Here, again, 'tis pleasant to see the peculiar genius of Cowper contrasted with that of Thomson. The gentle Cowper delighting, for the most part, in tranquil images--for his life was passed amidst tranquil nature; the enthusiastic Thomson, more pleased with images of power.

Cowper says--

"On the flood, Indurated and fixed, the snowy weight Lies undissolved, _while silently beneath, And unperceived, the current steals away_."

How many thousand times the lines we are now going to quote have been quoted, nobody can tell; but we quote them once more for the purpose of asking you, if you think that any one poet of this age could have written them--could have chilled one's very blood with such intense feeling of cold! Not one.

"In these fell regions, in Arzina caught, _And to the stony deep his idle ship Immediate seal'd_, he with his hapless crew, Each full exerted at his several task, _Froze into statues; to the cordage glued The sailor, and the pilot to the helm!_"

The oftener--the more we read the "Winter"--especially the last two or three hundred lines--the angrier is our wonder with Wordsworth for asserting that Thomson owed the national popularity that his "Winter"

immediately won, to his "commonplace sentimentalities, and his vicious style!" Yet true it is, that he was sometimes guilty of both; and, but for his transcendent genius, they might have obscured the lustre of his fame. But such sins are not very frequent in the "Seasons," and were all committed in the glow of that fine and bold enthusiasm, which to his imagination arrayed all things, and all words, in a light that seemed to him at the time to be poetry--though sometimes it was but "false glitter." Admitting, then, that sometimes the style of the "Seasons" is somewhat too florid, we must not criticise single and separate passages, without holding in mind the character of the poet's genius and his inspirations. He luxuriates--he revels--he wantons--at once with an imaginative and a sensuous delight in nature. Besides, he was but young; and his great work was his first. He had not philosophised his poetical language, as Wordsworth himself has done, after long years of profoundest study of the laws of thought and speech. But in such study, while much is gained, may not something be lost? And is there not a charm in the free, flowing, chartered libertinism of the diction and versification of the "Seasons"--above all, in the closing strains of the "Winter," and in the whole of the "Hymn," which inspires a delight and wonder seldom breathed upon us--glorious poem, on the whole, as it is--from the more measured march of the "Excursion?"

All those children of the Pensive Public who have been much at school, know Thomson's description of the wolves among the Alps, Apennines, and Pyrenees,

"Cruel as death, and hungry as the grave!

Burning for blood, bony and gaunt and grim!" &c.

The first fifteen lines are equal to anything in the whole range of English descriptive poetry; but the last ten are positively bad. Here they are:--

"The godlike face of man avails him nought!

Even beauty, force divine! at whose bright glance The generous lion stands in soften'd gaze, Now bleeds, a hapless undistinguish'd prey.

But if, apprised of the severe attack, The country be shut up, lured by the scent, On churchyard drear (inhuman to relate!) The disappointed prowlers fall, and dig The shrouded body from the grave; o'er which, Mix'd with foul shades and frighted ghosts, they howl."

Wild beasts do not like the look of the human eye--they think us ugly customers--and sometimes stand shilly-shallying in our presence, in an awkward but alarming attitude, of hunger mixed with fear. A single wolf seldom or never attacks a man. He cannot stand the face. But a person would need to have a godlike face indeed to terrify therewith an army of wolves some thousand strong. It would be the height of presumption in any man, though beautiful as Moore thought Byron, to attempt it. If so, then

"The godlike face of man avails him nought,"

is, under the circumstances, ludicrous. Still more so is the trash about "beauty, force divine!" It is too much to expect of an army of wolves some thousand strong, "and hungry as the grave," that they should all fall down on their knees before a sweet morsel of flesh and blood, merely because the young lady was so beautiful that she might have sat to Sir Thomas Lawrence for a frontispiece to Mr Watts's "Souvenir." 'Tis all stuff, too, about the generous lion standing in softened gaze at beauty's bright glance. True, he has been known to look with a certain sort of soft surliness upon a pretty Caffre girl, and to walk past without eating her--but simply because, an hour or two before, he had dined on a Hottentot Venus. The secret lay not in his heart, but in his stomach. Still the notion is a popular one, and how exquisitely has Spenser changed it into the divinest poetry in the character of the attendant lion of

"Heavenly Una, with her milk-white lamb!"

But Thomson, so far from making poetry of it in this passage, has vulgarised and blurred by it the natural and inevitable emotion of terror and pity. Famished wolves _howking_ up the dead is a dreadful image--but "_inhuman to relate_," is not an expression heavily laden with meaning; and the sudden, abrupt, violent, and, as we feel, unnatural introduction of ideas purely superstitious, at the close, is revolting, and miserably mars the terrible _truth_.

