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_.