… James Thomson (1700-1748) is confessedly the most important figure in the early history of Romanticism. He foreshadowed the new spirit in various ways, as in his strong love of liberty, his constant plea for the poor as against the rich, his preference for blank verse, his imitation of older models, especially Spenser, and in his tendency toward comprehensive schemes; but his chief importance is in his attitude toward external Nature. If, however, we take into consideration all his work, we shall find in more than three-fourths of it the utmost apparent indifference to Nature. In the five tragedies written between 1738 and 1748 there is no hint that their author knew more of the world about him than the veriest classicist of them all. In "Alfred" (1740), written by Thomson and Mallet, there are occasional descriptive touches, but these are almost too slight to mention when we think what effects might have been produced in a play the action of which occurs on a beautiful wooded island inhabited only by a few peasants. In the other tragedies Nature is drawn upon merely for conventional similitudes, as in "Edward and Elenora" (1739), where five of the eleven similitudes are the comparison of rage or fierce passions to tempests; or in "Sophonisba," an earlier play (1728), where there is not a fresher or more forceful comparison than that of an army to a torrent, passion to a whirlwind, the hero to a lion, and the heroine to a blooming morn. In the 3,300 lines of the tedious poem, "Liberty" (1734-36), not more than fifty refer to external Nature, and of these the only passages that suggest, even remotely, the author of "The Seasons" are the descriptions of the sullen land of Sarmatia and the shaggy mountain charms of the Swiss Alps. "The Castle of Indolence," written in 1733, is the only one of the poems written after 1730 that indicates any genuine love of Nature. The charm of this poem for modern readers is perhaps largely due to its use of external Nature, for, though there is little of the rich, elaborate description characteristic of "The Seasons," what there is, is so exquisitely appropriate that all the listless, luxurious life of this land of soft delights is seen through a romantic and picturesque setting of waving, shadowy woods, sunny glades, and silver streams. Yet a closer study of the descriptive stanzas shows little more than a musically felicitous combination of the attributes conventionally recognized as belonging to a pleasing landscape. The only lines really indicative of a love of Nature such as the classicists had not known are the following from the second canto:

I care not, Fortune, what you me deny:
You can not rob me of free Nature's grace;
You can not shut the windows of the sky,
Through which Aurora shows her brightening face;
You can not bar my constant feet to trace
The woods and lawns, by living stream, at eve.

It is to "The Seasons" (1726-30) that we must go if we wish to understand Thomson's work as a poet of Nature. A brief analysis of the study of external Nature in these poems will serve to show both in what respects Thomson's work was the outcome of a new spirit, and in what respects its affiliations are with the old.

An important part of Thomson's poetical endowment was his quick sensitiveness to the sights and sounds and odors of the world about him. He looked on Nature with the eye of an artist, but not of an artist in black and white. It was not form but color that attracted him. There are occasional descriptions, as of the garden in "Spring" and of the precious stones in "Summer," where the lines glow like a painter's palette, and throughout "The Seasons" there is a general impression of rich and varied coloring. That this impression is stronger than a list of the color terms used would seem to justify is due to two facts, both characteristic of Thomson's work in general. In the first place he did not care for nicely discriminated shades or delicate tints. He loved broad masses of strong, clear color. He dwells with ever new delight on blue as seen in the sky or reflected in water, and on green, "smiling Nature's universal robe." In the second place he is especially rich in such words as indicate color in general without specification as to the kind. "The flushing year," "every-coloured glory," "the boundless blush of spring," "the innumerous-coloured scene of things," "unnumbered dyes," "hues on hues," are typical phrases. Motion also caught his eye more quickly than form. The dancing light and shade in a forest pathway, the waving of branches, the flow of water, the rapid flight or slow march of clouds, the golden, shadowy sweep of wind over ripened grain, count for much in the pleasurable impression made upon his mind by different scenes.