"Mix'd with foul shades and frighted ghosts, they howl."

Why, pray, are the shades foul, and the ghosts only frightened? And wherein lies the specific difference between a shade and a ghost?

Besides, if the ghosts were frightened, which they had good reason to be, why were not they off? We have frequently read of their wandering far from home, on occasions when they had no such excellent excuse to offer. This line, therefore, we have taken the liberty to erase from our pocket-copy of the "Seasons"--and to draw a few keelavine strokes over the rest of the passage--beginning with "man's godlike face."

Go read, then, the opening of "Winter," and acknowledge that, of all climates and all countries, there are none within any of the zones of the earth that will bear a moment's comparison with those of Scotland.

Forget the people if you can, and think only of the region. The lovely Lowlands undulating away into the glorious Highlands--the spirit of sublimity and the spirit of beauty one and the same, as it blends them in indissoluble union. Bury us alive in the dungeon's gloom--incommunicable with the light of day as the grave--it could not seal our eyes to the sight of Scotland. We should see it still by rising or by setting suns. Whatever blessed scene we chose to call on would become an instant apparition. Nor in that thick-ribbed vault would our eyes be deaf to her rivers and her seas. We should say our prayers to their music, and to the voice of the thunder on a hundred hills. We stand now in no need of senses. They are waxing dim--but our spirit may continue to brighten long as the light of love is allowed to dwell therein, thence proceeding over nature like a victorious morn.

There are many beautiful passages in the poets about RAIN; but who ever sang its advent so passionately as in these strains?--

"The effusive south Warms the wide air, and o'er the void of heaven Breathes the big clouds with vernal showers distent.

At first a dusky wreath they seem to rise, Scarce staining ether; but by swift degrees, In heaps on heaps, the doubling vapour sails Along the loaded sky, and mingling deep Sits on th' horizon round a settled gloom: Not such as wintry storms on mortals shed, Oppressing life; but lovely, gentle, kind, And full of every hope and every joy, The wish of nature. Gradual sinks the breeze Into a perfect calm, that not a breath Is heard to quiver through the closing woods, Or rustling turn the many-twinkling leaves Of aspen tall. Th' uncurling floods diffused In glassy breadth, seem through delusive lapse Forgetful of their course. 'Tis silence all And pleasing expectation. Herds and flocks Drop the dry sprig, and, mute-imploring, eye The falling verdure!"

All that follows is, you know, as good--better it cannot be--till we come to the close, the perfection of poetry, and then sally out into the shower, and join the hymn of earth to heaven--

"The stealing shower is scarce to patter heard By such as wander through the forest walks, Beneath th' umbrageous multitude of leaves.

But who can hold the shade, while heaven descends In universal bounty, shedding herbs, And fruits, and flowers, on Nature's ample lap?

Swift Fancy fired anticipates their growth; And, while the milky nutriment distils, Beholds the kindling country colour round."

Thomson, they say, was too fond of epithets. Not he, indeed. Strike out one of the many there--and your sconce shall feel the crutch. A poet less conversant with nature would have feared to say, "sits on the horizon round _a settled gloom_," or rather, he would not have seen or thought it was a settled gloom; and, therefore, he could not have said--

----"But lovely, gentle, kind, And full of every hope and every joy, _The wish of Nature._"

Leigh Hunt--most vivid of poets, and most cordial of critics--somewhere finely speaks of a ghastly line in a poem of Keats'--

"Riding to Florence with the murder'd man;"

that is, the man about to be murdered--imagination conceiving as one, doom and death. Equally great are the words--

"Herds and flocks Drop the dry sprig, and, mute-imploring, eye The falling verdure."

The verdure is seen in the shower--to be the very shower--by the poet at least--perhaps by the cattle, in their thirsty hunger forgetful of the brown ground, and swallowing the dropping herbage. The birds had not been so sorely distressed by the drought as the beasts, and therefore the poet speaks of them, not as relieved from misery, but as visited with gladness--

"Hush'd in short suspense, The plumy people streak their wings with oil, To throw the lucid moisture trickling off, And wait th' approaching sign, to strike, at once, Into the general choir."

Then, and not till then, the _humane_ poet bethinks him of the insensate earth--insensate not; for beast and bird being satisfied, and lowing and singing in their gratitude, so do the places of their habitation yearn for the blessing--

"E'en mountains, vales, And forests, seem impatient, to demand The promised sweetness."

