of night, "vague, bombastic, and senseless," and Pope's translation of the celebrated moonlight scene in the Iliad, altogether "absurd,"-and then without ever once dreaming of any necessity of showing them to be so, or even if he had succeeded in doing so, of the utter illogicality of any argument drawn from their misery and wretchedness to establish the point he hammers at, he all at once says, with the most astounding assumption, "having shown that much of what his [Thomson's] biographer deemed genuine admiration, must, in fact, have been blind wonderment-how is the rest to be accounted for?" " Having shown" !!! Why he has shown nothing but his own arrogance in supposing that his mere ipse dixit will be taken by the whole world as proof that Dryden and Pope had not the use of their eyes. "Strange to think of an enthusiast," he says, (alluding to the passage in Pope's translation of the Iliad,) "as may have been the case with thousands, reciting those verses under the cope of a moonlight sky, without having his raptures in the least disturbed by a suspicion of their absurdity!" We are no enthusiasts-we are far too old for that folly-but we have eyes in our head, though sometimes rather dim and motey, and as good eyes too as Mr. Wordsworth, and we often have recited-and hope often will recite them again-Pope's exquisite lines, not only without any "suspicion of their absurdity," but with the conviction of a most devout belief, that with some little vagueness, perhaps, and repetition, and a word here and there that might be altered for the better, the description is at once beautiful and sublime. But grant it miserable-and grant all else Mr. Wordsworth has so dictatorially uttered-and what then? Though descriptive poetry may not have flourished during the period between Paradise Lost and the Seasons, did not mankind enjoy the use of their seven senses? Could they not see and hear without the aid of those oculists and aurists the poets? Were all the shepherds and agriculturists of England and Scotland blind and deaf to all the sights and sounds of nature, and all the gentlemen and ladies too, from the king and queen upon the throne, to the lowest of their subjects? Very like a whale. Causes there were why poetry flowed

during that era in another channel than that of the description of natural scenery-and if it flowed too little in that channel then-which is true-equally is it true that it flows now in it too much—especially among the poets of the Lake School, to the neglect-not of sentiments and affections-for there they excel-but of strong direct human passion applied to the stir and tumult-of which the interest is profound and eternal-of all the great affairs of human life. But though the descriptive poets during the period between Milton and Thomson were few and indifferent, no reason is there in this world for imagining with Mr. Wordsworth, that men had forgotten both the heavens and the earth. They had not-nor was the wonder with which they must have regarded the great shows of nature, the "natural product of ignorance," then, any more than it is now, or ever was during a civilized age. If we be right in saying so-then neither could the admiration which the "Seasons," on the first appearance of that glorious poem, excited, be said, with any sense or truth, to have been but a "wonder, the natural produce of ignorance." Mr. Wordsworth having thus signally, and, we may say, shamefully, failed in his attempt to show that "much of what Thomson's biographer deemed genuine admiration, must, in fact, have been blind wonderment," let us accompany him in his still more futile and absurd efforts to show "how the rest is to be accounted for." He attempts to do so after this fashion. "Thomson was fortunate in the very title of his poem, which seemed to bring it home to the prepared sympathies of every one; in the next place, notwithstanding his high powers, he writes a vicious style; and his false ornaments are exactly of that kind, which would be most likely to strike the undiscerning. He likewise abounds with sentimental commonplaces, that, from the manner in which they were brought forward, bore an imposing air of novelty. In any well-used copy of the 'Seasons,' the book generally opens of itself with the Rhapsody on Love, or with one of the stories, perhaps of Damon and Musidora. These also are prominent in our Collections of Extracts, and are the parts of his work,

which, after all, were probably most efficient in first recommending the author to general notice."

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Thomson, in one sense, was fortunate in the title of his poem. But a great poet like Wordsworth might— nay ought, to have chosen another word—or have given of that word a loftier explanation, when applied to Thomson's choice of the Seasons for the subject of his immortal poem. Genius made that choice-not fortune. The "Seasons" are not merely the title" of his poem, they are his poem, and his poem is the Seasons. But how, pray, can Thomson be said to have been fortunate in the title or the subject either of his poem, in the sense that Mr. Wordsworth means? Why, according to him, people knew little, and cared less, about the seasons! “The art of seeing had in some measure been learned!" he allows-but that was all-and that all is but littleand surely far from being enough to have disposed people in general to listen to the strains of a poet who painted nature in all her moods, and under all her aspects. Thomson, then, we say, was either most unfortunate in the title of his poem, or there was not that indifference to, and ignorance of, natural scenery in the "wide soul of the world," on which Mr. Wordsworth so strenuously insists as part, or rather the whole, of his preceding argu

ment.

