"The whole imprison'd river growls below."
Here, again, 'tis pleasant to see the peculiar genius of Cowper contrasted with that of Thomson. The gentle Cowper delighting, for the most part, in tranquil images—for his life was passed amidst tranquil nature; the enthusiastic Thomson, more pleased with images of power. Cowper says—
"On the flood,
Indurated and fixed, the snowy weight
Lies undissolved, while silently beneath,
And unperceived, the current steals away."
How many thousand times the lines we are now going to quote have been quoted, nobody can tell; but we quote them once more for the purpose of asking you, if you think that any one poet of this age could have written them—could have chilled one's very blood with such intense feeling of cold! Not one.
"In these fell regions, in Arzina caught,
And to the stony deep his idle ship
Immediate seal'd, he with his hapless crew,
Each full exerted at his several task,
Froze into statues; to the cordage glued
The sailor, and the pilot to the helm!"
The oftener—the more we read the "Winter"—especially the last two or three hundred lines—the angrier is our wonder with Wordsworth for asserting that Thomson owed the national popularity that his "Winter" immediately won, to his "commonplace sentimentalities, and his vicious style!" Yet true it is, that he was sometimes guilty of both; and, but for his transcendent genius, they might have obscured the lustre of his fame. But such sins are not very frequent in the "Seasons," and were all committed in the glow of that fine and bold enthusiasm, which to his imagination arrayed all things, and all words, in a light that seemed to him at the time to be poetry—though sometimes it was but "false glitter." Admitting, then, that sometimes the style of the "Seasons" is somewhat too florid, we must not criticise single and separate passages, without holding in mind the character of the poet's genius and his inspirations. He luxuriates—he revels—he wantons—at once with an imaginative and a sensuous delight in nature. Besides, he was but young; and his great work was his first. He had not philosophised his poetical language, as Wordsworth himself has done, after long years of profoundest study of the laws of thought and speech. But in such study, while much is gained, may not something be lost? And is there not a charm in the free, flowing, chartered libertinism of the diction and versification of the "Seasons"—above all, in the closing strains of the "Winter," and in the whole of the "Hymn," which inspires a delight and wonder seldom breathed upon us—glorious poem, on the whole, as it is—from the more measured march of the "Excursion?"
All those children of the Pensive Public who have been much at school, know Thomson's description of the wolves among the Alps, Apennines, and Pyrenees,
"Cruel as death, and hungry as the grave!
Burning for blood, bony and gaunt and grim!" &c.
The first fifteen lines are equal to anything in the whole range of English descriptive poetry; but the last ten are positively bad. Here they are:—
"The godlike face of man avails him nought!
Even beauty, force divine! at whose bright glance
The generous lion stands in soften'd gaze,
Now bleeds, a hapless undistinguish'd prey.
But if, apprised of the severe attack,
The country be shut up, lured by the scent,
On churchyard drear (inhuman to relate!)
The disappointed prowlers fall, and dig
The shrouded body from the grave; o'er which,
Mix'd with foul shades and frighted ghosts, they howl."