[Illustration]
The author of The Seasons was born at Ednam, a couple of miles or so
from Kelso, on the 11th of September, 1700. His father was the minister
of the parish, and it was intended to bring him up to the same
profession. The early childhood only of Thomson was spent here, for his
father removed to Southdean, near Jedburgh, having obtained the living
of that place.
Ednam has nothing poetical about it. It lies in a rich farming country
of ordinary features. The scenery is flat, and the village by no means
picturesque. It consists of a few farm-houses, and long rows of hinds'
cottages. David Macbeth Moir, the Delta of Blackwood's Magazine,
described the place some years ago in these lines:
"A rural church; some scattered cottage roofs,
From whose secluded hearths the thin blue smoke
Silently wreathing through the breezeless air,
Ascended mingling with the summer sky;
A rustic bridge, mossy and weather-stained;
A fairy streamlet, singing to itself;
And here and there a venerable tree
In foliaged beauty; of these elements,
And only these, the simple scene was formed."
Yet even this description is too favorable. It would induce us to
believe that the spot had something of the picturesque--it has nothing
of it. The streamlet sings little even to itself through that flat
district; the mossy bridge has given way to a good, substantial, but
unpoetical stone one. The landscape is by no means over-enriched by fine
trees. There are some limes, I believe they are, in the churchyard. The
old church has been pulled down since Thomson's time, and the new one
now standing is a poor, barn-like affair, with a belfry that would do
for a pigeon cote. The manse in which the poet was born has also
disappeared, and a new, square, unpicturesque one been built upon the
site. Perhaps no class of people have less of the poetical or the
picturesque in them than the Presbyterian clergy of Scotland. The hard,
dry, stern Calvinism imparted by John Knox has effectually expelled all
that. The country people of Scotland are generally intelligent, and have
a taste for poetry and literature; but to a certainty they do not derive
this from their clergy. In no country have I found the parish clergy so
ignorant of general literature, or so unacquainted with any thing that
is going on in the world, except the polemics of their own Church. The
cargo of _Geneva_ which Knox imported has operated on the religious
feeling of Scotland worse than any gin or whisky on its moral or
physical condition. It is a _spirit_ as unlike Christianity as possible.
One is all love and tenderness; the other all bitterness and hardness:
the one is gentle and tolerant; the other fierce and intolerant: the one
careless of form, so that the life and soul of charity and piety are
preserved; the other is all form and doctrine--doctrine, hard,
metaphysical, rigid, and damnatory. On the borders, too, in many places,
the very people seem to me more ignorant and stupid than is the wont of
Scotland; they would match the Surrey chopsticks or Essex calves of
England.
I walked over from Kelso on the Sunday morning to Ednam. The people
were collected about the church door, waiting for the time of service. I
thought it a good opportunity to hear something of the traditions of the
country about Thomson. Nobody could tell me any thing. So little idea
had they of a poet, that they informed me that another poet had been
born there besides Thomson. I asked whom that might be. They said, "One
White, a decrepit old man who used to write under the trees of the
church-yard;" and this they thought having another poet! Such--as we are
often obliged to exclaim--is fame!
An old woman, into whose cottage I stepped, on returning, to avoid a
shower, was more intelligent. She told me that her mother had lived at
the old manse, and frequently heard what had been told to inquirers. The
manse in which Thomson was born, she said, was of mud; and he was born
in the parlor, which had a bed in a recess concealed by a curtain.
The present minister is the son of a saddler at Hawick. I stayed the
service, or at least nearly three hours of it. It is the odd custom of
many country places in Scotland, where the people have too far to come
to be able to do it twice in the day, to actually have two services
performed all at one sitting. With that attention to mere rigid
formality which this Calvinism has introduced, that task-work holiness
which teaches that God's wrath will be aroused if they do not go through
a certain number of prayers, sermons, and ceremonies in the day, they
have the morning and afternoon services all at once. There were,
therefore, _two_ enormously long sermons, three prayers, three singings,
and, to make worse of it, the sermons consisted of such a mass of
doctrinal stubble as filled me with astonishment that such actual
rubbish, and worse than rubbish, could at the present day be inflicted
on any patient and unoffending people. What a gross perversion and
misconception of Christianity is this! How my heart bled at the very
idea that the State paid and upheld this system, by which the people
were not blessed with the pure, simple, and benign knowledge of that
simplest, most beautiful, and love-inspiring of all systems,
Christianity, but were actually cursed with the drawing of the horrid
furze-bushes of school divinity and Calvinistic damnation across their
naked consciences.
