NA TU RE-POET R Y. 
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sition that could be offered by Douglas and his men, Douglas 
swore that he would “ let ” or mar that hunting ; and the place 
where, five hundred years ago, the Scottish Earl mustered his 
men in defence of his exclusive rights to the chase, and in 
redemption of his oath, is, strange to say, identified with the 
Churchyard of Southdean. With the Union came peaceful times ; 
the hollow was gradually cleared of its beeches and oaks and more 
prevailing pines; rural industry settled among farms and bleating 
folds, where of old there had passed by the hasty steps of the 
forayer and the hunter ; and the true golden age thus inaugu- 
rated may be said to tarry in the Southdean still. 
A more likely region in respect of natural beauty for the 
creation of a poet of Nature it would not be easy to find. To this 
happy valley among the uplands of the South of Scotland there 
was brought by his father, on November 6, 1700, an infant just 
two months old, who was destined to become the Poet of Nature 
and the harbinger of the modern style. They came from Ednam, 
a parish in the north of the shire, where the poet was born and 
where his father had passed eight years of his professional life 
as minister of the parish. It has been remarked by a careful 
observer that the scenery around Southdean bears in Summer a 
striking resemblance to the scenery around Virgil’s birthplace of 
Andes, near Mantua. The remark is interesting ; and we can 
well believe that the spirit that pervades the “ Georgies ” and the 
kindred spirit that animates the Seasons derived their bent and 
bias, their inspiration and aspiration, from early and close 
acquaintance with scenery similar in beauty, variety, and the 
charm of pastoral repose. 
The interest that would fain trace a connection between 
Mantua and Southdean is increased when we consider that 
Virgil was probably the first poet to engage the attention of 
young Thomson ; that, while a student on holiday in the long 
vacations, a copy of Virgil’s poems was his companion in angling 
excursions on the Jed ; and that when, later in life, Thomson 
was travelling in Italy, the fields where the bard of Mantua 
“gathered his immortal honey” were a principal object of his 
quest. With Thomson, all his life long, Virgil was always first 
favourite, whom his imitator was always willing to take for the 
god of poetry. Students of Thomson will allow that, to the 
qualities which he so much admired in the poetry of Virgil, we 
owe a large part of the charms of his own verse. 
Amidst such scenes, fit nurse for a youthful poet, Thomson 
spent the early and most impressionable years of his life. His 
years of fruition, when he was finally moulding his poems and 
issuing them in the form we now have them, were passed in 
Richmond, a district lovelier and more poetic than even his 
native region. Thus, with a few years between, our Nature- 
poet spent the two extremes of his life under influences the very 
best and happiest that ever poet could desire. Both sets of 
influences, the earliest and the latest, are reflected in Thomson’s 