It is evident that Thomson received more through his eye than through his ear, but he was very far from being indifferent to the sounds of Nature. The hum of bees, the low of cattle, the bleating of sheep are frequently noted. The songs of birds, while often represented by some general phase, as "the music of the woods," or "woodland hymns," are now and then more minutely specified, as in the fine description of the "symphony of spring." There is also effective representation of the sounds heard in storms, as in the summer thunderstorm. The most frequent sounds are, as is inevitable in an English poet whose facts come from actual observation, those made by water, as the plaint of purling rills, the thunder of impetuous torrents, or the growling of frost-imprisoned rivers.

While Thomson was not the first poet to speak of the odor of the bean-flower, his words show a keen appreciation of that perfume, and certainly the "smell of dairy" was a country odor first poetically noticed by him. His sensitiveness to odors is not especially marked, yet it is safe to say that he was in this respect more observant than his immediate predecessors or contemporaries.

In reading the poetry of Nature after Dryden in historical sequence, there is, in coming to "The Seasons," a sudden sense of freedom and elation, a sense of having at last come upon a poet who writes freely and spontaneously from a large personal experience, whose facts press in upon him even too abundantly. He knows many kinds of Nature and under varying aspects. His garden picture, though somewhat too much in the floral catalogue style, shows how well he knew the cultivated flowers he described, and he speaks with no less loving minuteness of furze, the thorny brake, the purple heather, dewy cowslips, white hawthorn, and lilies of the vale. It is a pleasure to see how much he knew about birds. He describes their habits with remarkable accuracy and minuteness. He shows their tender arts in courtship, their skill in nest-building, and the "pious frauds" whereby they lure away the would-be trespasser. In no poetry between Marvell and Thomson do we find birds so fully described, and Marvell has nothing so charming and sympathetic as Thomson's winter red-breast. Thomson's scope is also wider in that he knew the birds of the seashore as well as those of wood and meadow. Equally close attention is given to the various domestic fowl. The peacock had flaunted his painted tail through poetry for a hundred years, and is now for the first time outranked as an object of interested observation by the hen, the duck, and the turkey. The frequent descriptions of domestic animals, especially the sheep, the horse, and the ox, also show minute knowledge such as could not have been gained from books. It is, moreover, a significant fact that through these numerous and varied studies there runs a genuine love for animals. Thomson was, at least in poetic theory, a vegetarian, and he vigorously denounced the killing of animals for food as conduct worthy only of wild beasts. His poetical invectives against hunting are as vigorous as Cowper's. He objects to caging birds, and his indignation waxes high over the bees "robb'd and murder'd" by man's tyranny. The only unoffending animal that escapes Thomson's wide sympathy is the fish. The skill with which the monarch of the brook is lured from his dark haunt and at last "gaily" dragged to land is described with a gusto in curious contrast to the pity lavished on the tortured worm that may have served for bait.

As we have just seen, the animals that Thomson described were those that any country lad might know rather than those that had been canonically set apart for poetical service. The same independent judgment is evident in his study of other neglected realms in the world of Nature. He gloried in storms and winter. Though he now and then falls into the conventional phraseology, and speaks of winter as drear and awful, he yet in the same breath exclaims that he finds its horrors congenial. The contrast of a first winter in London turns his mind with full emphasis to the days of his youth when he wandered with unceasing joy through virgin snows, and listened to the roar of the winds and the bursting torrent, and watched the deep tempest brewing in the grim sky. Such experiences he remembers with joy for they "exalt the soul to solemn thought." Through all the descriptive portions of the "Winter" there is a vigorous, manly enthusiasm as tonic and bracing as the bright, frosty days themselves. Thomson's pleasure in the sterner phenomena of Nature is further shown by his evident delight in tracing the progress of any storm, whether the thunder storm of summer, the devastating wind and rain of autumn, or the black gloom of a winter tempest. These fierce tempests certainly are of more comparative importance in "The Seasons" than they are in Nature. Their frequent choice may be in part due to their dramatic qualities of rapidity and force. The crashing and hurtling of the elements was a subject not unsuited to Thomson's splendid but ponderous and swelling style. But in the main it is only fair to suppose that he wrote of storms well because he had many times watched them with an interest that had made him remember them.

