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.-AIKIN, JOHN, 1820, An Essay on the Plan and Character of Thomson's Seasons. 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.-WILSON, JOHN, 1831, An Hour's Talk about Poetry, Blackwood's Magazine, vol. 30, p. 483. 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?—NICOLAS, SIR NICHOLAS HARRIS, 1831-47, ed., Poetical Works of James Thomson. No one can read Thomson's "Seasons" with pleasure, and not be the better for it.-BRYDGES, SIR SAMUEL EGERTON, 1834, Autobiography, vol. 1, p. 387. gentle yet so genial a glow of philanthropy and religious gratitude, that its parts are, so to say, fused naturally together; the everchanging 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.-SHAW, THOMAS B., 1847, Outlines of English Literature, pp. 291, 292. as sweet a bard (Theocritus and Maro blent in one) As ever graced the name. The truthful, soul-subduing lays of him Of him who sang the Seasons as they roll, 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.BOYD, JAMES ROBERT, 1852, ed., The Seasons, Preface, p. 6. 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.VILLEMAIN, ABEL FRANÇOIS, 1855, Cours de Littérature Française. 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 cata The finest descriptive poem in the Eng- logues, the very fault of the previous lish or perhaps in any language. The work is animated throughout with so 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.BROOKE, STOPFORD, 1876, English Literature (Primer), p. 143. 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.SHAIRP, JOHN CAMPBELL, 1877, On Poetic Interpretation of Nature, p. 197. 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. -MINTO, WILLIAM, 1894, The Literature of the Georgian Era, ed. Knight, p. 61. 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.-DENNIS, JOHN, 1894, The Age of Pope, p. 91. 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.-MITCHELL, DONALD G., 1895, English Lands Letters and Kings, Queen Anne and the Georges, p. 75. "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.-REYNOLDS, MYRA, 1896, The Treatment of Nature in English Poetry, p. 89. 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.-EYRE-TODD, GEORGE, 1896, Scottish Poetry of the Eighteenth Century, vol. 1, p. 100. 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.PALGRAVE, FRANCIS TURNER, 1896, Landscape in Poetry, p. 169 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 In this he is second to none of the most original of his Scottish precursors.-BAYNE, WILLIAM, 1898, James Thomson (Famous Scots Series), p. 114. 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 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.BEERS, HENRY A., 1898, A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century, p. 107. MS. CORRECTIONS OF THE 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.-ToVEY, D. C., 1894, An Interleaved Copy of Thomson's "Seasons," The Athenæum, vol. 2, pp. 131, 132. "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.-COLLINS, JOHN CHURTON, 1897, A Literary Mare's-Nest, The Saturday Review, vol. 84, p. 118. (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 amanuesis, I hold by the notion that, whoever the amanuensis, the notes were dictated by Pope.-MOREL, LÉON, 1898, Thomson and Pope, The Saturday Review, vol. 86, p. 208. 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. 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.HILL, AARON, 1734, Letter to Thomson, Feb. 17. 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. JOHNSON, SAMUEL, 1779–81, Thomson, Lives of the English Poets. Thom 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. son 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.HAZLITT, WILLIAM, 1818, Lectures on the English Poets, Lecture v. 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.-NICOLAS, SIR NICHOLAS HARRIS, 1831-47, ed., Poetical Works of James Thomson. 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.-GOETHE BY ECKERMANN, JOHN PETER, 1832, Conversations of Goethe, vol. II, p. 427. 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.-CHILD, FRANCIS J., 1863, ed., Poetical Works of James Thomson, Advertisement. His poem upon "Liberty," which Johnson confesses that he had never read, appears so far as I have inspected itto 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.-STEPHEN, LESLIE, 1876, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, vol. II, p. 360. 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.SAINTSBURY, GEORGE, 1880, English Poets, ed. Ward, vol. III, p. 169. 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. BAYNE, WILLIAM, 1898, James Thomson (Famous Scots Series), pp. 82, 84. THE CASTLE OF INDOLENCE 1748 There is a poem by Thomson, the "Castle of Indolence," with some good stanzas. GRAY, THOMAS, 1748, Letter to Thomas Wharton, June 5, Works, vol. II, p. 184. 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' song deserves a preference: "He needs no muse who dictates from the heart." HERTFORD, COUNTESS, 1748, Letter to Lady Luxborough, May 15. 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.-CAMPBELL, THOMAS, 1819, Specimens of the British Poets. 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 |