No More Learning

When Thomson was growing up amid
the wild scenery of the Scottish Border
country, literary England was dominated by
an ideal of, verse in contrast to which even
Shakespeare's measures were held to be
barbarous. The rhyming iambic pentame-
ter, the favorite verse form, had been devel-
oped by Pope to such a point of polished
perfection that imitation alone was possible.
Moreover, it was employed only on a lim-
ited range of subjects. These might be
either classical or urbane: nothing so vul-
gar as nature or the common people was
worthy of the Muse. The genius of poetry
had been brought from the fresh air of the
fields into the vitiated air of the drawing-rooms; had been laced and
powdered and encased in stiff brocades, which hindered all freedom
of motion.
JAMES THOMSON

But of this Thomson knew nothing. It was his good fortune to
have been born far from London, and to have been brought up amid
the simple influences of country life. He was born in 1700 in the
parish of Ednam, in Roxburghshire, of which his father was minister.
He received his early education at Jedburgh school. It was at Jed-
burgh that he met a Mr. Riccalton, who was accustomed to teach
the boys Latin in the aisle of his church. He had written a poem
on 'A Winter's Day,' from which Thomson obtained his first idea for
the 'Seasons. ' The future poet's education was received more from
nature than from books. The magnificent panorama of the year
was unrolled continually before him, and he was not indifferent


## p. 14852 (#426) ##########################################

14852
JAMES THOMSON
to its beauties. It was with reluctance that he left his country
home for Edinburgh, where he remained five years as a student of
divinity. The ministry, however, had few attractions for him: in 1725
he abandoned his studies, and followed a fellow-student, Mallet, to
London, to seek his fortune there. Through the influence of a friend,
Lady Baillie, he obtained a tutorship in the family of Lord Binning;
but he held this position only a short time. The following winter
found him without money, without prospects, and almost without
friends. The death of his mother had plunged him into deep melan-
choly he gave vent to his feelings at the approach of the unfriendly
winter, by writing the first of his poems on the seasons. For several
weeks after its publication no notice was taken of it; then a gentle-
man of some influence in the London world of letters ran across it,
and immediately proclaimed its value in the coffee-houses.
(Winter)
began to be widely read: its popularity was soon established.
Thomson enjoyed all the prestige of a man who has struck a new
vein in literature. It is easy to understand how the jaded palates
of the London circles, surfeited with Popian classicism, were re-
freshed by this simple poem of winter in the country. To the gener-
ations which know Wordsworth, Thomson's song of the bleak season
seems well-nigh artificial; but it was Nature herself to the coffee-
house coteries who had forgotten her existence. It contains indeed
much that is sincere, wholesome, and beautiful. The pretty picture
of bright-eyed robin-redbreast hopping across the cottage floor in
quest of crumbs, the pathetic description of the peasant-shepherd
dying in the snow, while his wife and children wait for him in vain,
must have stirred unwonted emotions in the hearts of a generation
accustomed to the jeweled artificialities of the Rape of the Lock. '
Thomson's conception of nature was in no sense like that of Words-
worth: he never disassociated it from human interests; it is always
the background for the human drama: but for this reason it was
popular, and will always remain popular, with a class of persons to
whom the Wordsworthian conception seems cold and unsympathetic.
'Winter' was also significant because it was written in blank
verse of a noble order.
The rhyming couplets of the classicists, the
rocking-horse movement of their verse, had done much to destroy
the exquisite musical sense which had reached its perfection in the
Elizabethans. It was the mission of Thomson to revive this sense
through his artistic use of blank verse.
'Summer' was published not long after 'Winter. ' It was followed
by an Ode to the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton. ' 'Spring' was pub-
lished in 1728, and 'Autumn' in 1730. In this same year, the play of
'Sophonisba' also appeared; but Thomson never succeeded as a play-
wright. His 'Agamemnon,' his Tancred and Sigismunda,' his masque
of 'Alfred,' which contains the song 'Rule, Britannia,' are stilted and


## p. 14853 (#427) ##########################################

JAMES THOMSON
14853
dreary compositions. He had written 'Alfred' in conjunction with
his friend Mallet. His poem 'Liberty,' published the first part in
1734 and the second in 1736, was of no higher order of merit. It
would seem that after writing the 'Seasons,' Thomson's energies
declined, not again to be revived in full force until he wrote the
Castle of Indolence,' shortly before his death. His income during
these years was obtained partly from his books, and partly from
sinecure positions. In 1744 he was appointed Surveyor-General of
the Leeward Islands, a position which he held until his death in
1748.
In the year of his death The Castle of Indolence' was published.
It is a poem of great beauty and charm, whose richness of diction
is suggestive of Keats. The sensuous Spenserian stanza employed
is well adapted to the subject. The false enchanter, Indolence,
holds many captive in his castle by his magic arts; but he is at last
conquered by the Knights of the Arts and Industries. The slum-
berous atmosphere of the Castle and its environment is wonderfully
communicated in the opening stanzas; and the poem in its entirety
is worthy of the author of the 'Seasons' at his best.
What Wordsworth is to the nineteenth century, Thomson was to
the eighteenth. With him began that outpouring of the true poetical
spirit which was to culminate one hundred years later.
RULE, BRITANNIA!
From the Masque of Alfred'
WH
HEN Britain first, at Heaven's command,
Arose from out the azure main,
This was the charter of the land,
And guardian angels sung this strain:-
"Rule, Britannia, rule the waves;
Britons never will be slaves. "
-
The nations not so blest as thee,
Must in their turns to tyrants fall;
While thou shalt flourish great and free,
The dread and envy of them all.
"Rule, Britannia, rule the waves;
Britons never will be slaves. "
Still more majestic shalt thou rise,
More dreadful from each foreign stroke;


