The Age of Pope Part 7

'His praise, ye brooks, attune, ye trembling rills; And let me catch it as I muse along.

Ye headlong torrents, rapid, and profound; Ye softer floods, that lead the humid maze Along the vale; and thou, majestic main, A secret world of wonders in thyself, Sound His stupendous praise, whose greater voice Or bids you roar, or bids your roarings fall.

Soft roll your incense, herbs, and fruits, and flowers, In mingled clouds to Him, whose sun exalts, Whose breath perfumes you, and whose pencil paints.

Ye forests bend, ye harvests wave, to Him; Breathe your still song into the reaper's heart, As home he goes beneath the joyous moon.

Great source of day! best image here below Of thy Creator, ever pouring wide, From world to world, the vital ocean round, On Nature write with every beam His praise.

The thunder rolls: be hushed the prostrate world; While cloud to cloud returns the solemn hymn.

Bleat out afresh, ye hills; ye mossy rocks Retain the sound: the broad responsive low, Ye valleys, raise; for the Great Shepherd reigns, And His unsuffering kingdom yet will come.'

Swift complains that the _Seasons_, being all descriptive, nothing is doing, a defect inseparable from the subject. But the work has a poet's best gift--imagination--and a poet's instinct for apprehending the charm of what is minute in Nature, as well as of what is grand.

Thomson has been called the naturalist's poet, and Hartley Coleridge observes that he is 'a perfect reservoir of natural images.' In his account of what he had learnt only by report he depends sometimes on the ignorant traditions of the country people; but in describing what he observes with the bodily eye, and with the eye of the mind, he is faithful to what he sees, and to what he perceives. No Dutch painter can be more exact and accurate than Thomson in the delineation of familiar scenes, and of animal life. In ill.u.s.tration of this gift, which Cowper shares with him, a scene, not to be surpa.s.sed for truthfulness of description, shall be quoted from _Winter_:

'Through the hushed air the whitening shower descends, At first thin-wavering; till at last the flakes Fall broad and wide and fast, dimming the day With a continual flow. The cherished fields Put on their winter robe of purest white.

'Tis brightness all; save where the new snow melts Along the mazy current. Low the woods Bow their h.o.a.r head; and ere the languid sun, Faint from the west, emits his evening ray, Earth's universal face, deep-hid and chill, Is one wild dazzling waste, that buries wide The works of man. Drooping, the labourer-ox Stands covered o'er with snow, and then demands The fruit of all his toil. The fowls of heaven, Tamed by the cruel season, crowd around The winnowing store, and claim the little boon Which Providence a.s.signs them. One alone, The redbreast, sacred to the household G.o.ds, Wisely regardful of th' embroiling sky, In joyless fields and th.o.r.n.y thickets, leaves His shivering mates, and pays to trusted man His annual visit. Half afraid, he first Against the window beats; then brisk, alights On the warm hearth; then, hopping o'er the floor, Eyes all the smiling family askance, And pecks, and starts, and wonders where he is-- Till more familiar grown, the table-crumbs Attract his slender feet. The foodless wilds Pour forth their brown inhabitants. The hare, Though timorous of heart and hard beset By death in various forms, dark snares, and dogs, And more unpitying men, the garden seeks Urged on by fearless want. The bleating kind Eye the bleak heaven, and next the glistening earth, With looks of dumb despair; then, sad-dispersed Dig for the withered herb through heaps of snow.'

Thomson loves also to paint the landscape on a broad scale, and though his diction is sometimes too florid, he generally satisfies the imagination, as, for instance, in the splendid description in _Summer_ of a sand-storm in the desert.

'Breathed hot From all the boundless furnace of the sky, And the wide, glittering waste of burning sand, A suffocating wind the pilgrim smites With instant death. Patient of thirst and toil, Son of the desert! even the camel feels, Shot through his withered heart, the fiery blast.

Or from the black-red ether, bursting broad, Sallies the sudden whirlwind. Straight the sands, Commoved around, in gathering eddies play; Nearer and nearer still they darkening come; Till with the general all-involving storm Swept up, the whole continuous wilds arise; And by their noonday fount dejected thrown, Or sunk at night in sad disastrous sleep, Beneath descending hills, the caravan Is buried deep. In Cairo's crowded streets The impatient merchant, wondering, waits in vain, And Mecca saddens at the long delay.'

