But these thou must renounce, if lust of wealth
E'er win its way to thy corrupted heart;
For, ah! it poisons like a scorpion's dart;
Prompting th' ungenerous wish, the selfish scheme,
The stern resolve, unmoved by pity's smart ;
The troublous day, and long distressful dream.

*

SECTION IX.

THOMSON (1700-1748).

The Seasons.

*

He has been justly called the great painter of Nature's scenery and Nature's joys. His chief merit consisted in describing her, and the pleasure afforded by a contemplation of her infinite and glorious varieties. "Touched by his more than magic pencil, every thing around us lives, and breathes, and speaksspeaks forth its Creator's praise: the little hills rejoice on every side; the trees of the fields clap their hands, and all creation joins in one general song."

He excelled in delineating, not the strong and boisterous passions of the human heart, but its gentler emotions and more pleasing traits. Of himself he says:

"I solitary court

The inspiring breeze, and meditate the book
Of Nature, ever open; aiming thence,

Warm from the heart, to pour the moral song."

The "Seasons" are, the most read and generally admired of his works, yet not without its faults. The language is sometimes inflated-style sometimes monotonous, but from continued elevation. The digressions have been objected to as blemishes, but by others have been approved and admired as essential to the highest merit of the poem.

Some have pronounced his " Castle of Indolence" altogether superior to the "Seasons." It was designed as a satire upon his own indolent character, and an incentive to the young to put forth vigorous exertions.

Several tablets were erected to his memory, containing beautiful inscriptions. Beneath one of these

was written this beautiful passage from the season of Winter:

"Father of Light and Life! Thou good Supreme!

O teach me what is good! teach me thyself;

Save me from folly, vanity, and vice,

From every low pursuit! and feed my soul

With knowledge, conscious peace, and virtue pure;
Sacred, substantial, never-fading bliss!"

His great work, "The Seasons," with a few precepts intermingled, presents, in beautiful series and harmonious connection, the phenomena of nature and the operations of man contemporary with these, through the four seasons; forming, in fact, a biographical memoir of the infancy, maturity, and old age of an English year. Thus beautifully has Montgomery de

scribed it.

A short characteristic specimen of Thomson was given in the chapter on Personification. Other specimens will be found in the following section:

Some characteristic traits of Thomson and Cowper are given by Hazlitt, as follows:

Thomson, the kind-hearted Thomson, was the most indolent of mortals, and of poets. His faults are, that he is often affected through carelessness, and pompous from unsuspecting simplicity of character. He seldom writes a good line but he makes up for it by a bad one. Cowper has surpassed him 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 minutia 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 readers. 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 humanizes whatever he touches. He makes all his descriptions teem with life. His blank verse is not harsh, nor utterly untunable; but it is heavy and monotonous ; it seems always laboring up hill.

"If Cowper had a more polished taste, Thomson had, beyond comparison, a more fertile genius, more impulsive force, a more entire forgetfulness of himself in his subject,

If in Thomson you are sometimes offended with the slovenliness of the author by profession, determined to get through his task at all events; in Cowper you are no less dissatisfied with the finicalness of the private gentleman, who does not care whether he completes his work or not; and in whatever he does, is evidently more solicitous to please himself than the public. He shakes hands with nature with a pair of fashionable gloves on. He had neither Thomson's love of the unadorned beauties of nature, nor Pope's exquisite sense of the elegances of art. poet, and deserves all his reputation. amiable weaknesses, elegant trifling. of pictures of domestic comfort and social refinement, as well as of natural imagery and feeling, which can hardly be forgotten but with the language itself. His satire is also excellent. It is pointed and forcible, with the polished manners of the gentleman, and the honest indignation of the virtuous man. His religious poetry wants elevation and fire. His story of John Gilpin has, perhaps, given as much pleasure to as many people as any thing of the same length that ever was written."

SECTION X.

COWPER.
The Task.