## p. 14854 (#428) ##########################################

14854
JAMES THOMSON
As the loud blast that tears the skies
Serves but to root thy native oak.
"Rule, Britannia, rule the waves;
Britons never will be slaves. "
Thee haughty tyrants ne'er shall tame;
All their attempts to bend thee down
Will but arouse thy generous flame,
But work their woe, and thy renown.
"Rule, Britannia, rule the waves;
Britons never will be slaves. "
To thee belongs the rural reign;
Thy cities shall with commerce shine;
All thine shall be the subject main,
And every shore it circles thine.
"Rule, Britannia, rule the waves;
Britons never will be slaves. "
The Muses, still with freedom found,
Shall to thy happy coast repair;
Blest isle! with matchless beauty crowned,
And manly hearts to guard the fair.
"Rule, Britannia, rule the waves;
Britons never will be slaves. "
APRIL RAIN
From the Seasons- Spring
C
OME, gentle Spring; ethereal mildness, come:
And from the bosom of your dropping cloud,
While music wakes around, veiled in a shower
Of shadowing roses, on our plains descend.
O Hertford, fitted or to shine in courts
With unaffected grace, or walk the plain
With innocence and meditation joined
In soft assemblage, listen to my song,
Which thy own season paints; when Nature all
Is blooming and benevolent, like thee.
And see where surly Winter passes off,
Far to the north, and calls his ruffian blasts:
His blasts obey, and quit the howling hill,
The shattered forest, and the ravished vale;
While softer gales succeed, - at whose kind touch,


## p. 14855 (#429) ##########################################

JAMES THOMSON
14855
Dissolving snows in livid torrents lost,
The mountains lift their green heads to the sky.
As yet the trembling year is unconfirmed,
And Winter oft at eve resumes the breeze,
Chills the pale morn, and bids his driving sleets
Deform the day delightless: so that scarce
The bittern knows his time with bill ingulphed
To shake the sounding marsh; or from the shore
The plovers when to scatter o'er the heath,
And sing their wild notes to the listening waste.
The northeast spends his rage, he now shut up
Within his iron cave; 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 fast degrees,
In heaps on heaps, the doubling vapor sails
Along the loaded sky, and mingling deep,
Sits on the 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. The 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 fallen verdure. Hushed in short suspense,
The plumy people streak their wings with oil,
To throw the lucid moisture trickling off;
And wait the approaching sign to strike, at once,
Into the general choir. Even mountains, vales,
And forests seem, impatient, to demand
The promised sweetness. Man superior walks
Amid the glad creation, musing praise,
And looking lively gratitude. At last
The clouds consign their treasures to the fields;
And softly shaking on the dimpled pool
Prelusive drops, let all their moisture flow
In large effusion o'er the freshened world.


## p. 14856 (#430) ##########################################

14856
JAMES THOMSON
THE LOST CARAVAN
From the Seasons- Summer
REATHED hot
B
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 INUNDATION
From The Seasons-Autumn
EFEATING oft the labors of the year,
DⓇ
The sultry south collects a potent blast.
At first the groves are scarcely seen to stir
Their trembling tops, and a still murmur runs
Along the soft-inclining fields of corn;
But as the aerial tempest fuller swells,
And in one mighty stream, invisible,
Immense, the whole excited atmosphere
Impetuous rushes o'er the sounding world,
Strained to the root, the stooping forest pours
A rustling shower of yet untimely leaves.
High-beat, the circling mountains eddy in,
From the bare wild, the dissipated storm,
And send it in a torrent down the vale.
Exposed and naked to its utmost rage,


## p. 14857 (#431) ##########################################

JAMES THOMSON
14857
Through all the sea of harvest rolling round,
The billowy plain floats wide; nor can evade,
Though pliant to the blast, its seizing force-
Or whirled in air, or into vacant chaff
Shook waste. And sometimes too a burst of rain,
Swept from the black horizon, broad, descends
In one continuous flood. Still overhead
The mingling tempest weaves its gloom, and still
The deluge deepens; till the fields around
Lie sunk and flatted in the sordid wave.
Sudden, the ditches swell; the meadows swim.
Red, from the hills, innumerable streams
Tumultuous roar; and high above its bank
The river lift: before whose rushing tide,
Herds, flocks, and harvests, cottages and swains,
Roll mingled down; all that the winds had spared,
In one wild moment ruined, the big hopes
And well-earned treasures of the painful year.
Fled to some eminence, the husbandman
Helpless beholds the miserable wreck
Driving along; his drowning ox at once
Descending, with his labors scattered round,
He sees; and instant o'er his shivering thought
Comes Winter unprovided, and a train
Of clamant children dear. Ye masters, then,
Be mindful of the rough laborious hand
That sinks you soft in elegance and ease;
Be mindful of those limbs, in russet clad,
Whose toil to yours is warmth and graceful pride;
And oh, be mindful of that sparing board
Which covers yours with luxury profuse,
-
Makes your glass sparkle, and your sense rejoice!
Nor cruelly demand what the deep rains
And all-involving winds have swept away.
THE FIRST SNOW
From the Seasons'- Winter
TH
HE keener tempests come; and fuming dun
From all the livid east, or piercing north,
Thick clouds ascend,- in whose capacious womb
A vapory deluge lies, to snow congealed.


## p. 14858 (#432) ##########################################

14858
JAMES THOMSON
Heavy they roll their fleecy world along;
And the sky saddens with the gathered storm.
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 hoar 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 laborer 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 assigns them. One alone,
The redbreast, sacred to the household gods,
Wisely regardful of the embroiling sky,
In joyless fields and thorny 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 black heaven, and next the glistening earth,
With looks of dumb despair; then, sad dispersed,
Dig for the withered herb through heaps of snow.