Imagine a company of hard-working and care-worn peasants, coming for
five or ten miles on a Sunday to listen to such chopped-straw preaching
as this. The sermons were to prove that the temptation of Christ in the
wilderness was a _bonâ fide_ and actual history. And first, the preacher
told them what profound subtlety the temptations of Satan showed, such
as advising Christ after forty days' fast to cause the stones to be made
bread; as if Christ could not have done that if he needed, without the
devil's suggestion. And then he told them that Christ was God himself,
so that the devil knowing that, instead of showing such profound
subtlety, must have been a very daft devil indeed to try to tempt him at
all. Poor people! of all the beautiful sayings and doings in the life of
our Savior; of all the divine precepts which he peculiarly brought down
from heaven for the especial consolation and invigoration of the poor;
of all the deeds and the expressions of an infinite love; of all those
teachings that "the Sabbath is made for man, and not man for the
Sabbath;" of all the gracious declarations that it was not by doctrine
and cunningly-devised fables, but by the great spirit of love--love to
God and to one another, and by keeping his commandments, that we are to
be saved, was there nothing that could be dealt out to you? Could your
dry and thirsting spirits receive nothing but this dry and musty fodder
of sectarian disquisition? Oh! how much better were one simple word of
genuine feeling from the most unlettered preacher on a bare hill-side!
My only wonder was to find any body in the church at all, for I thought
I must have met the whole village going to Kelso, where they have
_eight_ different sects, the most zealous of all being the Free Church.
It is only by a passage through Scotland that you get a living idea of
what a movement the movement of this Free Church has been. In every
town, from the extremest south to the extremest north, you see free
churches rising or arisen. Even in little Melrose there is a large one;
and I observed that they built them as near, on all occasions, as
possible to the established one, and, if compassable, exactly opposite.
Indeed, I have been told that land has, in many instances, been offered
gratuitously to build a free church upon, and has been refused because
it was not opposite to the established one. Such is the fruit of an
Establishment in Scotland, and such were the evidences of its teachings
in Ednam. How different to the fine, genial, and genuine faith of James
Thomson!
On a hill on the right hand of the road, proceeding from Kelso to Ednam,
and about a quarter of a mile from that village, a plain obelisk has
been erected to the memory of the poet, bearing this inscription:
"Erected in memory of James Thomson, Author of the Seasons. Born at
Ednam, 11th of September, A.D. 1700."
The Earl of Buchan, who erected a temple of the Muses at Dryburgh, in
the center of which he placed Thomson, and who placed the brass tablet
to his memory in the church at Richmond, also instituted an annual
commemoration of his fame at Ednam, which has long fallen into
desuetude. For the first meeting of this kind, Burns wrote his Address
to the Shade of Thomson in crowning his bust at Ednam.
Of Thomson's sojourn at Southdean, nearly all that is now known is
comprehended in the following passage in Mr. Robert Chambers's "Picture
of Scotland:" "The father of James Thomson was removed from Ednam to
this parish while the poet was a child; and here, accordingly, the
author of the Seasons spent the days of his boyhood. In the churchyard
may still be seen the humble monument of the father of the poet, though
the inscription is nearly obliterated. The manse in which that
individual reared his large family, of whom one was destined to become
so illustrious, was what would now be described as a small thatched
cottage. It is traditionally recollected that the poet was sent to the
University of Edinburgh, seated behind his father's man on horseback,
but was so reluctant to quit the country for a town life, that he had
returned on foot before his conductor, declaring that he could study as
well on the braes of Sou'den--so Southdean is generally pronounced--as
in Edinburgh."
Here Thomson undoubtedly acquired that deep love for nature, and that
intimate acquaintance with it, which enabled him to produce the poem of
the Seasons, which, with considerable faults of style, is one of the
richest compositions in the language, in the legitimate subject matter,
in the grandeur of its scenery, drawn from all regions of the earth, and
in the broad and beautiful spirit of its religious philosophy. It has
stood the test of more than a century, during which time great changes
have taken place in the theory of versification and in public taste.