The _Seasons_ was at one time, and for many years the most popular volume of poetry in the country. It was to be found in every cottage, and pa.s.sages from the poem were familiar to every school-boy. The appreciation of the work was more affectionate than critical, and Thomson's faults were sometimes mistaken for beauties; but the popularity of the _Seasons_ was a healthy sign, and the poem, a forerunner of Cowper's _Task_, brought into vigorous life, feelings and sympathies that had been long dormant.

Pope, who is twice mentioned in the poem, took a great interest in its progress through the press. Thomson consulted him frequently, and accepted many of his suggestions, while apparently retaining at all times an independent judgment. To the familiar episode of 'the lovely young Lavinia' the following graceful pa.s.sage is said, but on very doubtful authority to have been added by Pope.[30] The first line, given for the sake of the context, is from Thomson's pen:

'Thoughtless of beauty, she was Beauty's self, Recluse amid the close-embowering woods; As in the hollow breast of Apennine, Beneath the shelter of encircling hills, A myrtle rises, far from human eye, And breathes its balmy fragrance o'er the wild; So flourished, blooming and unseen by all, The sweet Lavinia; till, at length, compelled By strong necessity's supreme command With smiling patience in her looks she went To glean Palemon's fields.'

Thomson had now gained the highest mark of his fame, and, like Pope, had won it in a few years. Nearly two years of foreign travel followed, the poet having obtained the post of governor to a son of the Solicitor-General. The fruit of this tour was a long poem in blank verse on _Liberty_, which probably gave him infinite labour, but his ascent upon this occasion of what he calls 'the barren, but delightful mountain of Parna.s.sus,' was labour lost. It is enough to say of _Liberty_, that it contains more than three thousand lines of unreadable blank verse.

Sinecures were the rewards of genius in Thomson's day, and he was made Secretary of Briefs in the Court of Chancery. He took a cottage at Richmond, within an easy walk of Pope, and the two poets met often and lived amicably.

Thomson did not enjoy his official fortune long, for his patron died, and though he might have kept his post had he applied to the Lord Chancellor, in whose gift it was, he appears to have been too lazy to do so. His friend Lyttelton in this emergency introduced him to the Prince of Wales, who, on learning that his affairs 'were in a more poetical posture than formerly,' gave him a pension of 100 a year. There was no certainty in a gift of this nature, and in about ten years it was withdrawn.

_The Castle of Indolence_ (1748) was the latest labour of Thomson's life, and in the judgment of many critics takes precedence of _The Seasons_ in poetical merit. This verdict may be questioned, but the poem, written in the Spenserian stanza, has a soothing beauty and an enchanting felicity of expression which show the poet's genius in a new light. It is unlike any poetry of that age, and when compared with _The Seasons_, the verse, as Wordsworth justly says, 'is more harmonious and the diction more pure.' All the imagery of the poem is adopted to the vague and sleepy action of the characters represented in it. It is a veritable poet's dream, which carries the reader in its earliest stanzas into 'a pleasing land of drowsy-head:'

'In lowly dale, fast by a river's side, With woody hill o'er hill encompa.s.sed round, A most enchanting wizard did abide, Than whom a fiend more fell is nowhere found.

It was, I ween, a lovely spot of ground; And there a season atween June and May Half prankt with Spring, with Summer half embrowned, A listless climate made, where, sooth to say, No living wight could work, ne cared even for play.'

There are verbal inspirations in a great poet which satisfy the ear, capture the imagination, and live in the memory for ever. Milton's pages are studded with them like stars; Gray has a few, Wordsworth many, and Keats some not to be surpa.s.sed for witchery. Of such poetically suggestive lines Thomson has his share, and although it seems unfair to remove them from their context, the excision may be made in a few cases, since they show not only that a new poet had appeared in an age of prose, but a poet of a new order, whose inspiration was felt by his successors. How poetically imaginative is Thomson's imagery of the 'meek-eyed morn, mother of dews;' of

'Ships dim discovered dropping from the clouds;'

of

'Autumn nodding o'er the yellow plain;'

of the summer wind

'Sweeping with shadowy gust the fields of corn;'

and of the Hebrid-Isles

'Placed far amid the melancholy main,'

a line which may have suggested the lovelier verse of Wordsworth descriptive of the cuckoo:

'Breaking the silence of the seas Among the farthest Hebrides.'

