90 LANDSCAPE AND LITERATURE 



poets. Their banks supply secluded spots for reverie 

 and communion with nature. Under their shade and 

 shelter, bird and blossom and flower are guarded from 

 the blasts around, while the sparkle and murmur of 

 their waters give a sense of life and companionship 

 even in the depths of solitude. Constant familiarity 

 with such a type of stream as that of the Scottish 

 lowlands can hardly fail to strike the imagination in a 

 different way from that which has attended the slow- 

 creeping and silent brooks of the south-east of Eng- 

 land. The Scottish poets, even in the earlier centuries, 

 show traces of the influence of their more rugged sur- 

 roundings ; but not till the eighteenth century did this 

 influence manifest itself in such a manner as to affect 

 the general flow of English literature. 



Of the two Scottish lowland poets whom we have 

 now to notice, James Thomson was considerably the 

 earlier. He was born in Roxburghshire in 1700, 

 within hearing of the ripple of the Tweed, within 

 sight of the Cheviot and Lammermuir Hills, and in 

 a region famous in Border ballad and song. To the 

 east the uplands of the Cheviot Hills rise as a blue 

 ridge, high enough to come often within the clouds, 

 to catch the first snows of autumn, and to keep them 

 unmelted in northern rifts until the spring. From 

 these long, bare undulating uplands a number of 

 streams descend northwards into the Tweed, each 

 having its own dale, with its own ridge of moors on 

 either hand, and its meadows and cornfields along the 

 bottom. The slope of the ground gives these de- 

 scending waters such an impetus as sends them dashing 

 over rocky channels, here and there cutting a scaur or 



