rable 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, homefelt 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: To shake the sounding marsh, or from the shore 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 minutiæ 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 read ers. The colours with which he paints seem yet 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 af fectation, 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 im pression 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 fullswelling 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: Or from the black-red ether, bursting broad, 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 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, 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, Wide roams the Russian exile. Nought around And heavy-loaded groves, and solid floods, Their icy horrors to the frozen main; And cheerless towns far distant, never bless'd, Save when its annual course the caravan Bends to the golden coast of rich Cathay, The feeling of loneliness, of distance, of lingering, slow-revolv ing 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 rein-deer, and of the return of spring in Lapland "Where pure Niemi's fairy mountains rise, And fring'd with roses Tenglio rolls his stream," is equally picturesque and striking in a different way. The traveller lost in the snow, is a well known 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 hush'd air the whitening shower descends, At first thin wav'ring, till at last the flakes Fall broad and wide, and fast, dimming the day Put on their winter-robe of purest white: 'Tis brightness all, save where the new snow melts And pecks, and starts, and wonders where he is: |