LECTURE V. ON THOMSON AND COWPER. THOMSON, the kind-hearted Thomson, was the most indolent of mortals and of poets. But he was also one of the best both of mortals and of poets. Dr. Johnson makes it his praise that he wrote "no line which dying he would wish to blot." Perhaps a better proof of his honest simplicity and inoffensive goodness of disposition would be that he wrote no line which any other person living would wish that he should blot. Indeed he himself wished, on his death-bed, formally to expunge his dedication of one of the Seasons to that finished courtier and candid biographer of his own life, Bubb Doddington. As critics, however, not as moralists, we might say on the other hand, "Would he had blotted a thousand!" The same suavity of temper and sanguine warmth of feeling which threw such a natural grace and genial spirit of enthusiasm over his poetry, was also the cause of its inherent vices and defects. He is affected through carelessness, pompous from unsuspecting simplicity of character. 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 commonplaces 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 I 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. All that is admirable in the Seasons is the emanation of a fine natural genius, and sincere love of his subject, unforced, unstudied, that comes uncalled-for and departs unbidden. But he takes no pains, uses no self-correction; or if he seems to labour, it is worse than labour lost. His genius "cannot be constrained by mastery." The feeling of nature, of the changes of the seasons, was in his mind; and he could not help conveying this feeling to the reader by the mere force of spontaneous expression; but if the expression did not come of itself, he left the whole business to chance; or, willing to evade instead of encountering the difficulties of his subject, fills up the intervals of true inspiration with the most vapid and worthless materials, pieces out a beautiful half line with a bombastic allusion, or overloads an exquisitely natural sentiment or image with a cloud of painted, pompous, cumbrous phrases, like the shower of roses in which he represents the Spring, his own lovely, fresh, and innocent Spring, as descending to the earth: "Come, gentle Spring! ethereal Mildness! come, Who, from such a flimsy, round-about, unmeaning commencement as this, would expect the delightful, unexaggerated, home-felt descriptions of natural scenery, which are scattered in such unconscious profusion through this and the following cantos? For instance, the very next passage is crowded with a set of striking images: "And see where surly Winter passes off Far to the north, and calls his ruffian blasts; The shatter'd forest, and the ravag'd vale; While softer gales succeed, at whose kind touch And sing their wild notes to the list'ning waste." 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. He does not go into the minutiae of a landscape, but describes the vivid impression which the whole makes upon his own imagination, and thus transfers the same unbroken, unimpaired impression to the imagination of his readers. The colours with which he paints seem yet wet and breathing, like those of the living statue in the Winter's Tale. Nature in his descriptions is seen growing around us, fresh and lusty as in itself. We feel the effect of the atmosphere, its humidity or clearness, its heat or cold, the glow of summer, the gloom of winter, the tender promise of the spring, the full overshadowing foliage, the declining pomp and deepening tints of autumn. He transports us to the scorching heat of vertical suns, or plunges us into the chilling horrors and desolation of the frozen zone. We hear the snow drifting against the broken casement without, and see the fire blazing on the hearth within. The first scattered drops of a vernal shower patter on the leaves above our heads, or the coming storm resounds through the leafless groves. In a word, he describes not to the eye alone, but to the other senses, and to the whole man. He puts his heart into his subject, writes as he feels, and humanises whatever he touches. He makes all his descriptions teem with life and vivifying soul. His faults were those of his style of the author and the man; but the original genius of the poet, the pith and marrow of his imagination, the fine natural mould in which his feelings were bedded, were too much for him to counteract by neglect, or affectation, or false ornaments. It is for this reason that he is, perhaps, the most popular of all our poets, treating of a subject that all can understand, and in a way that is interesting to all alike, to the ignorant or the refined, because he gives back the impression which the things themselves make upon us in nature. "That," said a man of genius,* seeing a little shabby soiled copy of Thomson's Seasons lying on the window-seat of an obscure country alehouse, "That is true fame !" It has been supposed by some, that the Castle of Indolence is Thomson's best poem; but that is not the case. He has in it, indeed, poured out the whole soul of indolence, diffuse, relaxed, supine, dissolved into a voluptuous dream, and surrounded himself with a set of objects and companions, in entire unison with the listlessness of his own temper. Nothing can well go beyond the descriptions of these inmates of the place and their luxurious, pampered way of life—of him who came among them like a burnished fly in month of June," but soon left them on his heedless way; and him "For whom the merry bells had rung, I ween, If in this nook of quiet, bells had ever been." The in-door quiet and cushioned ease, where "all was one full-swelling bed;" the out-of-door stillness, broken only by "the stock-dove's plaint amid the forest deep—” “That drowsy rustled to the sighing gale ”– * Coleridge. See Memoirs of W. Hazlitt, 1867, i. 65.-ED. are in the most perfect and delightful keeping. But still there are no passages in this exquisite little production of sportive ease and fancy, equal to the best of those in the Seasons. Warton, in his Essay on Pope, was the first to point out and do justice to some of these; for instance, to the description of the effects of the contagion among our ships at Carthagena-" of the frequent corse heard nightly plunged amid the sullen waves," and to the description of the pilgrims lost in the deserts of Arabia. This last passage, profound and striking as it is, is not free from those faults of style which I have already noticed : From all the boundless furnace of the sky, And the wide-glitt'ring waste of burning sand, With instant death. Patient of thirst and toil, Shot through his wither'd heart the fiery blast, Is buried deep. In Cairo's crowded streets, Th' impatient merchant, wond'ring, waits in vain ; And Mecca saddens at the long delay." There are other passages of equal beauty with these: such as that of the hunted stag, followed by "the inhuman rout": - That from the shady depth 66 Expel him, circling through his ev'ry shift. The whole of the description of the frozen zone, in the Winter, is perhaps even finer and more thoroughly felt, |