Compositions of great variety, and of the most splendid character, have
since rendered fastidious the public judgment, yet the Seasons are and
will continue to be read with pleasure.
Though the old man-servant who had jogged along to Edinburgh with little
Jemmy Thomson behind him was astonished, on his return, to find him at
home again, yet another attempt must have been more successful, for at
the University of Edinburgh he finished his education. The poetic
nature, however, convinced him by that time that it was not his vocation
to preach the arid notions of Knox, and palm them off as the grand,
heart-opening truths of Christianity. His father had died two years
after his coming to Edinburgh, leaving his mother with a considerable
family, who raised upon her little estate, by mortgage, what she could,
and came to reside in Edinburgh. James resolved not to weigh upon her
resources longer than needful, but set out for London with his poem of
Winter in his pocket. He had introductions to several influential
persons, and one of them to Mr. Mallet, then tutor to the sons of the
Duke of Montrose. His great want, Dr. Johnson says, on reaching London,
was a pair of shoes. To make his calls, these were necessary, and his
Winter was his sole resource. It was a wintery one, for he could find no
purchaser for it for a long time, and when purchased, it did not for a
good while sell. At length it fell under the eye of a Mr. Whatley, who
instantly perceived its merit, and zealously spread the information.
Thomson was quickly a popular author, and from this time resided chiefly
in the neighborhood of London. He made one tour on the Continent as
companion to Mr. Talbot, the eldest son of the chancellor. The despotism
which he saw abroad induced him to write his poem of Liberty, one of his
very worst productions, and which lost him much government preferment;
and when the public complained of this, a ministerial writer remarked
that "Thomson had taken a _Liberty_ which was not agreeable to
_Britannia_ in any _Season_."
Government preferment, however, he did receive. The chancellor conferred
on him the place of Secretary of the Briefs, which made him independent.
On the death of the Chancellor Talbot he lost this post, through being
too indolent to make application to Lord Hardwicke for it, though
Hardwicke kept it open for some time that he might. For a time he was
again reduced by this circumstance to poverty and difficulty. Out of
this he was, after a while, permanently raised through the influence of
Lord Lyttleton, a pension of a hundred a year being conferred on him.
This removed the pressure of utter necessity, but compelled him to work,
without which compulsion, perhaps, no man would have worked less. About
three years before his death, Lord Lyttleton, being then in power, made
him Surveyor-general of the Leeward Islands. Those islands he surveyed
from his elevation on Richmond Hill, and very general his survey of
course must have been. The particular and actual survey was left to his
deputy in the islands themselves, and Thomson netted a yearly balance,
the deputy being paid, of three hundred a year, which, with his pension,
left him most comfortably at ease in the castle of indolence. Besides
his two principal poems, he wrote several tragedies, as Sophonisba, in
which the unfortunate line,
"O Sophonisba, Sophonisba, O!"
was parodied by a wag with
"O Jemmy Thomson, Jemmy Thomson, O!"
and was echoed through the town every where and for a long time.
Agamemnon was another, Edward and Eleonora a third, and Tancred and
Sigismunda his last and best, except a posthumous one--Coriolanus.
Among the haunts of Thomson were the country houses of many of the more
literary or more tasteful noblemen of the time, as Hagley, the seat of
Lord Lyttleton; Bub Doddington's seat in Dorsetshire; Stowe, then the
seat of Lord Cobham; the seat of the Countess of Hertford, &c. The last
place, however, it seems, only received Thomson once. It was the
practice, says Johnson, of the Countess of Hertford, to whom Thomson
dedicated his poem of Spring, to invite some poet every summer into the
country to hear her verses and assist her studies. This honor was once
conferred on Thomson, who took more delight in carousing with Lord
Hertford and his friends than assisting her ladyship's poetical
operations, and never, therefore, received another summons.