## p. 14859 (#433) ##########################################

JAMES THOMSON
14859
THE SHEEP-WASHING
From the Seasons'- Summer
HE meek-eyed morn appears, mother of dews,
THE At first faint gleaming in the dappled east;
Till far o'er ether spreads the widening glow,
And from before the lustre of her face,
White break the clouds away. With quickened step
Brown night retires. Young day pours in apace,
And opens all the lawny prospect wide.
The dripping rock, the mountain's misty top,
Swell on the sight and brighten with the dawn.
Roused by the cock, the soon-clad shepherd leaves
His mossy cottage, where with peace he dwells;
And from the crowded fold, in order, drives
His flock to taste the verdure of the morn.
Now swarms the village o'er the jovial mead:
The rustic youth, brown with meridian toil,
Healthful and strong; full as the summer rose
Blown by prevailing suns, the ruddy maid,
Half naked, swelling on the sight, and all
Her kindled graces burning o'er her cheek;
Even stooping age is here; and infant hands
Trail the long rake, or with the fragrant load
O'ercharged, amid the kind oppression roll.
Wide flies the tedded grain; all in a row
Advancing broad, or wheeling round the field,
They spread their breathing harvest to the sun,
That throws refreshful round a rural smell;
Or as they rake the green-appearing ground,
And drive the dusky wave along the mead,
The russet hay-cock rises thick behind,
In order gay: while heard from dale to dale,
Waking the breeze, resounds the blended voice
Of happy labor, love and social glee.
Or rushing thence in one diffusive band,
They drive the troubled flocks, by many a dog
Compelled to where the mazy-running brook
Forms a deep pool; this bank abrupt and high,
And that fair-spreading in a pebbled shore.
Urged to the giddy brink, much is the toil,
The clamor much of men and boys and dogs,
Ere the soft fearful people to the flood


## p. 14860 (#434) ##########################################

14860
JAMES THOMSON
Commit their woolly sides. And oft the swain,
On some, impatient, seizing hurls them in:
Emboldened then, nor hesitating more,
Fast, fast they plunge amid the flashing wave,
And panting, labor to the farther shore.
Repeated this, till deep the well-washed fleece
Has drunk the flood, and from his lively haunt
The trout is banished by the sordid stream.
Heavy and dripping, to the breezy brow
Slow move the harmless race: where as they spread
Their swelling treasures to the sunny ray,
Inly disturbed, and wondering what this wild.
Outrageous tumult means, their loud complaints
The country fill; and tossed from rock to rock,
Incessant bleatings run around the hills.
At last of snowy white, the gathered flocks
Are in the wattled pen, innumerous pressed,
Head above head; and ranged in lusty rows
The shepherds sit, and whet the sounding shears.
The housewife waits to roll her fleecy stores,
With all her gay-drest maids attending round.
One, chief, in gracious dignity enthroned,
Shines o'er the rest, the pastoral queen, and rays
Her smiles, sweet-beaming, on her shepherd-king;
While the glad circle round them yield their souls
To festive mirth, and wit that knows no gall.
Meantime their joyous task goes on apace:
Some mingling stir the melted tar, and some,
Deep on the new-shorn vagrant's heaving side,
To stamp his master's cypher ready stand;
Others the unwilling wether drag along;
And glorying in his might, the sturdy boy
Holds by the twisted horns the indignant ram.
Behold where, bound and of its robe bereft
By needy man,- that all-depending lord,—
How meek, how patient, the mild creature lies!
What softness in its melancholy face,
What dumb complaining innocence appears!
Fear not, ye gentle tribes,-'tis not the knife
Of horrid slaughter that is o'er you waved;
No, 'tis the tender swain's well-guided shears,
Who having now, to pay his annual care,
Borrowed your fleece, to you a cumbrous load,
Will send you bounding to your hills again.


## p. 14861 (#435) ##########################################

JAMES THOMSON
14861
THE CASTLE OF INDOLENCE
From The Castle of Indolence
The castle hight of Indolence,
And its false luxury;
Where for a little time, alas!
We lived right jollily.
MORTAL man, who livest here by toil,
O
Do not complain of this thy hard estate;
That like an emmet thou must ever moil,
Is a sad sentence of an ancient date:
And certes, there is for it reason great;
For though sometimes it makes thee weep and wail,
And curse thy star, and early drudge and late,
Withouten that would come a heavier bale,—
Loose life, unruly passions, and diseases pale.
In lowly dale, fast by a river's side,
With woody hill o'er hill encompassed 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 carèd even for play.
Was naught around but images of rest:
Sleep-soothing groves, and quiet lawns between;
And flowery beds that slumbrous influence kest,
From poppies breathed; and beds of pleasant green,
Where never yet was creeping creature seen.
Meantime, unnumbered glittering streamlets played,
And hurled everywhere their waters sheen;
That, as they bickered through the sunny glade,
Though restless still themselves, a lulling murmur made.
Joined to the prattle of the purling rills
Were heard the lowing herds along the vale,
And flocks loud bleating from the distant hills,
And vacant shepherds piping in the dale;
And now and then, sweet Philomel would wail,
Or stock-doves plain amid the forest deep.
That drowsy rustled to the sighing gale;


## p. 14862 (#436) ##########################################

14862
JAMES THOMSON
And still a coil the grasshopper did keep;
Yet all these sounds yblent inclinèd all to sleep.
Full in the passage of the vale, above,
A sable, silent, solemn forest stood;
Where naught but shadowy forms was seen to move,
As Idless fancied in her dreaming mood:
And up the hills, on either side, a wood
Of blackening pines, aye waving to and fro,
Sent forth a sleepy horror through the blood:
And where this valley winded out below,
The murmuring main was heard, and scarcely heard, to flow.
A pleasing land of drowsihead it was,
Of dreams that wave before the half-shut eye;
And of gay castles in the clouds that pass,
For ever flushing round a summer sky:
There eke the soft delights, that witchingly
Instill a wanton sweetness through the breast,
And the calm pleasures always hovered nigh;
But whate'er smacked of noyance, or unrest,
Was far, far off expelled from this delicious nest.
The landscape such, inspiring perfect ease,
Where Indolence (for so the wizard hight)
Close-hid his castle mid embowering trees,
That half shut out the beams of Phoebus bright,
And made a kind of checkered day and night:
Meanwhile, unceasing at the massy gate,
Beneath a spacious palm, the wicked wight
Was placed; and to his lute, of cruel fate
And labor harsh, complained, lamenting man's estate.
Here freedom reigned, without the least alloy;
Nor gossip's tale, nor ancient maiden's gall,
Nor saintly spleen durst murmur at our joy,
And with envenomed tongue our pleasures pall.
For why? there was but one great rule for all;
To wit, that each should work his own desire,
And eat, drink, study, sleep, as it may fall,
Or melt the time in love, or wake the lyre,
And carol what, unbid, the Muses might inspire.
The rooms with costly tapestry were hung,
Where was inwoven many a gentle tale;


