincerity of his emotion and the truth of his poetry by sentimental vapidities, by pastoral billing and cooing, and by such an abundance of epithets, personified abstractions, pompous invocations and oratorical tirades, that we perceive in him beforehand the false and decorative style of Thomas, David, and the Revolution.

  Thomson is one of those minor poets who are read by each successive generation with about equal favor. His fame is as high now as it was during his lifetime, perhaps higher. His descriptions of English scenery, because of their faithfulness to nature, are much read by foreigners, especially by Germans.

  For generations past, as the magic of Nature unrolls its annual recurrences and vicissitudes, some beauty or some majesty has here and there, by this person and by that, been more keenly perceived, more deeply loved, or acknowledged with a more fully realized sense of awe, because of something written by Thomson. He has been one of the concentrators and intensifiers—one of the fixing and fashioning spirits—of that characteristically modern passion, the love of scenery…. Our progenitors, to the fourth and fifth step of ascent from our own time, have delighted in Thomson; and, notwithstanding the shifting of literary models, and of the tenor of public taste, our successors, to as remote or a remoter term, may probably do the same.

  Thomson dared to be true to the face of nature, and to make the delineation of it the all-sufficient object of poetry. And it enhances the merit of the poet that in this, a new form of poetic art, he was thoroughly successful, and influenced the eighteenth century literature of Britain, indeed all British literature since his time.

  No competent criticism of any school has ever denied Thomson’s claim to a place, high if not of the highest, among poets of the second order. His immense and enduring popularity would settle the question, if it had ever been seriously debated. For the orbis terrarum may indeed judge without hesitation on such point, when its judgment is ratified beforehand by many generations. Popularity which outlasts changes of manners and fashions is a testimony to worth which cannot be left out of the account, and Thomson’s popularity is eminently of this kind. Neither the somewhat indiscriminate admiration of the romantic style, of which Percy set the fashion, nor the naturalism of Cowper, nor the great revolution championed in various ways by Scott, by the Lakists, and by Byron, nor the still more complete revolution of Shelley and Keats, availed to shake the hold of “The Seasons” on the popular mind.

  For the most part in Thomson, we have mere picturesqueness—a reproduction of Nature for the mere pleasure of reproducing her—a kind of stock-taking of her habitual effects.

  Just at present Thomson’s reputation is a pious tradition rather than a visibly potential reality. It seems strange that this should be so, in an age which gives unmistakable and increasing welcome to the apostles of the new naturalism; for it is no exaggeration to say that the discoveries of Jefferies and of Burroughs were well known to Thomson, and that Thomson presented his transcripts of nature with perfect truth, freedom, and beauty, and sublimity of effect. One of the secrets of Thomson’s power our new naturalists possess, namely, fulness of knowledge, acquired by careful sympathetic study; but for the felicity of his expression of the phenomena of nature he stands to this day unmatched. His pages are broadcast with these felicities of phrase. Such are his castled clouds, for ever flushing round a flushing sky; the sleepy horror of his waving pines; the still song of his harvests, breathed into the reaper’s heart; his sturdy boy grasping the indignant ram by the twisted horns; his lively-shining leopard, the beauty of the waste; his ruddy maid, full as the summer rose blown by prevailing suns; the slender feet of his red-breast, attracted by the table crumbs; his light-footed dews; his isles amid the melancholy main. One does not need to pick and choose; they start from the opened leaves.

  He was not an idealist; he sought simply to depict what he saw, and what apparently everyone might easily see. On the other hand, if Thomson was a realist, he was assuredly not one of the type to which the garbage of nature is as valuable and as well worthy of description as her noblest scenes. He discriminated. The most commonplace scene was good enough for his verse provided it was perfect of its kind; but decay and dissolution were, to him, matter for reference, not for elaborate portraiture.

  Thomson must be acknowledged to be one of the greatest of our minor poets—i.e., of those that are ranked next to the great names of Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, and Byron. He holds this place in virtue of his vigor of imagination, his broad manly sentiment, the individuality of his verse, and the distinction of his subject. These have given him a remarkable and enduring popularity.