With many other aspects of Nature was Thomson familiar. He knew much of the sky both by day and by night. His few short descriptions of the starry heavens are worth more than all Young's far-sought epithets. One phrase concerning the radiant orbs

That more than deck, that animate the sky,

seems a conscious turning away from the old artificial conception. One of the finest moon-light passages is reminiscent of Milton in two lines,

Now through the passing cloud she seems to stoop,
Now up the pure cerulean rides sublime,

but the close,

The whole air whitens with a boundless tide
Of silver radiance, trembling round the world,

is Thomson's own, and is a good example of the full sweet harmony that marks his verse at its best. There are many passages and apparently casual phrases indicative of the closeness with which he watched clouds. The doubling fogs that roll around the hills and wrap the world in a "formless gray confusion" through which the shepherd stalks gigantic is described with a Wordsworthian felicity and precision.

The descriptions referred to below of early morning, of sunset, of evening, and of night may be perhaps taken as among the best examples of their sort in "The Seasons." As a whole they show conclusively from what long intimacy with Nature Thomson wrote. The very freshness of morning breathes from the sunrise picture in "Summer" and the little picture in "Autumn" is more delicately suggestive than many a more pretentious description of the dawning day. The sunset after the rain in "Spring" is one of the best examples of Thomson's power to paint word pictures. It would be difficult for any canvas to present a scene at once so mellow and radiant, and so transfused with the joy of a renovated earth. As exquisite in their way are the descriptions of the slow approach of "Sober Evening" with her circling shadows and the softly swelling breeze that stirs the stream and wood; and the later description of the strange uncertain mingling of light and darkness in a summer night in England. These passages and others that might be quoted show to what fine issues Thomson's pen was sometimes touched, but it cannot be denied that his really intimate and exact knowledge of Nature and her ways could not hold all his descriptions subject to the charm of simplicity and truth.

As further illustrative of Thomson's knowledge of all that pertained to the country we have his admirably vivid and detailed accounts of the homely labors of a farmer's life, as plowing, sowing, reaping, hay making, and sheep shearing. Of these the sheep shearing is the most simply charming and natural. It is also the most noteworthy, because sheep and shepherds had long been the very substance out of which pastorals were woven so that in such descriptions the contrast between the new and the old way of looking at country life is sharply defined. Thomson's pastoral queen and shepherd king are at the opposite pole from the sentimental, affected, useless nymphs and swains who had before posed as the guardians of English sheep. His shepherds are sturdy fellows, doing honest work and plenty of it, and as such they had no predecessors in English classical poetry. The sheep, too, are real animals. They have to be watched with a vigilance of which no flower-crowned swain playing on an oaten pipe would be capable. And they must be washed and sheared and branded. In winter they must be housed and fed, no matter what the dangers on the dark, stormy hills. It is this strong, refreshing air of reality in Thomson's poetry, and his unfeigned respect and admiration for the actual country life in England that completed the work begun by the ugly satire of Swift and the mock pastorals of Gay, and made the old, conventional, pseudoclassic pastoral from that time on an impossibility in English poetry.

The phrase, "dislike of boundaries," is perhaps not very apt, but it may serve to describe what is certainly a pervasive quality of Thomson's work, and a significant quality, for if there was one thing more pleasing than another to an orthodox classicist it was a welldefined limit. Thomson preferred the blank verse to the couplet because the unrhymed, flowing lines gave a certain freedom. There is an air of abundance, of even undue exuberance about much of his work. Even his diction presents this idea of lavishness. There is a surprisingly large number of such words as "effulgent," "refulgent," "effusion," "diffusion," "suffusion," "profusion," from the roots "fundo" and "fulgeo" with their idea of a liberal pouring out. "Luxuriant," "ample," "prodigal," "boundless," "unending," "ceaseless," "immense," "interminable," "immeasurable," "vast," "infinite," are typical words.