## p. 14863 (#437) ##########################################

JAMES THOMSON
14863
Such as of old the rural poets sung,
Or of Arcadian or Sicilian vale:
Reclining lovers, in the lonely dale,
Poured forth at large the sweetly tortured heart;
Or, sighing tender passion, swelled the gale,
And taught charmed echo to resound their smart;
While flocks, woods, streams around, repose and peace impart.
Those pleased the most, where, by a cunning hand,
Depainted was the patriarchal age;
What time Dan Abram left the Chaldee land,
And pastured on from verdant stage to stage,
Where fields and fountains fresh could best engage.
Toil was not then; of nothing took they heed,
But with wild beasts the sylvan war to wage,
And o'er vast plains their herds and flocks to feed:
Blest sons of Nature they! true golden age indeed!
Sometimes the pencil, in cool airy halls,
Bade the gay bloom of vernal landscapes rise,
Or Autumn's varied shades embrown the walls:
Now the black tempest strikes the astonished eyes;
Now down the steep the flashing torrent flies;
The trembling sun now plays o'er ocean blue,
And now rude mountains frown amid the skies:
Whate'er Lorraine light-touched with softening hue,
Or savage Rosa dashed, or learnèd Poussin drew.
Each sound, too, here to languishment inclined,
Lulled the weak bosom, and induced ease:
Aerial music in the warbling wind,
At distance rising oft, by small degrees,
Nearer and nearer came; till o'er the trees
It hung, and breathed such soul-dissolving airs,
As did, alas! with soft perdition please:
Entangled deep in its enchanting snares,
The listening heart forgot all duties and all cares.
A certain music, never known before,
Here lulled the pensive, melancholy mind;
Full easily obtained. Behooves no more,
But sidelong, to the gently waving wind,
To lay the well-tuned instrument reclined;
From which, with airy, flying fingers light,
Beyond each mortal touch the most refined,


## p. 14864 (#438) ##########################################

14864
JAMES THOMSON
The god of winds drew sounds of deep delight:
Whence, with just cause, the harp of Æolus it hight.
Ah me! what hand can touch the string so fine?
Who up the lofty diapason roll
Such sweet, such sad, such solemn airs divine,
Then let them down again into the soul:
Now rising love they fanned; now pleasing dole
They breathed in tender musings through the heart;
And now a graver sacred strain they stole,
As when seraphic hands a hymn impart:
Wild warbling nature all, above the reach of art!
Such the gay splendor, the luxurious state,
Of Caliphs old, who on the Tygris's shore,
In mighty Bagdat, populous and great,
Held their bright court, where was of ladies store;
And verse, love, music, still the garland wore:
When sleep was coy, the bard, in waiting there,
Cheered lone midnight with the Muse's lore;
Composing music bade his dreams be fair,
And music lent new gladness to the morning air.


## p. 14865 (#439) ##########################################

14865
JAMES THOMSON
(1834-1882)
HE strange sombre genius of the second James Thomson found
its ultimate and most perfect utterance in that remarkable
poem 'The City of Dreadful Night,' likely to remain long
the litany of pessimism in English verse. It is a work of gloomy
but splendid imagination, with a rhythmical mastery and sonorous.
beauty of diction which declare its author plainly a man of rare
poetic gift. 'The City of Dreadful Night' stands as one of the
unique productions of nineteenth-century poetry. It is Thomson's
letter of credit on posterity. His other poems shrink into insignifi-
cance beside it; yet they too, while lacking the technical perfection
and sustained power of his masterpiece, have touches of the same
high quality.
Thomson's life was that of a roving bohemian journalist and lit-
erary hack.
He was born in Port Glasgow, Scotland, on November
24th, 1834; was educated in the Caledonian Orphan Asylum, and en-
tered the British army as regimental schoolmaster. His acquaintance
there with Charles Bradlaugh, whose agnostic views were acceptable
to him, led to his becoming a contributor to the National Reformer,
when the former established it in 1860. After leaving the military
service, Thomson gave himself up to literature, writing much for rad-
ical papers.
His earliest work appeared in Tait's Edinburgh Maga-
zine, and his best poems in Bradlaugh's periodical,-To Our Ladies
of Death' in 1863, and The City of Dreadful Night' in 1874. He
came to America in 1872 on a mining speculation of unsuccessful
issue; and while in this country, was commissioned by the New York
World to go to Spain as special correspondent. In this newspaper
work he used the pen-name Bysshe Vanolis, which he shortened to
B. V. ,- the one name indicating his passion for Shelley, the other
being an anagram on the German romantic poet Novalis. When
Thomson was a young man in the Army, stationed in Ireland, he
won the love of a girl whose premature death affected him deeply,
- intensifying what seems to have been a natal tendency towards
hypochondria. Irregular habits in later life developed this; and he
became a victim of alcohol and opium in the desire to escape in-
somnia and drown melancholy. He died miserably before his time,
in the London University Hospital, June 3d, 1882, aged 48. His
poems were published in collected form in 1880. There is a biogra-
phy of him by Salt.
XXV-930


