From seeming evil still educing good.”
There is much benevolence in his poetry, much feeling for the miseries and wrongs of mankind, but no perception of that deeper mystery—that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain, waiting for a deliverance. Neither is there any sense of the relation of the creation to the Creator other than that which the somewhat mechanical conception of a maker and a machine supply. Perhaps it is not to be wondered at that Thomson does not seem to feel the inadequacy of this conception, for we in our own day, who have got to feel so profoundly its inadequacy, have not as yet gone far to supply its place with a worthier. Yet whatever may be his shortcomings, all honor to the poet of the “Seasons”! Genuine lover of the country as he was, he was the first English poet who led poetry back into the fields, and made her once more free of her own native region.
CHAPTER XIII.
NATURE IN COLLINS, GRAY, GOLDSMITH, AND BURNS.
COLLINS.
When Thomson was laid in Richmond Church, another poet chanted over him a dirge breathing the very pathos of Nature herself:—
“In yonder grave a Druid lies,
Where slowly winds the stealing wave,
The year’s best sweets shall duteous rise
To deck its poet’s sylvan grave.