O'er rocks and woods, in broad brown cataracts,
A thousand snow-fed torrents shoot at once.'[32]
It is worthy of remark, however, that even though nature is his theme, the poet writes rather as an interested spectator than as an earnest votary. He reveals no passion for the landscapes he depicts. He never appears as if himself a portion of the scene, alive with sympathy in all the varying moods of nature. His verse has no flashes of inspiration, such as contact with storm and spate drew from Burns. It was already, however, a great achievement that Thomson broke through the conventionalities of the time, and led his countrymen once more to the green fields, the moors, and the woodlands.
In the successive poems which when placed together made the Seasons, published in 1730, Thomson continued to draw on his recollections of the Scottish Border for the descriptions of landscape that form so fundamental a part of his theme. It is interesting to note that even after he had been five years in the south of England, and must have seen in that time much variety of weather and many different watercourses, it is still from the north that he draws his sketches. When, for instance, he tells how in autumn,
'Red from the hills, innumerable streams
Tumultuous roar,'[33]
the colour of his torrents betrays their Scottish origin. He was thinking of the spates in his native streams which sweep across tracts of Old Red Sandstone, and come down almost brick-red in hue. There are no red rocks, and therefore no red brooks in Middlesex and the surrounding districts.
But before the completion of the Seasons the influence of English lowland scenery had begun to impress itself on Thomson's imagination. The softer and ampler landscape of fruitful plains, with its richer agriculture and fuller population, its farms, villages, and country houses, filled his mind with a new pleasure. Some trace of this widened experience may be seen in the additions successively made to the earlier poems, such as the picture of Hagley Park introduced into the poem on Spring. But it was in his last effusion, The Castle of Indolence, that this English influence gained entire sway, and the Scottish memories faded into the background. Here we find ourselves amid the typical landscapes of the south of England—landscapes, however, so transfused by poetic genius as to acquire an individuality of their own. We are led into 'a lowly dale fast by a river's side'; we wander through 'sleep-soothing groves and quiet lawns between'; we see 'glittering streamlets' in a sunny glade'; we skirt a 'sable, silent, solemn forest'; and pass a 'wood of blackening pines,' which runs up the hills on either side, and see the famous castle 'close hid amid embowering trees,' that make a kind of chequered day and night. The landscape, we are told, 'inspires perfect ease'—a quality which must now have become indispensable to the 'bard, more fat than bard beseems.' Thomson, with his adoption of English scenery, had also polished his style and rid himself of much of his turgidity and latinism. He had changed his theme, too, and had chosen one more in consonance with the prevailing vogue. But to the end he had an eye for the charms of the free open face of nature. For the share he took in bringing back into our literature the recognition of these charms, he will ever hold an honourable place in the history of letters.
It was from another and somewhat dissimilar part of the Scottish lowlands that a far more powerful impulse than that of Thomson was given by the genius of Burns to the progress of the literary revolution of the eighteenth century. The landscapes of Ayrshire, where Burns was born and spent most of his life, though akin in their main aspects to those of Roxburghshire, present nevertheless certain well-marked differences in topography which were not without their influence on the muse that inspired Tam o' Shanter and Halloween.
The lowlands familiar to Burns throughout most of his life form a wide and undulating plain, surrounded on three sides by ranges of upland, and on the fourth by the open Firth of Clyde. The heights along the southern side belong to the long and broad chain of uplands which stretches from Portpatrick to Saint Abb's Head. Rising sometimes to more than 2,500 feet above the sea, they stretch as a wide pastoral country, much of which is still covered with 'muirs and mosses many.' These high grounds catch the clouds and mists from the Atlantic, and receive such a copious rainfall as to feed many large streams which cross the lowlands to the sea. The number and size of these streams form a notable feature in the scenery, and the different geological formations through which they flow have contributed to give much variety to their channels. Here they may be seen flowing in a narrow glen, there opening into a wider strath, or creeping sullenly in a narrow chasm between precipitous walls of naked stone, or dashing merrily over rock and boulder beneath overarching trees, or sweeping in wide curves through open meadows or dense woods, and finally carrying their burden of mossy water into the blue firth.