## p. 14866 (#440) ##########################################

14866
JAMES THOMSON
Thomson's spirit brooded on the night side of things, and there
is a weird, mystic quality to his imaginings. He is, in his greatest
poem, a master of the gloomy, the phantasmal, and the irremediably
sad, expressed in statuesque form and stately, mournful music. He
is of the school of Poe in the command of the awful; metrically, he
suggests comparison with Swinburne; and his creed is that of the
Italian poet-pessimist Leopardi, to whom his book of verse is dedi-
cated. But his note is entirely distinctive: there is nothing imitative
about The City of Dreadful Night. ' It stands like a colossal image
hewn out of black marble, to be admired as wonderful art in the
same breath that it is deplored as the morbid outcome of genius. Of
its decided merit there can be no question. Negation and despair
have seldom found a sincerer, a more poignant, and a more majestic
utterance.
FROM THE CITY OF DREADFUL NIGHT›
O, THUS, as prostrate, "In the dust I write
L My heart's deep languor and my soul's sad tears. "
Yet why evoke the spectres of black night
To blot the sunshine of exultant years?
Why disinter dead faith from moldering hidden?
Why break the seals of mute despair unbidden,
And wail life's discords into careless ears?
Because a cold rage seizes one at whiles
To show the bitter old and wrinkled truth
Stripped naked of all vesture that beguiles,
False dreams, false hopes, false masks and modes of
youth;
Because it gives some sense of power and passion
In helpless impotence to try to fashion.
Our woe in living words howe'er uncouth.
Surely I write not for the hopeful young,
Or those who deem their happiness of worth,
Or such as pasture and grow fat among
The shows of life and feel nor doubt nor dearth,
Or pious spirits with a God above them
To sanctify and glorify and love them,
Or sages who foresee a heaven on earth.
For none of these I write, and none of these
Could read the writing if they deigned to try:


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JAMES THOMSON
14867
So may they flourish, in their due degrees,
On our sweet earth and in their unplaced sky.
If any cares for the weak words here written,
It must be some one desolate, fate-smitten,
Whose faith and hope are dead, and who would
die.
Yes, here and there some weary wanderer
In that same city of tremendous night
Will understand the speech, and feel a stir
Of fellowship in all-disastrous fight:
I suffer mute and lonely, yet another
Uplifts his voice to let me know a brother
Travels the same wild paths, though out of sight.
O sad Fraternity, do I unfold
Your dolorous mysteries shrouded from of yore?
Nay, be assured: no secret can be told
To any who divined it not before;
None uninitiate by many a presage
Will comprehend the language of the message,
Although proclaimed aloud forevermore.
THE City is of Night: perchance of Death,
But certainly of Night; for never there
Can come the lucid morning's fragrant breath
After the dewy dawning's cold gray air:
The moon and stars may shine with scorn or pity;
The sun has never visited that city,
For it dissolveth in the daylight fair.
Dissolveth like a dream of night away;
Though present in distempered gloom of thought
And deadly weariness of heart all day.
But when a dream night after night is brought
Throughout a week, and such weeks few or many
Recur each year for several years, can any
Discern that dream from real life in aught?
A river girds the city west and south,
The main north channel of a broad lagoon,
Regurging with the salt tides from the mouth;
Waste marshes shine and glister to the moon


## p. 14868 (#442) ##########################################

14868
JAMES THOMSON
For leagues, then moorland black, then stony ridges;
Great piers and causeways, many noble bridges,
Connect the town and islet suburbs strewn.
Upon an easy slope it lies at large,
And scarcely overlaps the long curved crest
Which swells out two leagues from the river marge.
A trackless wilderness rolls north and west,
Savannas, savage woods, enormous mountains,
Bleak uplands, black ravines with torrent fountains;
And eastward rolls the shipless sea's unrest.
The city is not ruinous, although
Great ruins of an unremembered past,
With others of a few short years ago
More sad, are found within its precincts vast.
The street-lamps always burn; but scarce a casement
In house or palace front from roof to basement
Doth glow or gleam athwart the mirk air cast.
The street-lamps burn amidst the baleful glooms,
Amidst the soundless solitudes immense
Of rangèd mansions dark and still as tombs.
The silence which benumbs or strains the sense
Fulfills with awe the soul's despair unweeping:
Myriads of habitants are ever sleeping,
Or dead, or fled from nameless pestilence!
Yet as in some necropolis you find
Perchance one mourner to a thousand dead,
So there; worn faces that look deaf and blind
Like tragic masks of stone. With weary tread,
Each wrapt in his own doom, they wander, wander,
Or sit foredone and desolately ponder
Through sleepless hours with heavy drooping head.
Mature men chiefly; few in age or youth:
A woman rarely: now and then a child;
A child! If here the heart turns sick with ruth
To see a little one from birth defiled,
Or lame or blind, as preordained to languish
Through youthless life, think how it bleeds with anguish
To meet one erring in that homeless wild.
They often murmur to themselves: they speak
To one another seldom, for their woe


## p. 14869 (#443) ##########################################

JAMES THOMSON
14869
Broods maddening inwardly and scorns to wreak
Itself abroad; and if at whiles it grow
To frenzy which must rave, none heeds the clamor,
Unless there waits some victim of like glamour,
To rave in turn, who lends attentive show.
The City is of Night, but not of Sleep:
There sweet sleep is not for the weary brain;
The pitiless hours like years and ages creep,
A night seems termless hell. This dreadful strain
Of thought and consciousness which never ceases,
Or which some moments' stupor but increases,
This worse than woe, makes wretches there insane.
They leave all hope behind who enter there:
One certitude while sane they cannot leave,
One anodyne for torture and despair,—
The certitude of Death, which no reprieve
Can put off long; and which, divinely tender,
But waits the outstretched hand to promptly render
That draught whose slumber nothing can bereave.
Of all things human which are strange and wild,
This is perchance the wildest and most strange,
And showeth man most utterly beguiled,
To those who haunt that sunless City's range:
That he bemoans himself for aye, repeating
How Time is deadly swift, how life is fleeting,
How naught is constant on the earth but change.
The hours are heavy on him, and the days;
The burden of the months he scarce can bear:
And often in his secret soul he prays
To sleep through barren periods unaware,
Arousing at some longed-for date of pleasure;
Which having passed and yielded him small treasure,
He would outsleep another term of care.
Yet in his marvelous fancy he must make
Quick wings for Time, and see it fly from us:
This Time which crawleth like a monstrous snake,
Wounded and slow and very venomous;
Which creeps blindworm-like round the earth and ocean,
Distilling poison at each painful motion,
And seems condemned to circle ever thus.


