206 
NATURE NOTES. 
“ Where the Northern ocean, in vast whirls 
Boils round the naked melancholy isles 
Of farthest Thule ; and the Atlantic surge 
Pours in among the stormy Hebrides ; 
Who can recount what transmigrations there 
Are annual made ? what nations come and go ? 
And how the living clouds on clouds arise ? 
Infinite wings ! till all the plume-dark air, 
And wide resounding shore, are one wild cry.” 
He draws the various autumn aspects of the moon in the 
time of “ shooting stars,” 
“ Near extinct her deadened orb appears. 
And scarce appear, of sickly beamless white.” 
And there are the various “ will-o’-the-wisps,” as the strange 
light which “ sent by the better genius of the night,” sits harm- 
less “gleaming on the horse’s mane.” Winter has many fine 
passages, too long for quotation : as the signs and presages of 
storm, no mean echo of Virgil, or the familiar description of 
the robin. Perhaps Thomson’s greatest strength is in his 
description of light and heat, clouds and mists; which he 
renders with all the accuracy, and no little of the poetry, so 
abundant in the poems of \Vordsworth or Shelley, and in the 
pictures of Turner. 
The seasons are hard to treat well in poetry ; a fine picture 
from nature is excellent as part of a poem not directly con- 
cerned with nature ; in simile or in metaphor : but a deliberate 
poem upon the aspects of nature may be tiresome in many ways. 
Thomson indulges too much in philosophic meditations of no 
great value, in tedious and irrelevant love stories, in high-flown 
rhetoric and bombast. But succeeding poets have agreed to 
praise his fine qualities. Cowper, whose judgment upon de- 
scriptive poetry is that of an expert, says that “ Thomson in 
description is admirable.” \\'ordsworth, who again is of the 
highest authority, gives him a somewhat patronising applause. 
He was Tennyson’s master in verse, at a very early age, and 
the model of his first verses; and IMr. Saintsbury classes Thom- 
son’s blank verse with that of Milton and of Tennyson, as “ one 
of the chief original models of the metre.” The plain-spoken 
Cobbett, indeed, speaks of “the pensioned poet. Jammy Thom- 
son, and that sickly stuff of his, which no man of sense ever can 
endure after he gets to the age of twenty.” But the weight of 
critical authority and of popular sympathy is against him. 
Dr. Johnson, in his Life of Thomson, and throughout Boswell, 
praises him highly. “ Thomson had, I think, as much of the 
poet about him as most writers. Everything appeared to him 
through the medium of his favourite pursuit. He could not 
have viewed those two candles burning but with a poetical 
eye.” Thomson has described “two” candles burning, but it 
was when his jovial huntsmen, well fed and well drunk, were 
“ seeing double.” 
“ Before their maudlin eyes 
Seen dim and blue, the double tapers dance, 
Like the sun wading through the misty sky.” 
