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,'

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:

'Breathed hot

From all the boundless furnace of the sky,
And the wide-glittering waste of burning sand,
A suffocating wind the pilgrim smites
With instant death. Patient of thirst and toil,
Son of the desert, even the camel feels,
Shot through his withered heart, the fiery blast.
Or from the black-red ether, bursting broad,

Sallies the sudden whirlwind. Straight the sands,
Commoved around, in gathering eddies play;
Nearer and nearer still they darkening come;
Till with the general all-involving storm
Swept up, the whole continuous wilds arise,
And by their noon-day fount dejected thrown,
Or sunk at night in sad disastrous sleep,
Beneath descending hills the caravan

Is buried deep. In Cairo's crowded streets,
The impatient merchant, wondering, 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' th' inhuman rout,' that—

"From the shady depth

Expel him, circling through his every shift.
He sweeps the forest oft, and sobbing sees
The glades mild opening to the golden day,
Where in kind contest, with his butting friends
He wont to struggle, or his loves enjoy.'

The whole of the description of the frozen zone, in the Winter, is perhaps even finer and more thoroughly felt, as being done from early associations, than that of the torrid zone in his Summer. Anything more beautiful than the following account of the Siberian exiles is, I think, hardly to be found in the whole range of poetry:

'There through the prison of unbounded wilds,
Barred by the hand of Nature from escape,
Wide roams the Russian exile. Nought around
Strikes his sad eye but deserts lost in snow;
And heavy loaded groves, and solid floods
That stretch athwart the solitary vast

Their icy horrors to the frozen main ;
And cheerless towns far distant, never blessed,
Save when its annual course the caravan
Bends to the golden coast of rich Cathay,
With news of human kind.'

The feeling of loneliness, of distance, of lingering, slow-revolving years of pining expectation, of desolation within and without the heart, was never more finely expressed than it is here.

The account which follows of the employments of the Polar night, of the journeys of the natives by moonlight, drawn by reindeer, and of the return of spring in Lapland,

"Where pure Niemi's fairy mountains rise,

And, fringed with roses, Tenglio rolls his stream,'

is equally picturesque and striking in a different way. The traveller lost in the snow is a wellknown and admirable dramatic episode. I prefer, however, giving one example of our author's skill in painting common domestic scenery, as it will bear a more immediate comparison with the style of some later writers on such subjects.

It is of little consequence what passage we take. The following description of the first setting in of winter is perhaps as pleasing as any :

'Through the hushed air the whitening shower descends,
At first thin, wavering, till at last the flakes

Fall broad and wide and fast, dimming the day
With a continual flow. The cherished fields

Put on their winter-robe of purest white.

'T is brightness all, save where the new snow melts
Along the mazy current. Low the woods

Bow their hoar head; and ere the languid Sun
Faint from the West emits his evening ray,
Earth's universal face, deep hid and chill,
Is one wild, dazzling waste, that buries wide
The works of man. Drooping, the labourer-ox
Stands covered o'er with snow, and then demands
The fruit of all his toil. The fowls of heaven,
Tamed by the cruel season, crowd around
The winnowing store, and claim the little boon
Which Providence assigns them. One alone,
The redbreast, sacred to the household gods,
Wisely regardful of the embroiling sky,
In joyless fields and thorny thickets leaves
His shivering mates, and pays to trusted man
His annual visit. Half afraid, he first
Against the window beats; then brisk alights
On the warm hearth; then hopping o'er the floor,
Eyes all the smiling family askance,

And pecks, and starts, and wonders where he is;
Till more familiar grown, the table-crumbs
Attract his slender feet. The foodless wilds

Pour forth their brown inhabitants. The hare,

Though timorous of heart, and hard beset

By death in various forms, dark snares, and dogs,
And more unpitying men, the garden seeks,
Urged on by fearless want. The bleating kind
Eye the bleak heaven, and next the glistening earth,
With looks of dumb despair; then, sad dispersed,
Dig for the withered herb through heaps of snow.'

It is thus that Thomson always gives a moral sense to Nature.

Thomson's blank verse is not harsh or utterly untunable, but it is heavy and monotonous; it seems always labouring up-hill. The selections which have been made from his works in Enfield's Speaker' and other books of extracts, do not convey the most favourable idea of his genius or taste, such as Palemon and Lavinia, Damon and Musidora, Celadon and Amelia. Those parts of any author which are most liable to be stitched in worsted, and framed and glazed, are not by any means always the best. The moral descriptions and reflections in the Seasons' are in an admirable spirit, and written with great force and fervour.

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