## p. 14870 (#444) ##########################################

14870
JAMES THOMSON
And since he cannot spend and use aright
The little Time here given him in trust,
But wasteth it in weary undelight
Of foolish toil and trouble, strife and lust,
He naturally claimeth to inherit
The everlasting Future, that his merit
May have full scope; as surely is most just.
O length of the intolerable hours,
O nights that are as æons of slow pain,
O Time, too ample for our vital powers,
O Life, whose woeful vanities remain
Immutable for all of all our legions,
Through all the centuries and in all the regions,
Not of your speed and variance we complain.
We do not ask a longer term of strife,
Weakness and weariness and nameless woes;
We do not claim renewed and endless life
When this which is our torment here shall close,
An everlasting conscious inanition!
We yearn for speedy death in full fruition,
Dateless oblivion and divine repose.
FROM ART)
F YOU have a carrier-dove
I'
That can fly over land and sea,
And a message for your Love,
"Lady, I love but thee! »
And this dove will never stir
But straight from her to you,
And straight from you to her,
As you know and she knows too,
Will you first insure, O sage,
Your dove that never tires
With your message in a cage,
Though a cage of golden wires?
Or will you fling your dove ? —
"Fly, darling, without rest,
Over land and sea to my Love,
And fold your wings in her breast! »


## p. 14870 (#445) ##########################################



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## p. 14871 (#449) ##########################################

14871
HENRY D. THOREAU
(1817-1862)
BY JOHN BURROUGHS
N THE front of the second order of American authors we must
place Henry D. Thoreau. He had many qualities which
would seem to entitle him to a place in the first order,
with Emerson, Longfellow, Bryant, Whitman; but he lacked at least
one thing which these men possessed — he lacked breadth: his sym
pathies were narrow; he did not touch his fellows at many points.
It has been complained that Emerson was narrow too; but Emerson
looked over a much wider field than Thoreau, had many more inter-
ests, was more affirmative, and in every way was a larger, more help-
ful spiritual force. In his life, Thoreau isolated himself from his
fellows as much as possible; he was very scornful of ordinary human
ends and ambitions, and seemed to set slight value upon the ordi-
nary human affections.
Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts, July 12th, 1817, and
died there in May 1862, of consumption; having seen forty-five years
of life, and probably spent more of it in the open air than any other
American man of letters. The business of his life was walking,—or
sauntering, as he preferred to call it,—and he aimed to spend half
of each day the year round in field or wood. He was a new kind of
sportsman, who carried a journal instead of a gun or trap, and who
brought home only such game as falls to the eye of the poet and
seer.
Thoreau was of French extraction on his father's side, and English
on his mother's. His intellectual traits were evidently from the former
source, his moral traits from the latter. That love of the wild and
savage, that crispness and terseness of expression, that playful exag-
geration, and that radical revolutionary cry, were French; while his
English blood showed itself more in his love of the homely, the aus-
tere, and his want of sociability.
His grandfather, John Thoreau, was born in the isle of Guernsey,
was a merchant in Boston; and died in Concord of consumption, in
1801. His father, also named John, after an unsuccessful mercantile
career became a lead-pencil maker in Concord in 1823; and from
that date to the time of his death in 1859, says Henry's biographer,
"led a plodding, unambitious, and respectable life. " Henry Thoreau


## p. 14872 (#450) ##########################################

14872
HENRY D. THOREAU
was the third of four children,- John, Helen, Henry, and Sophia,-
all persons of character and mark. "To meet one of the Thoreaus,"
says Mr. Sanborn, "was not the same as to encounter any other per-
son who might cross your path. Life to them was something more
than a parade of pretension, a conflict of ambitions, or an incessant
scramble for the common objects of life. " John and Helen were both
teachers, and died comparatively young. John is described as a sunny
soul, always serene and loving, and as possessed of a generous flow-
ing spirit; Henry was deeply attached to him, and his death in 1842
was an irreparable loss. He said seven years later that "a man can
attend but one funeral in his life,- can behold but one corpse. "
him this was the corpse and the funeral of his brother John.
To
Henry and his brother assisted their
former attaining great skill in the art.
him says that he at last succeeded in
the best English ones.
father in pencil-making; the
Emerson in his sketch of
making as good a pencil as
The way to fortune seemed open to him. But he said he should
never make another pencil. "Why should I? I would not do again
what I have done once. " This saying pleased Emerson: it has an
Emersonian ring. But Thoreau did not live up to it. Mr. Sanborn
says, "He went on many years, at intervals working at his father's
business. »
Thoreau entered Harvard College in 1833, and graduated in due
course, but without any special distinction. In his Senior year his
biographer says, "He lost rank with his instructors by his indiffer-
ence to the ordinary college motives for study. " The real Thoreau
was already cropping out: the ambition of most mortals was not his
ambition; there was something contrary and scornful in him from the
first. His noble sister Helen earned part of the money that paid his
way at college.
In 1838 he went to Maine in quest of employment as teacher, car-
rying recommendations from Mr. Emerson, Dr. Ripley, and from the
president of Harvard College; but his journey was not successful.
Later in the same year he seems to have been employed as teacher
in Concord Academy. About this time he first appeared as a lecturer
in the lyceum of his native village; and he continued to lecture as he
received calls from various New England towns till near the close of
his life. But it is doubtful if he was in any sen: e a popular lecturer.
He puzzled the people. I have been told, by man who when a
boy heard him read a lecture in some Massachi Setts town, that the
audience did not know what to make of him. They hardly knew
whether to take him seriously or not. His paradoxes, his strange
and extreme gospel of nature, and evidently hi: indifference as to
whether he pleased them or not, were not in the style of the usual
lyceum lecturer.


