Triumphantly distress'd! what joy, what dread!
Alternately transported and alarm'd!
What can preserve my life? or what destroy? An angel's arm can't snatch me from the grave; 90 Legions of angels can't confine me there.
"Tis past conjecture; all things rise in proof: While o'er my limbs sleep's soft dominion spread: What though my soul fantastic measures trod O'er fairy fields; or mourn'd along the gloom 95 Of pathless woods; or, down the craggy steep Hurl'd headlong, swam with pain the mantled pool; Or scal'd the cliff; or danc'd on hollow winds, With antic shapes, wild natives of the brain? Her ceaseless flight, tho' devious, speaks her nature 100 Of subtler essence than the trodden clod; Active, aerial, tow'ring, unconfin'd,
Unfetter'd with her gross companion's fall.
Ev'n silent night proclaims my soul immortal:
Ev'n silent night proclaims eternal day.
105 For human weal, heaven husbands all events;
Dull sleep instructs, nor sport vain dreams in vain. Why then their loss deplore, that are not lost? Why wanders wretched thought their tombs around, In infidel distress? Are angels there?
110 Slumbers, rak'd up in dust, ethereal fire?
They live! they greatly live a life on earth
Unkindled, unconceiv'd; and from an eye.
Of tenderness let heavenly pity fall
On me, more justly number'd with the dead.
115 This is the desert, this the solitude:
How populous, how vital, is the grave!
This is creation's melancholy vault,
The vale funereal, the sad cypress gloom;
The land of apparitions, empty shades!
120 All, all on earth is shadow, all beyond
Is substance; the reverse is folly's creed:
How solid all, where change shall be no more!
This is the bud of being, the dim dawn,
The twilight of our day, the vestibule;
125 Life's theatre as yet is shut, and death,
Strong death, alone can heave the massy bar,
This gross impediment of clay remove,
And make us embryos of existence free.
From real life but little more remote
130 Is he, not yet a candidate for light,
The future embryo, slumb'ring in his sire.
Embryos we must be, till we burst the shell,
Yon ambient azure shell, and spring to life,
The life of gods, O transport! and of man.
Yet man, fool man! here buries all his thoughts; Inters celestial hopes without one sigh.
Prisoner of earth, and pent beneath the moon,
Here pinions all his wishes; wing'd by heaven
To fly at infinite; and reach it there,
140 Where seraphs gather immortality,
On life's fair tree, fast by the throne of God.
What golden joys ambrosial clust'ring glow
In his full beam, and ripen for the just,
Where momentary ages are no more!
145 Where time, and pain, and chance, and death expire!
And is it in the flight of threescore years,
To push eternity from human thought,
And smother souls immortal in the dust?
A soul immortal, spending all her fires,
150 Wasting her strength in strenuous idleness,
Thrown into tumult, raptur'd, or alarm'd,
At aught this scene can threaten or indulge,
Resembles ocean into tempest wrought,
To waft a feather, or to drown a fly.
Where falls this censure? It o'erwhelms myself;
How was my heart incrusted by the world!
O how self-fetter'd was my grov'ling soul!
How, like a worm, was I wrapt round and round
In silken thought, which reptile fancy spun,
160 Till darken'd reason lay quite clouded o'er
With soft conceit of endless comfort here,
Nor yet put forth her wings to reach the skies!
Night-visions may befriend (as sung above):
Our waking dreams are fatal. How I dreamt
165 Of things impossible! (Could sleep do more?)
Of joys perpetual in perpetual change!
Of stable pleasures on the tossing wave!
Eternal sunshine in the storms of life!
How richly were my noon-tide trances hung
170 With gorgeous tapestries of pictur'd joys!
Joy behind joy, in endless perspective!
Till at death's toll, whose restless iron tongue
Calls daily for his millions at a meal,
Starting I woke, and found myself undone.
17. Where now my frenzy's pompous furniture?
The cobweb'd cottage, with its ragged wall
Of mould'ring mud, is royalty to me!
The spider's most attenuated thread
Is cord, is cable, to man's tender tie
180 On earthly bliss; it breaks at every breeze.
O ye blest scenes of permanent delight!
Full above measure! lasting beyond bound!
A perpetuity of bliss is bliss.
Could you, so rich in rapture, fear an end,
185 That ghastly thought would drink up all your joy,
And quite unparadise the realms of light.
Safe are you lodged above these rolling spheres;
The baleful influence of whose giddy dance
Sheds sad vicissitude on all beneath.
190 Here teems with revolutions every hour;
And rarely for the better, or the best,
More mortal than the common births of fate.
Each moment has its sickle, emulous
Of time's enormous scythe, whose ample sweep
195 Strikes empires from the root; each moment plays
His little weapon in the narrower sphere
Of sweet domestic comfort, and cuts down
The fairest bloom of sublunary bliss.
JAMES THOMSON (1700-1748) was
the son of a Presbyterian minister at the village of Ednam, in Roxburghshire (Scotland). He was educated at Jedburgh Grammar School and the University of Edinburgh, where he studied theology. But, disliking the idea of a clerical career, he went to London to devote himself to literature. He accepted several appointments as tutor to young noblemen, and with one of them travelled to France and Italy (1730-1731). Through the influence of noble patrons he twice obtained lucrative governmental offices and even a royal pension from the Prince of Wales. In 1736 he settled in a garden-house at Kew (near London), where he lived for the rest of his life.