are typical phrases. In one short description the birds are "innumerous;" they are "prodigal" of harmony; their joy overflows in music "unconfined;" the song of the linnets is "poured out profusely." In another short passage the stores of the vale are "lavish," the lily is "luxuriant" and grows in fair "profusion," the flowers are "unnumbered," beauty is "unbounded," and bees fly in "swarming millions." When images come into his mind it is by the ten thousand. In spring the country is "one boundless blush," "far diffused around." He loves the "liberal air," "lavish fragrance," "full luxuriance," "extensive harvests," "immeasurable," or "exhaustless" stores, "copious exhalations." All is superlative, exaggerated, scornful of limits. It was "the unbounded scheme of things" that most appealed to him.

The same point receives illustration in his sense for landscape. He rejoiced in a wide view. He loved to seek out some proud eminence and there let his eye wander "far excursive," and dwell on "boundless prospects." Such scenes not only gave him a chance for picturesque enumerations without any especial demand for minute discrimination, but they satisfied his preference for grand, general effects.

Closely connected with the sense for landscape is the use of geographical romance, or the heightening of poetic effect by the accumulation of sounding geographical names. The finest example of this device is in the lines descriptive of the thunder re-echoed among the mountains. In this passage the impression of sublimity is due to the suggestions of mysterious elemental forces subtly associated with such names as Carnarvon, Penmaenmawr, Snowdon, Thule, and Cheviot. This mental following of the thunder from peak to distant peak, this endeavor to strengthen the impression by the use of the remote and the unknown, show a mind set toward romantic rather than classical ideals.

A further indication of Thomson's defiance of limits is his curiosity. His mind goes back of the present fact and restlessly strives after causes and origins. In imagination he seeks to penetrate to the vast eternal springs from which Nature refreshes the earth. The most poetic example of this questioning spirit is in his address to the winds that blow with boisterous sweep to swell the terrors of the storm.

In what far-distant region of the sky,
Hush'd in deep silence, sleep you when 'tis calm?

The classical spirit held itself to useful questions that could have some rational answer. It is the romantic spirit that pushes its inquiries into the realms of the unknowable.

Throughout this study of Thomson's work there has been an implicit recognition of his strong love for Nature. This fact receives further definite confirmation from his letters. It is interesting to note that his early life was almost as fortunate in its environment as Wordsworth's. When he was a year old his father moved to Southdean, a small hamlet near Jedborough. Here the lad remained till he entered the university at Edinburgh at fifteen, and here he apparently passed most of his vacations till he went to London at twenty-five. One of his especial friends was Dr. Cranston of Ancrum whose love of Nature was equal to his own. Thomson's letters to Dr. Cranston, though somewhat stilted and high-flown, show clearly the eagerness with which they had together explored the picturesque country along the Tiviot and its tributary streams, the Ale and the Jed. In the first letter from London, under the date April 3, 1725, was written, "I wish you joy of the spring." In September of the same year Thomson wrote from Barnet:

Now I imagine you seized with a fine romantic kind of melancholy on the fading of the year; now I figure you wandering, philosophical and pensive, 'midst the brown, wither'd groves, while the leaves rustle under your feet, the sun gives a farewell parting gleam, and the birds

Stir the faint note and but attempt to sing.

Then again when the heavens wear a more gloomy aspect, the winds whistle, and the waters spout, I see you in the well-known clough, beneath the solemn arch of tall, thick embowering trees, listening to the amusing lull of the many steep, moss-grown cascades, while deep, divine contemplation, the genius of the place, prompts each swelling awful thought. I am sure you would not resign your place in that scene at any easy rate. None ever enjoyed it to the height you do, and you are worthy of it. There I walk in spirit and disport in its beloved gloom. This country I am in is not very entertaining; no variety but that of woods, and them we have in abundance; but where is the living stream? the airy mountain? or the hanging rock? with twenty other things that elegantly please the lover of nature. Nature delights me in every form.

