A FEW WORDS ON THOMSON. 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 eyesThomson 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 anti thesis-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 fields Put on their winter-robe of purest white. 'Tis brightness all; save where the new snow melts Nothing can be more vivid. spectrum. 'Tis of the nature of an ocular 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 wilds Pour forth their brown inhabitants." 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 fectly natural. Thus 66 "Drooping, the ox Stands cover'd o'er with snow, and then demands The fruit of all his toil." per 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 kind Eye the bleak heaven, and next the glistening earth, 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 feeling in a corresponding condition, to animals who dreadlessly Thomson redeems himself in what follow their instincts. immediately succeeds 66 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 wing 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 with food. But the whirlwind was uppens "Far off its coming groan'd," 66 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. Yes. Did you ever see water beginning to change itself into ice? 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 pool Breathes a blue film, and in its mid career Arrests 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 Indurated and fixed, the snowy weight 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, 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 "com monplace 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 his fame. 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 glance The 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, The disappointed prowlers fall, and dig The 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-they VOL. X. R |