Thomson did not live long after the publication of _The Castle of Indolence_. A cold caught upon the river led to a fever, which ended fatally on August 27th, 1748. He had for some years been in love with a Miss Young, the 'Amanda' of his very feeble love lyrics, and her marriage is said to have hastened his death. Men, however, do not die for love at the mature age of forty-nine, and as Thomson was 'more fat than bard beseems,' and was not always temperate in his habits, const.i.tutional causes are more likely to have led to the poet's death than Amanda's cruelty.

Dr. Johnson says somewhere that the further authors keep apart from each other the better, and the literary squabbles of the last century afforded him good ground for the remark. It is to Thomson's credit that, like Goldsmith twenty-six years later, he died, leaving behind him many friends and not a single enemy. His fame rests upon two poems, _The Seasons_ and _The Castle of Indolence_, and on a song which has gained a national reputation. Apart from _Rule Britannia_, which appeared originally in the _Masque of Alfred_ and is spirited rather than poetical, his attempts to write lyrical poetry resulted in failure; but from his own niche in the Temple of Fame time is not likely to dislodge Thomson.

FOOTNOTES:

[25] See _Martialis Epigrammata_, book v. lii.

[26] Fenelon was Archbishop of Cambray.

[27] _The Poetical Works of Gay_, edited, with Life and Notes, by John Underhill, 2 vols.

[28]

'I'll swim through seas; I'll ride upon the clouds; I'll dig the earth; I'll blow out every fire; I'll rave; I'll rant; I'll rise; I'll rush; I'll war; Fierce as the man whom smiling dolphins bore From the prosaic to poetic sh.o.r.e.

I'll tear the scoundrel into twenty pieces.'

'The reader,' Fielding adds in a note, 'may see all the beauties of this speech in a late ode called a _Naval Lyric_.'

[29] Written but not published. The earlier books of the _Night Thoughts_ appeared in 1742, the _Grave_ in 1743, but in a letter dated Feb. 25th, 1741-2, Blair in transmitting the MS. of the poem to a friend states that the greater portion of it was composed several years before his ordination ten years previously. Southey states that Blair's _Grave_ is the only poem he could call to mind composed in imitation of the _Night Thoughts_, but the style as well as the date contradicts this judgment.

[30] The tradition is founded on a volume in the British Museum containing MS. corrections supposed to be in Pope's handwriting. It is now, however, the opinion of experts that the writing is not Pope's. If he be the author, it is the only example of blank verse which we have from his pen.

CHAPTER III.

MINOR POETS.

Sir Samuel Garth--Ambrose Philips--John Philips--Nicholas Rowe--Aaron Hill--Thomas Parnell--Thomas Tickell--William Somerville--John Dyer--William Shenstone--Mark Akenside--David Mallet--Scottish Song-Writers.

[Sidenote: Sir Samuel Garth (1660-1717-18).]

In Pope's day even the medical profession was influenced by party feeling, and Samuel Garth became known as the most famous Whig physician, but his friendships were not confined to one side, and he appears to have been universally beloved.

Garth came of a Yorkshire family, and was born in 1660. He was admitted a Fellow of the College of Physicians in 1693, gained a large practice, and is said to have been very benevolent to the poor. The _Dispensary_ (1699) is a satire called forth by the opposition of the Society of Apothecaries, to an edict of the College, and is a mock-heroic poem, which the quarrel made so effective at the time that it pa.s.sed through several editions. The merit of achieving what the satirist intended may therefore be granted to the _Dispensary_. Few modern readers, however, will appreciate the welcome it received, and it is ludicrous to read in Anderson's edition of the poet that the poem 'is only inferior in humour, discrimination of character, and poetical ardour to the _Rape of the Lock_.' It would be far more accurate to say that the _Dispensary_ has not a single merit in common with that poem, and but slight merit of any kind.

The following pa.s.sage upon death is the most vigorous, and is interesting as having supplied Cowper with a line in the poem on his Mother's Picture:[31]