Later in life Thomson was "more fat than bard beseems," and correspondingly indolent, and his biographers give the impression that no beauty of the world about him could compete with the charms of an easy chair. But his letters still bear witness to a love of Nature as real if not as active as that of his youth. In July, 1743, he wrote to Mr. Lyttleton promising to spend some weeks with him at Hagley:

As this will fall in Autumn, I shall like it the better, for I think that season of the year the most pleasing and the most poetical. The spirits are not then dissipated with the gaiety of spring, and the glaring light of summer, but composed into a serious and tempered joy. The year is perfect….. The muses, whom you obligingly say I shall bring with me, I shall find with you—the muses of the great, simple country, not the little, fine-lady muses of Richmond Hill.

Again four or five years later, he wrote to Paterson, "Retirement and nature are more and more my passion every day."

This passion for Nature finds frequent expression in the poems, but no citation of specific instances can be so convincing as the general impression of unforced personal enthusiasm made upon the reader of "The Seasons." Moreover, Thomson's conception of the effect of Nature on man, the next topic, may be fairly counted as but a transcript from his own experience, and therefore as further illustrative of his love for Nature.

In "The Seasons" as in preceding poetry both man and Nature have a place, but there is a great transfer of emphasis. Nature had been ignored or counted as the servant, the background, the accompaniment of man. Now the human incidents are few and unimportant and are used chiefly to lay additional stress by their tone on the spirit characteristic of each season. Nature is loved and studied and described purely for her own sake. There is very little use of natural facts as similes for human qualities, and there is, practically, no use of pathetic fallacy. The effect of Nature on the man sensitive to her high ministration is represented as twofold. In the first place and chiefly, she storms his senses with her ravishing delights. She gives him pleasures of the most rich and varied sort. She enchants him with color and harmony and perfume. These pleasures are, however, of the eye and ear. They do not touch the deeper joys of the heart. Of the appeal of Nature to the soul of man, in the true Wordsworthian sense, Thomson knew little. Yet occasional passages indicate that he had received from Nature gifts higher than that of mere external, sensuous enjoyment. He attributes to Nature in at least a partially Wordsworthian sense, the power of soothing, elevating, and instructing. He sings the "infusive force" of spring on man,

When heaven and earth as if contending vie
To raise his being, and serene his soul.

It is his delight to "meditate the book of Nature" for thence he hopes to "learn the moral song." At the soft evening hour, he

Not only does he attend to Nature's voice from month to month, and watch with admiration her every shape, but he

Feels all her sweet emotions at his heart.

While these and a few other similar passages would hardly be remarked in the poetry of Nature after Wordsworth, they are of great historical importance because they show the early beginning of that spirit which received its final and perfect expression seventy years later in "The Lyrical Ballads."

Thomson's two dominant conceptions in his thought of God in Nature were as the almighty Creator and the ever-active Ruler. The whole tenor of his poems goes to show that he saw in Nature not God himself but God's hand. Even his invocations to Nature, animate and inanimate, to praise God in one general song of adoration, are but highly emotional and figurative statements of the conception that God is not all, but Lord of all. Now and then, however, in the midst of the old ideas there comes the breath of a new thought. In one line we find the cold, conventional idea; in the next, an intimation of divine immanence. God's beauty walks forth in the spring. His spirit breathes in the gales. The seasons "are but the varied God." God is the Universal Soul of Heaven and earth. He is the Essential Presence in all Nature. Such sentences as these, whether uttered consciously, or half unconsciously under the influence of poetic excitement, clearly prefigure the modern conception of the union and inter-penetration of the physical and spiritual worlds.