Still he is a genuine
His worst faults are
He has left a number

He is one of the most instructive and pleasing of English poets, and is decidedly one of the best specimens of an easy and graceful epistolary style. His most adinired poem is the Task, some parts of which are inimitably good, but there are others rather trifling. "His language," says Campbell, "has such a masculine, idiomatic strength, and his manner, whether he rises into grace or falls into negligence, has so much plain and familiar freedom, that we read no poetry with a deeper conviction of its sentiments having come from the author's heart." He is distinguished for a rich and chastened humor in most of his writings, though at times he was the victim of most lamentable melancholy. In the description of the quiet pleasures of domestic life, he much excels, as may be seen in the fourth book of the Task. He is the author of many other poems, and of some admirable

hymns in constant use at the present day. specimen of his poetry, read the following:

THE INFIDEL AND THE CHRISTIAN.

"The path to bliss abounds with many a snare ;
Learning is one, and wit, however rare.
The Frenchman, first in literary fame

(Mention him, if you please. Voltaire? The same),
With spirit, genius, eloquence supplied,

Lived long, wrote much, laugh'd heartily, and died.
The Scripture was his jest-book, whence he drew
Bon-mots to gall the Christian and the Jew;
An infidel in health, but what when sick?
Oh-then a text would touch him at the quick :
View him at Paris, in his last career,
Surrounding throngs the demi god revere;
Exalted on his pedestal of pride,

And fumed with frankincense on every side,
He begs their flattery with his latest breath,
And smother'd in't at last, is praised to death.
Yon cottager, who weaves, at her own door,
Pillow and bobbins, all her little store;
Content, though mean, and cheerful, if not gay,
Shuffling her thread about the livelong day,
Just earns a scanty pittance, and at night
Lies down secure, her heart and pocket light:
She, for her humble sphere by nature fit,
Has little understanding, and no wit,
Receives no praise; but though her lot be such
(Toilsome and indigent), she renders much :
Just knows, and knows no more, her Bible true,
A truth the brilliant Frenchman never knew;
And in that charter reads with sparkling eyes
Her title to a treasure in the skies.

"O happy peasant! O unhappy bard!
His the mere tinsel, hers the rich reward;
He praised, perhaps, for ages yet to come,
She never heard of half a mile from home;
He lost in errors his vain heart prefers,
She safe in the simplicity of hers."

As a

The charm of Cowper's poetry is a pure, innocent, lovely mind, delighting itself in pure, innocent, and lovely nature the freshness of the fields, the fragrance of the flowers, breathes in his verse.

THOMSON AND COWPER COMPARED.

Thomson's genius, says Professor Wilson, does not

very, very often-though often-delight us by exquisite minute touches in the description of nature-like that of Cowper. It loves to paint on a great scale, and to dash objects off sweepingly by bold strokes such, indeed, as have almost always marked the genius of the mighty masters of the lyre and the rainbow. Cowper sets nature before your eyes

Thomson before your imagination. Which do you prefer? Both. In one mood of mind, we love Cowper best; in another, Thomson. Sometimes the Seasons are almost a Task, and sometimes the Task is out of Season. There is a delightful distinctness in all the pictures of the Bard of Olney-glorious gloom or glimmer in most of those of the Bard of Ednam. Cowper paints trees-Thomson, woods. Thomson paints, in a few wondrous lines, rivers from source to sea, like the mighty Barampooter-Cowper, in many no very wondrous lines, brightens up one bend of a stream, or awakens our fancy to the murmur of some single waterfall. But a truce to antithesis- a deceptive style of criticism and see how Thomson sings of snow. Why, in the following lines, almost-though not quite as well as Christopher North (Professor Wilson), in his Winter Rhapsody

"The cherish'd fields

Put on their tender robe of purest white,

"Tis brightness all; save where the new snow melts
Along the mazy current."

Nothing can be more vivid.

There are passages, nowever,

in which Thomson, striving to be pathetic, has overshot the mark, and ceased to be natural. Thus :

"The bleating kine

Eye the bleak heaven, and next the glittering earth

With looks of dumb despair."

The second line is perfect, but the third is not quite right. Sheep do not deliver themselves up to despair under any circumstances; and here Thomson transferred what would have been his own feelings in a corresponding condition, to animals who dreadlessly follow their instincts. Thomson redeems himself in what succeeds:

"Then sad dispersed,

Dig for the wither'd herb through heaps of snow."

For, as they disperse, they do look very sad—and, no doubt, are so but had they been in despair, they would not so readily, and constantly, and uniformly, and successfully have taken to digging-but whole flocks had perished...