Thomson was, in fact, the last person to hope for much literary and
understrapper service from, though in the shape of a countess, where, on
the one hand, bad verses had to be inflicted on him, and, on the other,
there was a good table and good talk. Indolence and self-indulgence
were his besetting sins. Every one has heard of the lady who said she
had discovered three things concerning the author in reading the
Seasons: that he was a great lover, a great swimmer, and rigidly
abstinent; at all which, Savage, who lived much with him, laughed
heartily, saying that he believed Thomson was never in cold water in his
life, and that the other particulars were just as true. The anecdote of
Quin, regarding Thomson's splendid description of sunrise, has been
equally diffused. He, like Savage, asserted that he believed Thomson
never saw the sun rise in his life, and related that, going one day to
see him at Richmond, he found him in bed at noon, and asking him why he
did not get up earlier, he replied, listlessly, that "he had nae
motive."
That no man ever lived more completely in a castle of indolence there
can be little question, and perhaps as little that it cut his life
short. He died at forty-eight, of cold taken on the Thames between Kew
and Richmond. He used, it seems, to be in the habit of walking from town
to his house at Richmond, and crossed at a boat-house somewhere here
about, which being also a public house, he there took a rest and
refreshment. The place is still shown. Here, it would seem, he came warm
from his walk, and, crossing in a damp wind, took cold; but this
susceptibility to cold was the direct result of his indolent,
self-indulgent, and effeminate habits. Had he followed those practices
of healthy activity so finely described in his poem, how much longer and
more useful might his life have been! Yet it must be a fact
unquestionable, that Thomson, as a boy, rose early, saw both sunrises
and all the glories of nature, plunged into the summer flood, and braved
the severity of winter. No man could so vividly or so accurately
describe what he had not experienced, and they who know best the country
know how exact is his knowledge of it. Every one can feel how masterly
are his descriptions of the grandest phenomena of nature in every
region of the world, when such descriptions are deducible from books. In
those, however, which came under his own eye, there is a life, and there
are beauties that attest that personal knowledge. The faults of his
Seasons are those of style. His blank verse is peculiar; you can never
mistake it for that of any other poet; but it has not the charm of that
of Milton, of Wordsworth, or of various other poets. It is often turgid,
and still more often prosaic. There are strange inversions used; and
with his adverbs and adjectives he plays the most terrible havoc.
Frequently the adjective is tossed behind the substantive, just for the
sake of the meter, and regardless of all other effect, as,
"Driving sleets
Deform the day delightless,"
instead of the delightless day. His adverbs are continually lopped of
their last syllable, and stand like wretched adjectives out of place;
as, the sower "liberal throws the grain," instead of liberally: clouds,
"cheerless, drown the crude, unripened year," instead of cheerlessly:
the herb dies, though with vital power: "it is copious blest," instead
of copiously. These barbarisms, which greatly deface this poem, abound;
but especially in the Spring, which was not published first in its
native position, but third, the routine of appearance being Winter,
Summer, Spring, and Autumn.
But, above its faults, how far ascend the beauties and excellences of
this poem, the finest of which spring out of that firm, glowing, and
noble spirit of patriotism and religion which animated James Thomson.
His patriotism bursts forth on all occasions, but more especially in
that elaborate description of England, her deeds and worthies, in the
Summer, commencing,
"Heavens! what a goodly prospect spreads around,
Of hills and dales, of woods and lawns, and spires
And glittering towns, and gilded streams, till all
The stretching landscape into smoke decays.
Happy Britannia!" &c.
His piety, the piety of love and wonder, of that profound admiration
which the contemplation of the works of the Divine Creator had inspired
him with, and of that grateful love and trust which the manifestations
of parental goodness every where had impressed upon his heart, these
are, as it were, the living soul of the poem, and the principles of
imperishable vitality. These sentiments, diffused throughout the poem
itself, concentrate themselves at its conclusion as predominant over all
others, and burst forth in that magnificent hymn, which has no rival in
the language except the glorious one of Milton, the morning hymn of our
first parents, beginning,
"These are thy glorious works, Parent of good,
Almighty! Thine this universal frame,
This wondrous fair; Thyself how wondrous then," &c.
The religion, too, of Thomson was the religion not of creeds and crabbed
doctrines of humanity. He had studied nature in the spirit of its Maker,
and the fruit of that study was an enlarged and tender sympathy for his
fellow-men. This sentiment is every where conspicuous as his piety; and
in the passage following the fine account of the man perishing in the
snow, rises to the power and descriptive eloquence of Shakspeare.
