BULLER.
What think you of the thunder in Thomson's Seasons?
NORTH.
What all the world thinks—that it is our very best British Thunder. He gives the Gathering, the General engagement, and the Retreat. In the Gathering there are touches and strokes that make all mankind shudder—the foreboding—the ominous! And the terror, when it comes, aggrandises the premonitory symptoms. "Follows the loosened aggravated roar" is a line of power to bring the voice of thunder upon your soul on the most peaceable day. He, too—prevailing poet—feels the grandeur of the Rain. For instant on the words "convulsing heaven and earth," ensue,
"Down comes a deluge of sonorous hail,
Or prone-descending rain."
Thomson had been in the heart of thunder-storms many a time before he left Scotland; and what always impresses me is the want of method—the confusion, I might almost say—in his description. Nothing contradictory in the proceedings of the storm; they all go on obediently to what we know of Nature's laws. But the effects of their agency on man and nature are given—not according to any scheme—but as they happen to come before the Poet's imagination, as they happened in reality. The pine is struck first—then the cattle and the sheep below—and then the castled cliff—and then the
"Gloomy woods
Start at the flash, and from their deep recess
Wide-flaming out, their trembling inmates shake."
No regular ascending—or descending scale here; but wherever the lightning chooses to go, there it goes—the blind agent of indiscriminating destruction.
BULLER.
Capricious Zig-zag.