John Jebb.
Peterstow Rectory, Ross.
Passage in Thomson (Vol. vii., p. 87.).—Steaming, as your intelligent correspondent C. says, is clearly the true reading. The word is so printed in the 4to. edition of the Seasons, 1730 (was not this the first collected edition of that poem?), and in every other to which I have referred. It does not, however, occur in the 4to. copy in the twenty-eighth, but in the thirty-first line. The four lines, fifteenth to eighteenth, originally given in the "Hymn," but afterwards wisely omitted by the poet, follow the words "In Autumn unconfined:"—
"Thrown from thy lap
Profuse o'er Nature falls the lucid shower
Of beamy fruits, and in a radiant stream
Into the stores of sterile winter pours."
The steaming property of the earth is well described by Dr. Carpenter, in his Vegetable Physiology, p. 168.:
"If a glass vessel be placed with its mouth downwards, on the surface of a meadow or grass plot, during a sunny afternoon in summer, it will speedily be rendered dim in the interior by the watery vapour which will rise into it; and this will soon accumulate to such a degree as to run down in drops. Any person walking in a meadow on which the sun is shining powerfully, where the grass has not long previously been refreshed by rain, may observe a tremulous motion in distant objects, occasioned by the rising of the watery vapour; exactly resembling that which takes place along the sea-shore, when the sun shines strongly on pebbles that have been left in a moistened state by the retiring tide."—Dr. Carpenter's Vegetable Physiology, p. 168. sect. 253.
"The atmosphere is made up of several steams, or minute particles of several sorts rising from the earth and the waters."—Locke's Elements of Natural Philosophy.
J. H. M.