"Ah! little think the gay, licentious proud,
Whom pleasure, power, and affluence surround;
They who their thoughtless hours in giddy mirth,
And wanton, often cruel, riot waste;
Ah! little think they, while they dance along,
How many feel, this very moment, death,
And all the sad variety of pain;
How many sink in the devouring flood,
Or more devouring flame; how many bleed,
By shameful variance betwixt man and man;
How many pine in want, and dungeon glooms;
Shut from the common air, and common use
Of their own limbs; how many drink the cup
Of baneful grief, or eat the bitter bread
Of misery; sore pierced by wintry winds,
How many shrink into the sordid hut
Of cheerless poverty! How many shake
With all the fiercer tortures of the mind,
Unbounded passion, madness, guilt, remorse;
Whence tumbled headlong from the height of life.
They furnish matter for the tragic Muse.
Even in the vale where Wisdom loves to dwell,
With Friendship, Peace, and Contemplation joined,
How many, racked with honest passions, droop
In deep retired distress. How many stand
Around the death-bed of their dearest friends,
And point the parting anguish. Thought fond man
Of these, and all the thousand nameless ills,
That one incessant struggle render life,
One scene of toil, of suffering, and of fate,
Vice in his high career would stand appalled,
And heedless, rambling Impulse learn to think;
The conscious heart of Charity would warm,
And her wide wish Benevolence dilate;
The social tear would rise, the social sigh;
And into clear perfection, gradual bliss,
Refining still, the social passions work."--_Winter_, p. 147.
Yes, if the great sentiment of this passage were but firmly imprinted on
the hearts of all men and all women, but especially the rich and
powerful, how soon would the face of this earth be changed, and the vale
of tears be converted into a lesser heaven! It is the grand defect of
our systems of education, for rich and for poor, but pre-eminently for
the former, that it is not taught that no man can live innocently who
lives only for his own enjoyment; that to live merely to enjoy ourselves
is the highest treason against God and man; that God does not live
merely for himself, his eternal existence is one constant work of
beneficence; and that it is the social duty of every rational being to
live like God, his Creator, for the good of others. Were this law of
duty taught faithfully in all our schools, with all its
responsibilities, the penalties of its neglect, the ineffable delight of
its due discharge, there would be no longer seen that moral monster, the
man or woman who lives alone for the mere purpose of selfish enjoyment.
That host of gay and idle creatures, who pass through life only to
glitter in the circles of fashion; to seek admiration for personal
attractions and accomplishments--for dressing, playing, dancing, or
riding--whose life is but the life of a butterfly when it should be the
life of a man, would speedily disperse, and be no more seen. That life
would be shrunk from as a thing odious and criminal, because useless;
when faculties, wealth, and fame are put into their hands, and a world
is laid before them in which men are to be saved and exalted; misery,
crime, shame, despair, and death prevented; and all the hopes and
capacities for good in the human soul are to be made easy to the
multitude. To live for these objects is to be a hero or a heroine, and
any man or woman may be that; to live through this world of
opportunities given but once, and to neglect them, is the most fearful
fate that can befall a creature of eternal responsibilities. But poets
and preachers have proclaimed this great truth for ages; the charge now
lies at the door of the educators, and they alone can impress
effectually on the world its highest and most inalienable duty, that of
living for the good of others.
Among those who have used the voice of poetry given them of God to rouse
their fellow-men to a life of beneficence, none have done it more
zealously or more eloquently than Thomson. For this we pass over here
the mere charms of his poetic achievements; over those great pictures
which he has painted of the world, and its elements of forests,
tempests, plagues, earthquakes; of the views of active life at home and
abroad; the hunter's perils and the hunter's carouse
"In ghostly halls of gray renown;"
of man roaming the forests of the tropics, or climbing the cliffs of the
lonely Hebrides; to notice in this brief article those bursts of
eloquent fire, in which he calls to godlike deeds--those of mercy and of
goodness. In this respect, as well as in that of mere poetical beauty,
his poem of the Castle of Indolence is pre-eminent. Thomson suffered
from the seductions of the vile wizard of Indolence, and in his first
canto he paints most effectively the horrors of that vice; in the second
canto he shows that, though he had fallen into the net of sloth, it had
not entirely conquered, and it could not corrupt him. He calls with the
energy of a martyr on his fellow-men to assume the privileges and
glories of men. The Castle of Indolence is as felicitous in its
versification as in its sentiments; it is full of harmony, and the
spirit of picturesque beauty pervades every line; there is a manliness
of sentiment about it that is worthy of true genius. Such a stanza as
this is the seed of independence to the minds of thousands:
"I care not, Fortune! what you me deny:
You can not rob me of free Nature's grace;
You can not shut the windows of the sky,
Through which Aurora shows her bright'ning face;
You can not bar my constant feet to trace
The woods and lawns, by living streams, at eve;
Let health my nerves and finer fibers brace,
And I their toys to the great children leave:
Of fancy, reason, virtue, naught can me bereave."
