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 themcould have chilled one's very soul as well as body, with such intense feeling of cold? Not one.

"In these fell regions, in Arzina caught,
And to the stony deep his idle ship

Immediate seal'd, he with his hapless crew,
Each full exerted at his several task,
Froze into statues-to the cordage glued
The sailor, and the pilot to his helm !”

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 commonplace sentimentalities, and hist 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." Besides, he was but young; and his great work was his first. He had not philosophized his language into poetry, 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, is not something 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 that is seldom breathed upon us-glorious poem, on the whole, as it is from the more measured march of the "Excursion?"

All that part 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.”

The first fifteen lines are equal to any thing 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
Of churchyard drear, (inhuman to relate!)
The disappointed prowlers fall, and dig

The shrouded body from the grave, o'er which,

Mix'd with foul shades and frighten'd ghosts, they howl." Wild beasts do not like the look of the human eye-they think us ugly customers and sometimes stand shillyshallying in our presence, in an awkward but alarming attitude, of hunger mixed with fear. A single wolf seldom or never attacks a man. He cannot stand the face. But a person would need to have a godlike face indeed to terrify therewith an army of wolves some thousand strong. It would be the height of presumption in any man, though beautiful as Moore thought Byron, to attempt it. If so,

then

"The godlike face of man avails him not,"

is, under these circumstances, ludicrous. Still more so is the trash about beauty, force divine! It is too much to expect of an army of wolves ten thousand strong, "and hungry as the grave," that they should all fall down on their knees before a sweet morsel of flesh and blood, merely because the young lady was so beautiful that she might have sat to Sir Thomas Lawrence for a frontispiece to Mr. Watts's Souvenir. 'Tis all stuff, too, about the generous lion standing in softened gaze at beauty's bright glance. True, he has been known to look with a certain sort of soft surliness upon a pretty Caffre girl, and to walk past without eating her but simply because, an hour or two before, he had dined on a Hottentot venus. The secret lay not in his heart, but in his stomach. Still the notion is a popular one, and how exquisitely has Spenser changed it into the divinest poetry in the character of the attendant lion of

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Heavenly Una with her milk-white lamb!"

But Thomson, so far from making poetry of it, in this passage, has vulgarized and blurred by it, the natural and inevitable emotion of terror and pity. Famished wolves howking up the dead is a dreadful image-but " inhuman to relate," is not an expression heavily laden with meaning; and the sudden, abrupt, violent, and, as we feel, unnatural introduction of ideas, purely superstitious, at the close, is most revolting, and miserably mars the terrible truth.

"Mix'd with foul shades and frighten'd ghosts they howl."

Why, pray, are the shades foul, and the ghosts only frightened? And wherein lies the specific difference between a shade and a ghost? Besides, if the ghosts were frightened, which they had good reason to be, why were not they off? We have frequently read of their wandering far from home, on occasions when they had no such excellent excuse to offer. This line, therefore, we have taken the liberty to erase from our pocket-copy of the Seasons-and to draw a few keelavine strokes over the rest of the passage-beginning with man's godlike face.

But here is a passage which will live for ever-in which not one word could be altered for the better-not one omitted but for the worse-not one added that would not be superfluous-a passage that proves that fiction is not the soul of poetry, but truth-but then such truth as was never spoken before on the same subject-such truth as shows that while Thomson was a person of the strictest veracity, yet was he very far indeed from being a matterof-fact man:

"As thus the snows arise, and foul and fierce,
All winter drives along the darken'd air;
In his own loose revolving fields, the swain
Disaster'd stands: sees other hills ascend,
Of unknown joyless brow; and other scenes,
Of horrid prospect, shag the trackless plain:
Nor finds the river, nor the forest, hid
Beneath the formless wild; but wanders on
From hill to dale, still more and more astray;
Impatient flouncing through the drifted heaps,

Stung with the thoughts of home; the thoughts of home

Rush on his nerves, and call their vigour forth
In many a vain attempt. How sinks his soul!
What black despair, what horror fills his heart!
When for the dusky spot, which Fancy feign'd
His tufted cottage rising through the snow,
He meets the roughness of the middle waste,
Far from the track and blest abode of man;
While round him night resistless closes fast,
And every tempest howling o'er his head,
Renders the savage wilderness more wild.
Then throng the busy shapes into his mind,
Of cover'd pits, unfathomably deep,

A dire descent! beyond the power of frost;
Of faithless bogs; of precipices huge,

Smooth'd up with snow; and, what is land, unknown,
What water, of the still unfrozen spring,

In the loose marsh or solitary lake,

Where the fresh fountain from the bottom boils.
These check his fearful steps; and down he sinks
Beneath the shelter of the shapeless drift,
Thinking o'er all the bitterness of death,
Mix'd with the tender anguish Nature shoots
Through the wrung bosom of the dying man,
His wife, his children, and his friends unseen.
In vain for him th' officious wife prepares
The fire fair-blazing, and the vestment warm;
In vain his little children, peeping out
Into the mingling storm, demand their sire,
With tears of artless innocence. Alas!
Nor wife, nor children, more shall he behold;
Nor friends, nor sacred home. On every nerve
The deadly winter seizes; shuts up sense;
And, o'er his inmost vitals creeping cold,
Lays him along the snows, a stiffen'd corse!"

Who wrote the affecting ballad-song called Donocht-head? "It is not mine," said Burns; "I would give ten pounds it were. It appeared first in the Edinburgh Herald, and came to the editor of that paper with the Newcastle postmark on it." If we mistake not, Allan Cunninghame tells us that it was written by an unfortunate of the name of Picken, who lived, suffered, and died in or about the town to which it would be a foolish work of supererogation to carry coals. Dr. Currie felt its beauty—indeed, the doctor was, on the whole, a good critic-though some

times he subjected poets in their fever-fits to his favourite. practice the cold bath. "This affecting poem," quoth he, "is apparently incomplete. The author need not be ashamed to own himself. It is worthy of Burns or of Macneil." It bears perusal well, even immediately after Thomson's Death in Snow.

DONOCHT-HEAD.

"Keen blaws the wind o'er Donocht-head,
The snaw drives snelly through the dale,
The Gaberlunzie tirls my sneck,

And shivering tells his waefu' tale.
'Cauld is the night, O let me in,
And dinna let your minstrel fa,'
And dinna let his winding-sheet

Be naething but a wreath o' snaw.

"Full ninety winters hae I seen,

And piped where gor-cocks whirring flew;
And mony a day I've danced, I ween,
To lilts which from my drone I blew.'
My Eppie waked, and soon she cried,

Get up, gudeman, and let him in;

For weel ye ken the winter night.
Was short when he began his din.'

"My Eppie's voice, I wow it's sweet,
Even though she bans and scaulds a wee;
But when it's tuned to sorrow's tale,
O, haith, it's doubly dear to me.
'Come in, auld carle, I'll steer my fire,

I'll make it bleeze a bonnie flame;
Your bluid is thin, ye've tint the gate,

Ye shouldna stray sae far frae hame.'

"Nae hame have I,' the minstrel said,
'Sad party-strife o'erturn'd my ha';
And, weeping at the eve of life,

I wander through a wreath o' snaw."

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A fragment! and the more piteous because a fragment. Go in search of the pathetic, and you will find it tearsteeped, sigh-breathed, moan-muttered, and groaned in fragments. The poet seems often struck dumb by wo