Of the two general points to be kept in view in the study of Thomson as a poet of Nature the second was a consideration of his affiliations with the classical spirit. It is surprising to observe in how few respects such affiliations can be justly predicated. There are occasional references to his Doric reed, and frequent invocations to his muse. As preliminary justification of his choice of themes are quotations from Virgil and Horace. The authority of the "Rural Maro" and the example of Cincinnatus lend added dignity to the English plow. Personifications of the conventional type often appear. There is one purely didactic description of the cure for a pest of insects, and another description of the method by which bees are robbed of their honey, that are evidently framed on Latin models. Nor do we miss the ever-recurring advice to read the page of the Mantuan swain beneath a spreading tree on a warm noon.

We also find that toward mountains and the sea Thomson held almost the traditional attitude. His nearness to the coast and his knowledge of shore birds show that he could not have been entirely ignorant of the ocean, but it apparently made little impression on him, for he seldom mentions it even casually, and but once with any emphasis. It is then one of the elements of a wild, fierce storm that sweeps the coast. A few of his epithets for mountains, as "keen-air'd" and "forest-rustling," are new though not especially felicitous, and he often mentions mountains by name, or as bounding some distant prospect. But in general his conception and his phraseology are those of his contemporaries. He speaks of the Alps as "dreadful," as "horrid, vast, sublime," and again as "horrid mountains." There is nowhere any evidence of the modern feeling toward mountains, though there are frequent expressions of appreciative love for green hills.

The point in which Thomson shows strongest traces of the old influence is his diction. He often has the new thought before he has found the appropriate dress for it. Birds are still the "plumy" or "feathery people," and fish are the "finny race." "Shaggy" and "nodding" are used of mountains and rocks and forests, and "deformed" and "inverted" of winter, in true classical fashion. "Maze" is one of his most frequent words. "Horrid" still holds a useful place. "Amusing" is five times applied to the charms of some landscape. Leaves are the "honours" of trees, paths are "erroneous," caverns "sweat," and all sorts of things are "innumerous." He also makes large use of Latinized words such as "turgent," "bibulous," "relucent," "luculent," "irriguous," "gelid," "ovarious," "incult," "concactive," "hyperborean." These words can hardly be said to belong to any received poetic diction. They are rather a mannerism of Thomson's style, and an outgrowth of his delight in swelling, sounding phrases.

From this summary we at once perceive how few and comparatively unimportant were the characteristics held in common by Thomson and the classicists in their treatment of external Nature.

This study of "The Seasons" shows that so far as intrinsic worth is concerned the poems are marked by a strange mingling of merits and defects, but that, considered in their historical place in the development of the poetry of Nature, their importance and striking originality can hardly be overstated. Though Thomson talked the language of his day, his thought was a new one. He taught clearly, though without emphasis, the power of Nature to quiet the passions and elevate the mind of man, and he intimated a deeper thought of divine immanence in the phenomena of Nature. But his great service to the men of his day was that he shut up their books, led them out of their parks, and taught them to look on Nature with enthusiasm. This service is of the greater historical value because it was so well adapted to the times. To begin with, it was a necessary first step. People cannot love what they do not know. Lead them to Nature, teach them to observe with amazement and delight, and the other steps follow in due course in accordance with the power of each soul to receive the deeper influences of Nature. In the second place, men were just ready to take this first decisive step away from the artificial to the natural. The work of the poets who immediately preceded Thomson had been too slight and fragmentary to count for much in the way of influence, yet they were most clear indications of a tendency, a silent preparation of the general poetic mind, for such work as Thomson's. He was at once and easily understood because, while his poems in their spontaneous freshness and charm, their rich, easy fulness of description, their minute observation, their sweep of view, their unforced enthusiasm, must have come as a revelation, it was a revelation in no sense defiant or iconoclastic. In the main it was a revelation of new delights, not of disturbing theories, or vexing problems. A touch more of subtley, of vision, of mystery, of the faculty divine, and Thomson might have waited for recognition as Wordsworth did. …