The address of the bard of active virtue is worthy of being listened to
in every age:
"Ye hapless race!
Dire laboring here to smother Reason's ray,
That lights our Maker's image in our face,
And gives us wide o'er earth unquestioned sway:
What is the adored Supreme Perfection, say?
What but eternal, never-resting soul,
Almighty power, and all-directing day;
By whom each atom stirs, the planets roll:
Who fills, surrounds, informs, and agitates the whole.
"Come, to the beaming God your hearts unfold!
Draw from its fountain life! 'Tis thence alone
We can excel. Up from unfeeling mold
To seraphs burning round the ALMIGHTY's throne,
Life rising still on life, in brighter tone,
Perfection forms, and with perfection bliss.
In universal nature this clear shown
Not needeth proof; to prove it were, I wis,
To prove the beauteous world excels the brute abyss.
"It was not by vile loitering in ease
That Greece obtained the brighter palm of art;
That soft, yet ardent Athens learned to please,
To keen the wit, and to sublime the heart,
In all supreme, complete in every part!
It was not thence majestic Rome arose,
And o'er the nations shook her conquering dart:
For sluggard's brow the laurel never grows:
Renown is not the child of indolent repose.
"Had unambitious mortals minded naught
But in loose joy their time to wear away;
Had they alone the lap of dalliance sought,
Pleased on her pillow their dull heads to lay;
Rude Nature's state had been our state to-day;
No cities here their towery fronts had raised,
No arts had made us opulent and gay;
With brother brutes the human race had grazed;
None e'er had soared to fame, none honored been, none praised.
"Great Homer's song had never fired the breast
To thirst of glory and heroic deeds;
Sweet Maro's Muse, sunk in inglorious rest,
Had silent slept amid the Mincian reeds;
The wits of modern times had told their beads,
And monkish legends been their only strains;
Our Milton's Eden had lain wrapped in weeds;
Our Shakspeare strolled and laughed with Warwick swains;
Ne had my master, Spenser, charmed his Mulla's plains.
"Dumb, too, had been the sage historic Muse,
And perished all the sons of ancient fame;
Those starry lights of virtue that diffuse
Through the dark depths of time their vivid flame,
Had all been lost with such as have no name.
Who then had scorned his care for others' good?
Who then had toiled rapacious men to tame?
Who in the public breach devoted stood,
And for his country's cause been prodigal of blood?
*...*...*...*
"Heavens! can you then thus waste in shameful wise
Your few important days of trial here?
Heirs of eternity! yborn to rise
Through endless states of being, still more near
To bliss approaching and perfection clear;
Can you renounce a fortune so sublime--
Such glorious hopes, your backward steps to steer,
And roll with vilest brutes through mud and slime?
No! no! your heaven-touched hearts disdain the sordid crime!"
It is a pleasure to find that the spot where these noble sentiments were
penned is still preserved sacred to the memory of the poet of truth and
virtue. As far as the restless and rapid change of property would permit
so near London, the residence of Thomson has been kept from destruction:
changed it is, it is true, but that change has been made with a
veneration for the Muse in the heart of the new inhabitant. The house of
Thomson, in what is called Kew-foot Lane, at Richmond, as shown in the
wood-cut at the head of this article, was a simple cottage; behind this
lay his garden, and in front he looked down to the Thames, and on the
fine landscape beyond. The cottage now appears to be gone, and in the
place stands the goodly villa of the Earl of Shaftesbury; the cottage,
however, is not really gone: it is only swallowed up in the larger house
of the present time. After Thomson's death, his cottage was purchased by
George Ross, Esq., who, out of veneration for his memory, forbore to
pull it down, but enlarged and improved it at the expense of £9000. The
walls of the cottage were left, though its roof was taken off, and the
walls continued upward to their present height. Thus, what was Thomson's
cottage forms now the entrance hall to Lord Shaftesbury's house. The
part of the hall on the left hand was the room where Thomson used to
sit, and here is preserved a plain mahogany Pembroke table of his, with
a scroll of white wood let into its surface, on which are inlaid, in
black letters, this piece of information:
"On this table James Thomson constantly wrote. It was
therefore purchased of his servant, who also gave these
brass hooks, on which his hat and cane were hung in this
his sitting room.
