[Thomson, George], a noted collector of songs, who set himself to gather in one work every existing Scotch melody; his untiring zeal resulted in the publication of 6 vols. of Scotch songs, the words of which had been adapted and supplied by a host of writers, including Scott, Campbell, Joanna Baillie, and above all, Robert Burns, who contributed upwards of 120; Haydn, Beethoven, Mozart, Weber, and others were engaged to supply instrumental preludes and codas; also published collections of Irish songs and Welsh melodies; was a native of Limekilns, Fife, and for 60 years principal clerk to the Board of Trustees, Edinburgh (1759-1851).
[Thomson, James], the poet of the "Seasons," born, the son of the parish minister, at Ednam, Roxburghshire; was educated and trained for the ministry at Edinburgh University, but already wooing the muse, he, shortly after his father's death in 1725, went to London to push his fortune; his poem "Winter," published in the following year, had immediate success, and raised up a host of friends and patrons, and what with tutoring and the proceeds of "Summer," "Spring," "Autumn," various worthless tragedies, and other products of his pen, secured a fair living, till a pension of £100 from the Prince of Wales, to whom he had dedicated the poem of "Liberty," and a subsequent £300 a year as non-resident Governor of the Leeward Islands, placed him in comparative affluence; the "Masque of Alfred," with its popular song "Rule Britannia," and his greatest work "The Castle of Indolence" (1748), were the outcome of his later years of leisure; often tediously verbose, not infrequently stiff and conventional in diction and trite in its moralisings, the poetry of Thomson was yet the first of the 18th century to shake itself free of the town, and to lead, as Stopford Brooke says, "the English people into that new world of nature which has enchanted us in the work of modern poetry" (1700-1748).
[Thomson, James], the poet of pessimism, born, a sailor's son, at Port-Glasgow, and brought up in an orphanage; was introduced to literature by [Mr. Bradlaugh] (q. v.), to whose National Reformer he contributed much of his best poetry, including his gloomy yet sonorous and impressive "The City of Dreadful Night," besides essays (1834-1882).
[Thomson, John], the artist minister of Duddingston, born at Dailly, in Ayrshire; succeeded his father in the parish of Dailly (1800), and five years later was transferred to Duddingston parish, near Edinburgh; faithful in the discharge of his parochial duties, he yet found time to cultivate his favourite art of painting, and in the course of his 35 years' pastorate produced a series of landscapes which won him wide celebrity in his own day, and have set him in the front rank of Scottish artists (1778-1840).
[Thomson, Joseph], African explorer, born at Thornhill, studied at Edinburgh University, and in 1878 was appointed zoologist to the Royal Geographical Society's expedition to Lake Tanganyika, which, after the death of the leader, Keith Johnston, at the start, he, at the age of 20, carried through with notable success; in 1882 explored with important geographical results Massai-land, and subsequently headed expeditious up the Niger and to Sokoto, and explored the Atlas Mountains; published interesting accounts of his various travels (1858-1895).
[Thomson, Sir William, Lord Kelvin], great physicist, born at Belfast; studied at St. Peter's College, Cambridge; was senior wrangler in 1845, and elected professor of Natural Philosophy in Glasgow in 1846; it is in the departments of heat and electricity he has accomplished his greatest achievements, and his best-known work is the invention of the siphon-recorder for the Atlantic cable, on the completion of which, in 1866, he was knighted, to be afterwards raised to the peerage in 1892; he has invented a number of ingenious and delicate scientific instruments, as well as written extensively on mathematical and physical subjects; b. 1824.
[Thor], in the Norse mythology "the god of thunder; the thunder was his wrath, the gathering of the black clouds is the drawing down of Thor's angry brows; the fire-bolt bursting out of heaven is the all-rending hammer flung from the hand of Thor; he urges his loud chariot over the mountain tops—that is the peal; wrathful he 'blows in his beard'—that is the rustling of the storm-blast before the thunder begin"; he is the strongest of the gods, the helper of both gods and men, and the mortal foe of the chaotic powers.
[Thoreau, Henry David], an American author who, next to his friend and neighbour Emerson, gave the most considerable impulse to the "transcendental" movement in American literature, born in Concord, where his life was mostly spent, of remote French extraction; was with difficulty enabled to go to Harvard, where he graduated, but without distinction of any sort; took to desperate shifts for a living, but simplified the problem of "ways and means" by adopting Carlyle's plan of "lessening your denominator"; the serious occupation of his life was to study nature in the woods around Concord, to make daily journal entries of his observings and reflections, and to preserve his soul in peace and purity; his handicrafts were unwelcome necessities thrust upon him; "What after all," he exclaims, "does the practicalness of life amount to? The things immediate to be done are very trivial; I could postpone them all to hear this locust sing. The most glorious fact in my experience is not anything I have done or may hope to do, but a transient thought or vision or dream which I have had"; his chief works are "Walden," the account of a two years' sojourn in a hut built by his own hands in the Concord Woods near "Walden Pool," "A Week on the Concord and Merrimac River," essays, poems, etc. (1817-1862).
[Thorn] (27), a town and fortress of the first rank in West Prussia, on the Vistula, 115 m. NW. of Warsaw; formerly a member of the [Hanseatic League] (q. v.); was annexed by Prussia in 1815; the birthplace of Copernicus; carries on a brisk trade in corn and timber.
[Thornbury, George Walter], a miscellaneous writer, author of numerous novels, "Songs of the Cavaliers and Roundheads," "Life of Turner," "Old and New London," etc.; born in London, where his life was spent in literary work (1828-1876).