The _religious_ Poet then speaks for his kind--and says devoutly--

"Man superior walks Amid the glad creation, musing praise, And looking lively gratitude."

In that mood he is justified to feast his fancy with images of the beauty as well as the bounty of nature; and genius in one line has concentrated them all--

"Beholds the kindling country colour round."

'Tis "an a' day's rain"--and "the well-showered earth is deep-enriched with vegetable life." And what kind of an evening? We have seen many such--and every succeeding one more beautiful, more glorious to our eyes than another--because of these words in which the beauty and the glory of one and all are enshrined--

"Till, in the western sky, the downward sun Looks out, effulgent, from amid the flush Of broken clouds, gay-shifting to his beam.

The rapid radiance, instantaneous, strikes Th' illumined mountain, through the forest streams, Shakes on the floods, and in a yellow mist, Far smoking o'er th' interminable plain, In twinkling myriads lights the dewy gems.

Moist, bright, and green, the landscape laughs around.

Full swell the woods; their every music wakes, Mix'd in wild concert with the warbling brooks Increased, the distant bleatings of the hills, And hollow lows responsive from the vales, Whence, blending all, the sweeten'd zephyr springs.

Meantime, refracted from yon eastern cloud, Bestriding earth, the grand ethereal bow Shoots up immense; and every hue unfolds In fair proportion, running from the red To where the violet fades into the sky."

How do you like our recitation of that surpassing strain? Every shade of feeling should have its shade of sound--every pause its silence. But these must all come and go, untaught, unbidden, from the fulness of the heart. Then indeed, and not till then, can words be said to be set to music--_to a celestial sing-song_.

The mighty Minstrel recited old Ballads with a warlike march of sound that made one's heart leap, while his usually sweet smile was drawn in, and disappeared among the glooms that sternly gathered about his lowering brows, and gave his whole aspect a most heroic character. Rude verses, that from ordinary lips would have been almost meaningless, from his came inspired with passion. Sir Philip Sidney, who said that "Chevy Chase" roused him like the sound of a trumpet, had he heard Sir Walter Scott recite it, would have gone distracted. Yet the "best judges" said he murdered his own poetry--we say about as much as Homer. Wordsworth recites his own Poetry (catch him reciting any other) magnificently--while his eyes seem blind to all outward objects, like those of a somnambulist. Coleridge was the sweetest of sing-songers--and his silver voice "warbled melody." Next to theirs, we believe our own recitation of Poetry to be the most impressive heard in modern times, though we cannot deny that the leathern-eared have pronounced it detestable, and the long-eared ludicrous; their delight being in what is called Elocution, as it is taught by player-folk.

O friendly reader of these our Recreations! thou needst not to be told--yet in love let us tell thee--that there are a thousand ways of dealing in description with Nature, so as to make her poetical; but sentiment there always must be, else it is stark nought. You may infuse the sentiment by a single touch--by a ray of light no thicker, nor one thousandth part so thick, as the finest needle ever silk-threaded by lady's finger; or you may dance it in with a flutter of sunbeams; or you may splash it in as with a gorgeous cloud-stain stolen from sunset; or you may bathe it in with a shred of the rainbow. Perhaps the highest power of all possessed by the sons of song, is to breathe it in with the breath, to let it slip in with the light of the common day!

Then some poets there are, who show you a scene all of a sudden, by means of a few magical words--just as if you opened your eyes at their bidding--and in place of a blank, a world. Others, again, as good and as great, create their world gradually before your eyes, for the delight of your soul, that loves to gaze on the growing glory; but delight is lost in wonder, and you know that they, too, are warlocks. Some heap image upon image, piles of imagery on piles of imagery, as if they were ransacking and robbing, and red-reavering earth, sea, and sky; yet all things there are consentaneous with one grand design, which, when consummated, is a Whole that seems to typify the universe. Others give you but fragments--but such as awaken imaginations of beauty and of power transcendent, like that famous Torso. And some show you Nature glimmering beneath a veil which, nunlike, she has religiously taken; and then call not Nature ideal only in that holy twilight, for then it is that she is spiritual, and we who belong to her feel that we shall live for ever.

Thus--and in other wondrous ways--the great poets are the great painters, and so are they the great musicians. But how they are so, some other time may we tell; suffice it now to say, that as we listen to the mighty masters--"sole or responsive to each other's voice"--

"Now, 'tis like all instruments, Now like a lonely lute; And now 'tis like an angel's song That bids the heavens be mute!"