92 LANDSCAPE AND LITERATURE 



poetic gift of the writer, and the poem immediately 

 became popular, for notwithstanding its artificial style, 

 it took the reader at once into the sanctuaries of 

 nature, from which the poetry of the previous hundred 

 years had been exiled. It awakened a general interest 

 in features of landscape never before described so fully 

 or so well in English verse. It painted changes of 

 the sky — tempest, rain-clouds and snow-storms, and 

 it brought the gloom of a northern winter vividly 

 before the imagination of dwellers in a more southerly 



o 



clime. 



Thomson told the world how in his youth, 



' Nursed by careless solitude he lived 

 And sang of nature with unceasing joy,' 1 



and how, with ' nature's volume broad displayed,' it 

 was his sole delight to read therein, happy if it might 

 be his good fortune, 



1 Catching inspiration thence 

 Some easy passage, raptured, to translate.' - 



He had been used in his early years to muse 

 'On rocks and hills and towers and wandering streams,' 3 

 and these now became the subjects of his song. 

 Thomson, like his greater successor Burns, had from 

 earliest boyhood been familiar with the burns and 

 waters of his northern home. When he came to 

 England he found but little entertainment in the land- 

 scapes around London, and longed for ' the living 

 stream, the airy mountain, and the hanging rock.' 

 He portrays with evident delight the changeful aspect 

 of his native watercourses in the various seasons ot 

 1 Winter, S. -Summer, 192. :i Ibid., 89. 



