Wild beasts do not like the look of the human eye—they think us ugly customers—and sometimes stand shilly-shallying in our presence, in an awkward but alarming attitude, of hunger mixed with fear. A single wolf seldom or never attacks a man. He cannot stand the face. But a person would need to have a godlike face indeed to terrify therewith an army of wolves some thousand strong. It would be the height of presumption in any man, though beautiful as Moore thought Byron, to attempt it. If so, then
"The godlike face of man avails him nought,"
is, under the circumstances, ludicrous. Still more so is the trash about "beauty, force divine!" It is too much to expect of an army of wolves some thousand strong, "and hungry as the grave," that they should all fall down on their knees before a sweet morsel of flesh and blood, merely because the young lady was so beautiful that she might have sat to Sir Thomas Lawrence for a frontispiece to Mr Watts's "Souvenir." 'Tis all stuff, too, about the generous lion standing in softened gaze at beauty's bright glance. True, he has been known to look with a certain sort of soft surliness upon a pretty Caffre girl, and to walk past without eating her—but simply because, an hour or two before, he had dined on a Hottentot Venus. The secret lay not in his heart, but in his stomach. Still the notion is a popular one, and how exquisitely has Spenser changed it into the divinest poetry in the character of the attendant lion of
"Heavenly Una, with her milk-white lamb!"
But Thomson, so far from making poetry of it in this passage, has vulgarised and blurred by it the natural and inevitable emotion of terror and pity. Famished wolves howking up the dead is a dreadful image—but "inhuman to relate," is not an expression heavily laden with meaning; and the sudden, abrupt, violent, and, as we feel, unnatural introduction of ideas purely superstitious, at the close, is revolting, and miserably mars the terrible truth.
"Mix'd with foul shades and frighted ghosts, they howl."
Why, pray, are the shades foul, and the ghosts only frightened? And wherein lies the specific difference between a shade and a ghost? Besides, if the ghosts were frightened, which they had good reason to be, why were not they off? We have frequently read of their wandering far from home, on occasions when they had no such excellent excuse to offer. This line, therefore, we have taken the liberty to erase from our pocket-copy of the "Seasons"—and to draw a few keelavine strokes over the rest of the passage—beginning with "man's godlike face."
Go read, then, the opening of "Winter," and acknowledge that, of all climates and all countries, there are none within any of the zones of the earth that will bear a moment's comparison with those of Scotland. Forget the people if you can, and think only of the region. The lovely Lowlands undulating away into the glorious Highlands—the spirit of sublimity and the spirit of beauty one and the same, as it blends them in indissoluble union. Bury us alive in the dungeon's gloom—incommunicable with the light of day as the grave—it could not seal our eyes to the sight of Scotland. We should see it still by rising or by setting suns. Whatever blessed scene we chose to call on would become an instant apparition. Nor in that thick-ribbed vault would our eyes be deaf to her rivers and her seas. We should say our prayers to their music, and to the voice of the thunder on a hundred hills. We stand now in no need of senses. They are waxing dim—but our spirit may continue to brighten long as the light of love is allowed to dwell therein, thence proceeding over nature like a victorious morn.
There are many beautiful passages in the poets about Rain; but who ever sang its advent so passionately as in these strains?—
"The effusive south
Warms the wide air, and o'er the void of heaven
Breathes the big clouds with vernal showers distent.
At first a dusky wreath they seem to rise,
Scarce staining ether; but by swift degrees,
In heaps on heaps, the doubling vapour sails
Along the loaded sky, and mingling deep
Sits on th' horizon round a settled gloom:
Not such as wintry storms on mortals shed,
Oppressing life; but lovely, gentle, kind,
And full of every hope and every joy,
The wish of nature. Gradual sinks the breeze
Into a perfect calm, that not a breath
Is heard to quiver through the closing woods,
Or rustling turn the many-twinkling leaves
Of aspen tall. Th' uncurling floods diffused
In glassy breadth, seem through delusive lapse
Forgetful of their course. 'Tis silence all
And pleasing expectation. Herds and flocks
Drop the dry sprig, and, mute-imploring, eye
The falling verdure!"