That

The title, Mr. Wordsworth says, seemed "to bring the poem home to the prepared sympathies of every one!" What! to the prepared sympathies of those who had merely, in some measure, learned the "art of seeing," and who had "paid," as he says in another sentence, "little accurate attention to the appearances of nature!" Never did the weakest mind ever fall into grosser contradictions, than does here one of the strongest, in vainly labouring to bolster up a bad cause, or rather a silly assertion, which he has desperately ventured on, from a most mistaken imagination, that it was necessary to account for the kind of reception which his own poetry had met with from the present age. The truth is, that had Mr. Wordsworth known, when he indited these unlucky and helpless sentences, that his own poetry was, in the best sense of the word, a thousand times more popular

than he supposed it to be-and Heaven be praised, for the honour of the age, it was and is so-never had they been written, nor had he here and elsewhere laboured to prove, that, in proportion as poetry was bad, or rather as it was no poetry at all, has it been, and always will be, more and more popular in the age contemporary with the writer. That Thomson, in the Seasons, often writes a vicious style, is true; but it is not true that he always, or generally, does so. His style has its faults, no doubt, and some of them inextricably interwoven with the whole web of his composition. It is a dangerous style to imitate-especially to dunces. But its virtue is divine; and that divine virtue, even in this low world of ours, wins admiration more surely and widely than earthly vice, be it in words, thoughts, feelings, or actions, is a creed that we will not relinquish at the beck or bidding even of the great author of the Excursion. That many did-do-and will admire the bad or indifferent passages in the Seasons-won by their false glitter, or commonplace sentimentalism, is no doubt true; but the delight, though as intense as perhaps it may be foolish, with which boys and virgins, woman-mantua-makers, and man-milliners, and "the rest," peruse the Rhapsody on Love,-one passage of which we have ventured a little way back to be facetious on,-and hang over the picture of Musidora undressing, while Damon watches the process of disrobement, panting behind a tree, will never account for the admiration with which the whole world hailed the " Winter," the first of the Seasons published; during which, Thomson had not the barbarity to plunge any young lady naked into the cold bath, nor the ignorance to represent, during such cold weather, any young lady turning her lover sick by the ardour of her looks, and the vehemence of her whole enamoured deportment. The time never was-nor could have been-when such passages were generally esteemed the glory of the poem. Indeed, independently of its own gross absurdity, the assertion is at total variance with that other assertion, equally absurd, that people admired most in the poem what they least understand; for the Rhapsody on Love is certainly very intelligible, nor does there seem

much mystery in Musidora going into the water to wash and cool herself on a hot day. Is it not melancholy, then, to hear such a man as Mr. Wordsworth, earnestly, and even somewhat angrily, trying to prove that "these are the parts of the work which, after all, were probably most efficient in first recommending the author to general notice?"

With respect to the "sentimental commonplaces with which Thomson abounds," no doubt they were and are popular; and many of them deserve to be so, for they are on a level with the usual current of human feeling, and many of them are eminently beautiful. Thomson had not the philosophical genius of Mr. Wordsworth, but he had a warm human heart, and its generous feelings overflow all his poem. Those are not the most poetical parts of the "Seasons" certainly, where such effusions prevail; but still, so far from being either vicious or worthless, they have often a virtue and a worth that ought to be felt by the children of men. There is something not very natural in the situation of the parties in the story of the "lovely young Lavinia," for example, and much of the sentiment is commonplace enough; but will Mr. Wordsworth dare to say,-in support of his theory, that the worst poetry is always at first (and at last too, it would seem, from the pleasure with which that tale is still read by all simple minds) the most popular, that that story is a bad one? We should like to hear him say so.

Mr. Wordsworth, in all the above false and feeble argumentation, is so blinded by his determination to see every thing in but one light, and that a most mistaken one, that he is insensible to the conclusion to which it all leads, or rather, which is involved in it. Why, according to him, even now, when people have not only learned the “art of seeing,” a blessing for which they can never be too thankful, but when descriptive poetry has long flourished far beyond its palmiest state in any other era of our poetry, still are we poor common mortals who admire the "Seasons," just as deaf and blind now, or nearly so, to their real merits-allowed to be transcendent-as our unhappy forefathers were, when that poem first appeared,