LIFE OF JAMES THOMSON, WITH A CRITICAL NOTICE OF THE SEASONS, AND CASTLE OF INDOLENCE. FOUR of the chief rural poets of Scotland were natives of scenes which biographers imagine had some influence on the character of their compositions: the author of "The Gentle Shepherd" was born on one of the pastoral tributaries of the Clyde :-Burns, whose fine series of songs reflect, as brightly as the streams reflect the sun, the feelings and sympathies of our peasantry, came from the banks of the romantic Doon:-the Muse that saw for us the pure and beautiful vision of "Kilmeny," lived on the poetic Ettrick-and the great author of "The Seasons"-a poem which gives a tongue to inanimate nature, while it elevates and chastens the human heartwas born on the classic Tweed. The birthplace of James Thomson was Ednam Manse, by Eden-water, close to the town of Kelso, and nigh Tweedside, in the county of Roxburgh. His father, connected with the district, it is said, was licensed to preach, June 17, 1691, and ordained, it is not known through what influence, minister of Ednam, July 12, 1692. The Session Book of the parish supplies us with the following decisive entries "1693, October 6, Mr. Thomas Thomson, minister of Ednam, and Beatrix Trotter, in the parish of - b Kelso, gave up their names for proclamation, in order to marriage." In due time, in the same record, follow the baptisms of their first son, Andrew; their second son, Alexander; their eldest daughter, Isabel; and, lastly, their third son, JAMES, who was born on the 11th, and baptized on the 15th of September, 1700. He was the fourth-born of nine children, of whom five were daughters. Of the poet's father, we are told that he was rather unaffectedly pious and diligent in his duties than worthy of remembrance for his learning and eloquence; while of his mother, who was co-heiress of Widehope, a small portion of land near Greenlaw, in Berwickshire, Lord Buchan, who spoke from report, says, "she was a woman of uncommon sensibility, and endowed with sublime affections" and Patrick Murdoch, who spoke from knowledge, calls her " a person of uncommon natural endowments, possessed of every social and domestic virtue, with an imagination, for vivacity and warmth, scarce inferior to her son's, which raised her devotional exercises to a pitch bordering on enthusiasm." It is pleasant to see the character of the parent appear in the child-Thomson had much of his mother in him. One of his latest biographers, curious in matters of descent, says: "Less has been said of his parents than they merit; and from the slight way in which they have been noticed, the idea may have arisen that he was of obscure origin." But expressions such as these are too poetic to settle questions of gentility of blood and be it borne in mind, that Presbyterianism having no bishoprics in her gift, and no cathedrals in her dreams, the high-born of the land seldom aspire to her pulpits, and the kirk has to seek her pastors amongst her citizens and husbandmen; and her pastors find their wives amongst the daughters of farmers and small portioners of land. From this class came the poet. It is more material to inquire how, and at what hour, the love of the Muse came upon him. Murdoch says that, before Thomson had grown up to man's estate, "the study of poetry had become general in Scotland; the best English authors being universally read, and imitations of them attempted." This, we fear, is easier to say than to prove the ancient love of poetry had faded away, like an unwatered flower, under the dry discipline of the kirk; and though it never perished, for an immortal thing cannot die, the people had been taught to listen to another charmer; and when a minister preached of a "broken covenant, and spilt blood," their hands sought the lance and neglected the lyre:-they thought of the sword of Gideon, rather than the harp of David. With this fervour Scotland was long possessed: at song and at ballad, once the favourites of all classes, she shook her head: the brightest labours of the pen had little merit in her eyes: a written discourse, however elegant, was as unwelcome as snow to summer: a sermon which failed to reach from noon to sunset she accounted a profane parsimony, and a grudging of gifts; and catechisings, admonitions, and exhortations were the things in which her soul delighted. In this severe school were the Presbyterians of the days when the poet was a boy trained and brought up: nor is there any reason to believe that a course less austere was pursued in his father's household. It is true that, with the higher born, and here and there with the learned, the belt of discipline was not so tightly buckled: yet, in a later day, to compose verse was accounted a sin in a schoolmaster; and the tragic drama of "Douglas" cost a minister his manse. When Thomson was little more than a year old, his father received, in the language of the pulpit, a callperhaps an harmonious one-from Ednam to Southdean, on the water of Jed, in the same county. An increasing family and a small stipend have been assigned as the reason for this removal-a thing not common in the kirk-from a scene of cultivated beauty, where the ruins of Roxburgh Castle, the magnificent remains of Kelso Abbey, the clear and slow-sliding stream of Tweed, and the hurrying current of the Teviot, unite with the hills and dales around in forming a landscape of no ordinary beauty: the all but unconscious poet was taken to one of a ruder, yet not, perhaps, less lovely kind. Southdean, or Sou'dean, as the peasantry call it, is truly a pastoral land lovely with its green hills, and its blooming heather, while the slender stream of the "crystal Jed," winding through the whole, adds a look of life, by its moving waters, to the upland solitude. In this lonesome, though romantic place, the poet passed his early years: nor was he insensible, when but a boy, to a scene which his biographer, Lord Buchan, calls a land "full of the elements of natural beauty-wood, water, eminence, and rock, with intermixture of rich and beautiful meadow." Here, as he wandered by himself, he first met the Muse-not the Muse that visited Burns, with a wildly witty grace on her brow, and a tartan kirtle reaching half-leg down; but such a one as his enthusiastic mother would have loved-a Muse staid, devout, demure: her looks, in the language of Milton, "commercing with the skies." The place of his birth, and the scenes where he was educated, are celebrated in Scottish song to such influences he was not insensible: he could not walk out without seeing a hill or a stream famous in story; nor could he stroll in either wood or field without treading in the yet uneffaced footsteps of patriots and poets; nor wander by a rivulet side, or drink out of a fountain—and of this he was fond-without feeling they were celebrated in imperishable |