A fair thought, a keen observation, a neat phrase are seldom strictly preserved. If accident does not take two or more writers to the same hill, show them the same sunset, and charge their minds with the same words, plagiarism will serve the purpose. Even if Cowley's rare wit had remained in manuscript unseen, its turns would not have been for many centuries entirely his own. Literature will out. To one or the other, to plagiarism or accident, is due a likeness between Thompson's
So fearfully the sun doth sound,
Clanging up beyond Cathay;
For the great earthquaking sunrise rolling up beyond Cathay,
and Mr. Kipling's "And the sun came up like thunder out of China, 'cross the Bay."
A wind got up frae off the sea.
It blew the stars as clear could be.
It blew in the een of a' the three,
And the mune was shining clearly!
sang Stevenson's Highlander years before Thompson wrote
And a great wind blew all the stars to flare.
But in neither case is Thompson, though the dates are against him, proved a thief.
Of a review of his Poems in the St. James's Gazette:—
"I only deprecate in it the implied comparison to Dante, and the to-me-bewildering comparison to Matthew Arnold. 'Tis not merely that I have studied no poet less; it is that I should have thought we were in the sharpest contrast. His characteristic fineness lies in that very form and restraint to which I so seldom attain: his characteristic drawback in the lack of that full stream which I am seldom without. The one needs and becomes strict banks—for he could not fill wider ones; the other too readily overflows all banks. But these are casual specks on an appreciative article—an article as unusually appreciative as that in the Chronicle."