In 1726 he published his first notable poem, Winter, which sprang into immediate popularity, and was soon followed by Summer (1727), Spring (1728), and Autumn (1730). A collective edition of the four parts appeared under the title of The Seasons (1730, much enlarged and altered in 1744). This poem, describing
the scenes and country life characteristic of the four seasons, inaugurated a new era in English poetry, as it was the first conspicuous poem mainly devoted to the description of nature. And though not yet quite emancipated from the conventional diction of the time, it was the first effective protest against the artificiality of the school of Pope, as it described nature as seen through a truly poetic temperament. Thomson's five tragedies were once much admired, but are now forgotten. And The Masque of Alfred (1740), written in conjunction with his friend David Mallet, is only remembered because it first contained the ode known as Rule, Britannia, which was to become the English national hymn. But his last poem, The Castle of Indolence (1748), an allegory which tells us of the drowsy captives of the false enchanter Indolence and the vain endeavour of the Knight of Arts and Industry to rescue them, is of high poetical merit and of great literary interest as the best imitation of Spenser's Faerie Queene.
11. 223-358 (1726): A Snow Scene.
The keener tempests come; and fuming dun
From all the livid east or piercing north
Thick clouds ascend, in whose capacious womb
A vapoury deluge lies, to snow congealed.
6 Heavy they roll their fleecy world along; And the sky saddens with the gathered storm. Thro' the hushed air the whitening shower descends, At first thin-wavering; till at last the flakes Fall broad and wide and fast, dimming the day 10 With a continual flow. The cherished fields Put on their winter-robe of purest white.
'Tis brightness all, save where the new snow melts Along the mazy current. Low the woods Bow their hoar heads; and, ere the languid sun 15 Faint from the west emits his evening-ray, Earth's universal face, deep-hid and chill,
Is one wild dazzling waste, that buries wide
The works of man. Drooping, the labourer-ox
Stands covered o'er with snow, and then demands
20 The fruit of all his toil. The fowls of heaven,
Tamed by the cruel season, crowd around
The winnowing store, and claim the little boon
Which Providence assigns them. One alone,
The redbreast, sacred to the household gods,
25 Wisely regardful of th' embroiling sky,
In joyless fields and thorny thickets leaves
His shivering mates, and pays to trusted man
His annual visit. Half-afraid, he first
Against the window beats; then, brisk, alights
30 On the warm hearth; then, hopping o'er the floor,
Eyes all the smiling family askance,
And pecks, and starts, and wonders where he is;
Till, more familiar grown, the table-crumbs
Attract his slender feet. The foodless wilds
35 Pour forth their brown inhabitants. The hare,
Tho' timorous of heart, and hard beset
By death in various forms
And more unpitying men
Urged on by fearless want.
dark snares, and dogs, the garden seeks, The bleating kind
40 Eye the bleak heaven, and next the glistening earth, With looks of dumb despair; then, sad dispersed, Dig for the withered herb thro' heaps of snow.
Now, shepherds, to your helpless charge be kind; Baffle the raging year, and fill their pens 45 With food at will; lodge them below the storm, And watch them strict: for from the bellowing east, In this dire season, oft the whirlwind's wing Sweeps up the burthen of whole wintry plains In one wide waft, and o'er the hapless flocks, 50 Hid in the hollow of two neighbouring hills, The billowy tempest whelms; till, upward urg'd, The valley to a shining mountain swells, Tipt with a wreath high-curling in the sky.
As thus the snows arise, and foul and fierce
55 All Winter drives along the darkened air,
In his own loose-revolving fields the swain
Disastered stands; sees other hills ascend,
Of unknown joyless brow; and other scenes,
Of horrid prospect, shag the trackless plain;
60 Nor finds the river nor the forest, hid
Beneath the formless wild; but wanders on
From hill to dale still more and more astray,
Impatient flouncing thro' the drifted heaps,
Stung with the thoughts of home. The thoughts of home
65 Rush on his nerves, and call their vigour forth
In many a vain attempt. How sinks his soul!
What black despair, what horror fills his heart
When, for the dusky spot which fancy feigned
His tufted cottage rising thro' the snow,
70 He meets the roughness of the middle waste,
Far from the track and blest abode of man,
While round him night resistless closes fast,
And every tempest, howling o'er his head,
Renders the savage wilderness more wild!
75 Then throng the busy shapes into his mind
Of covered pits unfathomably deep,
A dire descent! beyond the power of frost;
Of faithless bogs; of precipices huge,
Smoothed up with snow; and what is land unknown, 80 What water of the still unfrozen spring,
In the loose marsh or solitary lake,
Where the fresh fountain from the bottom boils.
These check his fearful steps; and down he sinks.
Beneath the shelter of the shapeless drift,
85 Thinking o'er all the bitterness of death,
Mixed with the tender anguish Nature shoots
Thro' the wrung bosom of the dying man —
His wife, his children, and his friends unseen.
In vain for him th' officious wife prepares
90 The fire fair-blazing and the vestment warm;
In vain his little children, peeping out
Into the mingling storm, demand their sire
With tears of artless innocence. Alas!
Nor wife nor children more shall he behold,
95 Nor friends nor sacred home. On every nerve
The deadly Winter seizes, shuts up sense,
And, o'er his inmost vitals creeping cold,
Lays him along the snows a stiffened corse,
Stretched out, and bleaching in the northern blast.
Ah! little think the gay licentious proud, Whom pleasure, power, and affluence surround,
|