## p. 14873 (#451) ##########################################

HENRY D. THOREAU
14873
There is a tradition that while teaching, he and his brother John
both fell in love with the same girl, and that Henry heroically gave
way to John. It doubtless cost him less effort than the same act
would have cost his more human brother.
It seems to have been about this time that he began his daily
walks and studies of nature. In August 1839 he made his voyage
down the Concord and Merrimac Rivers, in company with his
brother; out of which experience grew his first book, or rather which
he made the occasion of his first book,—'A Week on the Concord
and Merrimack Rivers,'-published ten years later. The book was
not a success commercially, and the author carried home the seven
hundred unsold copies on his back; boasting that he now had a very
respectable library, all of his own writing. The title of the book is
misleading: it is an account of a voyage on far other and larger
rivers than the Concord and Merrimac,- the great world currents
of philosophy, religion, and literature. The voyage but furnishes the
thread with which he ties together his speculations and opinions upon
these subjects. It is not, in my opinion, his most valuable or read-
able book, though it contains some of his best prose and poetry.
offends one's sense of fitness and unity. It is a huge digression.
We are promised a narrative of travel and adventure, spiced with
observation of nature; and we get a bundle of essays, some of them
crude and loosely put together. To some young men I have known,
the book proved a great boon; but I imagine that most readers of
to-day find the temptation to skip the long ethical and literary dis-
cussions, and be off down-stream with the voyagers, a very strong
one. When one goes a-fishing or a-boating, he is not in the frame
of mind to pause by the way to listen to a lecture, however fine.
It
In 1845 Thoreau put his philosophy of life to the test by build-
ing a hut in the woods on the shore of Walden Pond, a mile or
more from Concord village, and spending over two years there. Out
of this experiment grew his best-known and most valuable book,-
'Walden, or Life in the Woods. ' The book is a record of his life in
that sylvan solitude, and abounds in felicitous descriptions of the sea-
sons and the scenery, and fresh and penetrating observations upon
the wild life about him.
-
He went to the woods for study and contemplation, and to in-
dulge his taste for the wild and the solitary, as well as to make an
experiment in the art of simple living. He proved to his own satis-
faction that most of us waste our time on superfluities, and that a
man can live on less than $100 per year and have two-thirds of his
time to himself. He cultivated beans, gathered wild berries, did a
little fishing, and I suspect, went home pretty often for a square
meal. " In theory he seems to have been a vegetarian; but it is told
of him that when he had a day of surveying on hand, he was wont
«<


## p. 14874 (#452) ##########################################

14874
HENRY D. THOREAU
to fortify himself with pork as well as beans. At Walden he seems
to have written much of the 'Week,' his essay on Carlyle, and others
of his papers. Alcott and Emerson were his visitors; and besides
these, he reports that he had a good deal of company in the morning
when nobody called. He was a born lover of solitude. He says he
"never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. »
"I am
no more lonely than the loon in the pond that laughs so
loud, or than Walden Pond itself. What company has that lonely
lake, I pray? And yet it has not the blue devils, but the blue angels
in it, in the azure tint of its waters. "
Thoreau whistled a good deal, and at times very prettily, as in
this quotation, to help keep his courage up. Indeed the whole vol-
ume is a cheery exultant whistle, at times with a bantering defiant
tone in it. It is, on the whole, the most delicious piece of brag in
our literature. Who ever got so much out of a bean-field as Thoreau!
He makes one want to go forthwith and plant a field with beans,
and hoe them barefoot. He makes us feel that the occupation yields
a "classic result. "
"When my hoe tinkled against the stones, that music echoed to the woods
and the sky, and was an acco
ccompaniment to my labor which yielded an instant
and immeasurable crop. It was no longer beans that I hoed, nor I that hoed
beans; and I remembered with as much pity as pride, if I remembered at all,
my acquaintances who had gone to the city to attend the oratorios.
"On gala days the town fires its great guns, which echo like popguns to
these woods, and some waifs of martial music occasionally penetrate thus far.
To me, away there in my bean-field at the other end of the town, the big
guns sounded as if a puff-ball had burst; and when there was a military turn-
out of which I was ignorant, I have sometimes had a vague sense all the day
of some sort of itching and disease in the horizon, as if some eruption would
break out there soon, either scarlatina or canker-rash,-until at length some
more favorable puff of wind, making haste over the fields and up the Way-
land road, brought me information of the trainers. >>
After the Walden episode, Thoreau supported himself by doing
various odd jobs for his neighbors, such as whitewashing, gardening,
fence-building, land-surveying. He also lectured occasionally, and
wrote now and then for the current magazines. Horace Greeley
became his friend, and disposed of some of his papers for him to
Graham's Magazine, Putnam's Magazine, and the Democratic Review.
He made three trips to the Maine woods, —in 1846, 1853, and 1857,-
where he saw and studied the moose and the Indian. The latter
interested him greatly. Emerson said the three men in whom
Thoreau felt the deepest interest were John Brown, his Indian guide
in Maine, and Walt Whitman. The magazine papers which were the
outcome of his trips to the Maine woods were published in book form