  It is true that in this work man as a social being still occupies too large a place. Thomson cannot describe winter without giving a sentimental picture of the horrors of cold, nor spring without introducing a hymn to Love. Too frequently also there are suggestions of the “Georgics,” and apostrophes to those “who live in luxury and ease,” or to “the generous Englishmen” who “venerate the plough.” Nevertheless, Thomson has the painter’s eye. His winter and his spring are no mere adaptions from Vergil. He has a true and deep understanding of the English landscape. With delicate subtlety he renders the impressions produced by spring or autumn, the charm of the indefinite periods when season gives way to season, the approach of rain, the forebodings of storm, the scudding of heavy clouds across skies grey and overcast. Even in the awkward French version something of the charm of these pictures lingers yet…. It is in these grey-toned pictures that Thomson excels. But in others he revels in precision of detail…. Occasionally, too, Thomson can command richness of colouring and splendour of imagery…. What French author wrote in this style, in 1730?

  It was Thomson who made the first resistance to the new classical formula, and it is, in fact, Thomson who is the real pioneer of the whole romantic movement, with its return to nature and simplicity. This gift would be more widely recognised than it is if it had not been for the poet’s timidity, his easy-going indolence…. James Thomson is at the present hour but tamely admired. His extraordinary freshness, his new outlook into the whole world of imaginative life, deserves a very different recognition from what is commonly awarded to him. The “Hymn” which closes the “Seasons” was first published in 1730, when Pope was still rising towards the zenith of his fame. It recalled to English verse a melody, a rapture which had been entirely unknown since Milton’s death, more than sixty years before.

  “Jacob Thomson, ein vergessener Dichter des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts”—a forgotten poet of the eighteenth century—such is the title of a recent monograph on the author of “The Seasons” by Dr. G. Schmeding…. During the present century there have been no less than twenty editions of his poems, to say nothing of separate editions of “The Seasons;” while his works, or portion of them, have been translated into German, Italian, modern Greek and Russian. Only two years ago M. Léon Morel, in his “J. Thomson, sa vie et ses œuvres,” published an elaborate and admirable monograph on this “forgotten poet.” And now Mr. Tovey,… has given us a new biography of him and a new edition of his works, making, if I am not mistaken, the thirty-second memoir of him and the twenty-first edition of his works which have appeared since the beginning of the century: this is pretty well for a forgotten poet!

  As late as 1855 Robert Bell remarked that Thomson’s popularity seemed ever on the increase. The date may be taken to mark the turning point in his fame, for since about 1850 he has been unmistakably eclipsed on his own ground, in the favour of the class to whom he was dear, by Tennyson, while in Scotland the commemorative rites which were zealously performed in his honour at Ednam and Edinburgh between 1790 and 1820 (when an obelisk, in the erection of which Scott took a leading part, was erected at the poet’s native place) have been supplanted by the cult of Burns…. In the possession of the true poetic temperament, he has been surpassed not even by Tennyson.

  When he came to England he found but little entertainment in the landscapes around London, and longed for “the living stream, the airy mountain, and the hanging rock.” He portrays with evident delight the changeful aspect of his native watercourses in the various seasons of the year. He knew well the “deep morass” and “shaking wilderness,” where many of them “rise high among the hills,” and whence they assume their “mossy-tinctured” hue. He traces them as they “roll o’er their rocky channel” until they at last lose themselves in “the ample river” Tweed. He describes them as they appear at sheep-washing time, and dwells on their delights for boys as bathing-places. But it is their wilder moods that dwell most vividly in his memory, when

	From the hills
	O’er rocks and woods, in broad brown cataracts,
	A thousand snow-fed torrents shoot at once.

It is worthy of remark, however, that even though nature is his theme, the poet writes rather as an interested spectator than as an earnest votary. He reveals no passion for the landscapes he depicts. He never appears as if himself a portion of the scene, alive with sympathy in all the varying moods of nature. His verse has no flashes of inspiration, such as contact with storm and spate drew from Burns. It was already however, a great achievement that Thomson broke through the conventionalities of the time, and led his countrymen once more to the green fields, the moors, and the woodlands.