F. B."
These initials, F. B., are those of the Hon. Frances Boscawen, the widow
of Admiral Boscawen, who came into possession of the property after the
death of Mr. Ross, whose name, however, still attaches to it, being
called Rossdale, or, more commonly, Rosedale House. Mrs. Boscawen it was
who repaired the poet's favorite seat in the garden, and placed in it
the table on which he wrote his poems there; she it was, too, no doubt,
who hung the inscriptions there, her initials being again found appended
to one of them. Her son, Lord Falmouth, sold the place. No brass hooks
are now to be seen, that I could discover or learn any thing of.
The garden of Thompson, which lay behind the house, has been preserved
in the same manner and to the same extent as his house; the garden and
its trees remain, but these now form only part of the present grounds,
as the cottage forms only part of the present house. Mr. Ross, when he
purchased the cottage and some adjoining grounds, and came to live here
after Thomson, not only enlarged the house, but threw down the partition
fence, and enlarged the grounds to their present extent. A pleasanter
lawn and shrubberies are rarely to be seen; the turf, old and mossy,
speaks of long duration and great care; the trees, dispersed beautifully
upon it, are of the finest growth and of the greatest beauty. In no part
of England are there so many foreign trees as in the grounds of
gentlemen's villas near London; in many of them the cedars of Lebanon
are of a growth and majesty which probably Lebanon itself can not now
show. In these grounds there are some fine ones, but there is one of
especial and surpassing loveliness: it is the _pinus picea_, or silver
cedar. The growth is broad, like that of the cedar of Lebanon; but its
boughs do not throw themselves out in that exact horizontal direction
that those of the cedar of Lebanon do; they sweep down to the ground in
a style of exquisite grace. Heavy, full of life, rich in hue as masses
of chased silver, their effect, with their young cones sitting birdlike
on them, is like that of some tree of heaven, or of some garden of
poetic romance. Besides this superb tree, standing on its ample portion
of lawn, there are here the evergreen ilex, hickory, white sassafras,
scarlet and Ragland oaks, the tulip-tree, the catalpa, the tupelo, the
black American ash, &c. The effect of their fine growth, their varied
hues and foliage, their fine, sweeping branches, over the soft velvet
turf, is charming, for trees display the effects of breeding and culture
quite as much as horses, dogs, or men.
A large elm, not far from the house, is pointed out as the one under
which Thomson's alcove stood; this alcove has, however, been removed to
the extremity of the grounds, and stands now under a large Spanish
chestnut-tree in the shrubbery. It is a simple wooden construction, with
a plain back, and two outward, sloping sides, a bench running round it
within, a roof and boarded floor, so as to be readily removable
altogether. It is kept well painted of a dark green, and in it stands an
old, small walnut table with a drawer, which belonged to Thomson. On the
front of the alcove overhead is painted, on a white oval tablet,
"Here
Thomson sang
The Seasons
and their change."
Within the alcove hang three loose boards, on which are painted the
following inscriptions:
"Hail, Nature's Poet, whom she taught alone
To sing her works in numbers like her own.
Sweet as the thrush that warbles in the dale,
And soft as Philomela's tender tale;
She lent her pencil, too, of wondrous power,
To catch the rainbow, and to form the flower
Of many mingling hues; and, smiling, said--
But first with laurels crowned her favorite's head--
These beauteous children, though so fair they shine,
Fade in my _Seasons_, let them live in _Thine_.
And live they shall; the charm of every eye,
Till Nature sickens, and the Seasons die."
*...*...*...*