## p. 14875 (#453) ##########################################

HENRY D. THOREAU
14875
after his death; and next to Walden' I think make his most inter-
esting contribution.
In 1850, in company with his friend Ellery Channing, he made a
trip to Canada, and reports that he found traveling dirty work, and
that "a man needs a pair of overalls for it. " This poetic couple
wore very plain clothes, and by way of baggage had a bundle and
an umbrella. "We styled ourselves Knights of the Umbrella and the
Bundle. " The details of this trip may be found in his 'A Yankee
in Canada,' — also published after his death.
-
Thoreau was almost as local as a woodchuck. He never went
abroad, probably could not have been hired to go. He thought Con-
cord contained about all that was worth seeing. Nature repeats her-
self everywhere; only you must be wide awake enough to see her.
He penetrated the West as far as Minnesota in 1862 for his health,
but the trip did not stay the progress of his disease. He made several
trips to New York and Brooklyn to see Walt Whitman, whose poems
and whose personality made a profound impression upon him.
"The
greatest democrat the world has ever seen," was his verdict upon the
author of 'Leaves of Grass. '
One of the most characteristic acts of Thoreau's life was his pub-
lic defense of John Brown on October 30th, 1859, when the sentiment
of the whole country-abolitionists and all-set so overwhelmingly
the other way. Emerson, and other of Thoreau's friends, tried to
dissuade him from any public expression in favor of Brown just then;
but he was all on fire with the thought of John Brown's heroic and
righteous act, and he was not to be checked. His speech was calm
and restrained; but there was molten metal inside it, and metal of
the purest kind. It stirs the blood to read it at this time. Thoreau
and Brown were kindred souls-fanatics, if you please, but both
made of the stuff of heroes. Brown was the Thoreau of action and
of politics, and Thoreau was the Brown of the region of the senti-
ments and moral and social ideals.
It is Thoreau's heroic moral fibre that takes us. It is never re-
laxed; it is always braced for the heights. He was an unusual mixture
of the poet, the naturalist, and the moralist: but the moralist domi-
nated. Yet he was not the moralist as we know him in English
literature, without salt or savor, but a moralist escaped to the woods,
full of a wild tang and aroma. He preaches a kind of goodness that
sounds strange to conventional ears, - the goodness of the natural,
the simple. "There is no odor so bad as that which arises from
goodness tainted. " And goodness is tainted when it takes thought
of itself. A man's
"goodness must not be a partial and transitory act, but a constant super-
fluity, which costs him nothing, and of which he is unconscious. " "If I knew
for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design


## p. 14876 (#454) ##########################################

14876
HENRY D. THOREAU
of doing me good, I should run for my life,- as from that dry and parching
wind of the African desert called the Simoon, which fills the mouth and nose
and ears and eyes with dust till you are suffocated,- for fear that I should
get some of his good done to me, some of its virus mingled with my blood. »
Thoreau's virtue is a kind of stimulating contrariness; there is no
compliance in him: he always says and does the unexpected thing,
but always leaves us braced for better work and better living. "Sim-
plicity, simplicity, simplicity," he reiterates: "I say, let your affairs
be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a
million, count half a dozen; and keep your accounts on your thumb-
nail. "
He was a poet too, through and through, but lacked the perfect
metrical gift. In this respect he had the shortcomings of his mas-
ter, Emerson, who was a poet keyed to the highest pitch of bardic
tension, but yet whose numbers would not always flow. Thoreau
printed a few poems; one on 'Smoke' and one on 'Sympathy' have
merits of a high order. Thoreau's naturalism is the salt that gives
him his savor. He caught something tonic and pungent from his
intercourse with wild nature. Sometimes it is biting and smarting
like crinkle-root or calamus-root; at others it is sweet and aromatic
like birch or wintergreen: but always it is stimulating and whole-
some.
As a naturalist Thoreau's aim was ulterior to science: he loved
the bird, but he loved more the bird behind the bird, -the idea it
suggested, the mood of his mind it interpreted. He would fain see a
mythology shine through his ornithology. In all his walks and ram-
bles and excursions to mountains and to marsh, he was the idealist
and the mystic, and never the devotee of pure science.
His pages
abound in many delicious natural-history bits, and in keen observa-
tion; but when we sternly ask how much he has added to our store
of exact knowledge of this nature to which he devoted his lifetime,
we cannot point to much that is new or important. He was in quest
of an impalpable knowledge,- waiting, as he says in Walden,' "at
evening on the hill-tops for the sky to fall, that I might catch some-
thing, though I never caught much; and that, manna-wise, would dis-
solve again in the sun. ”
But he caught more than he here gives himself credit for; and it
does not dissolve away in the sun. His fame has increased from
year to year. Other names in our literature, much more prominent
than his in his own day,-as that of Whipple, Tuckerman, Giles,
etc. ,- have faded; while his own has grown brighter and brighter,
and the meridian is not yet.
John Burroughs


## p. 14877 (#455) ##########################################

HENRY D. THOREAU
14877
INSPIRATION
By permission of Houghton, Mifflin & Co. , publishers
HATE'ER we leave to God, God does,
And blesses us;
The work we choose should be our own,
God leaves alone.
WHATE
*
If with light head erect I sing,
Though all the Muses lend their force,
From my poor love of anything,
The verse is weak and shallow as its source.
But if with bended neck I grope
Listening behind me for my wit,
With faith superior to hope,
More anxious to keep back than forward it;
Making my soul accomplice there
Unto the flame my heart hath lit,-
Then will the verse for ever wear:
Time cannot bend the line which God hath writ.
Always the general show of things.
Floats in review before my mind,
And such true love and reverence brings,
That sometimes I forget that I am blind.
But now there comes unsought, unseen,
Some clear divine electuary,
And I, who had but sensual been,
Grow sensible, and as God is, am wary.
I hearing get, who had but ears,
And sight, who had but eyes before;
I moments live, who lived but years,
And truth discern, who knew but learning's lore.
I hear beyond the range of sound,
I see beyond the range of sight,
New earths and skies and seas around,
And in my day the sun doth pale his light.
A clear and ancient harmony
Pierces my soul through all its din,


## p.