leafless groves. In a word, he describes not to the
eye alone, but to the other senses, and to the whole man. He puts his
heart into his subject, writes as he feels, and humanises whatever he
touches. He makes all his descriptions teem with life and vivifying
soul. His faults were those of his style--of the author and the man;
but the original genius of the poet, the pith and marrow of his
imagination, the fine natural mould in which his feelings were bedded,
were too much for him to counteract by neglect, or affectation, or false
ornaments. It is for this reason that he is, perhaps, the most popular
of all our poets, treating of a subject that all can understand, and in
a way that is interesting to all alike, to the ignorant or the refined,
because he gives back the impression which the things themselves make
upon us in nature. "That," said a man of genius, seeing a little shabby
soiled copy of Thomson's Seasons lying on the window-seat of an obscure
country alehouse--"That is true fame!"

It has been supposed by some, that the Castle of Indolence is
Thomson's best poem; but that is not the case. He has in it, indeed,
poured out the whole soul of indolence, diffuse, relaxed, supine,
dissolved into a voluptuous dream; and surrounded himself with a set of
objects and companions, in entire unison with the listlessness of his
own temper. Nothing can well go beyond the descriptions of these inmates
of the place, and their luxurious pampered way of life--of him who
came among them like "a burnished fly in month of June," but soon left
them on his heedless way; and him,

"For whom the merry bells had rung, I ween,
If in this nook of quiet, bells had ever been."

The in-door quiet and cushioned ease, where "all was one full-swelling
bed"; the out-of-door stillness, broken only by "the stock-dove's plaint
amid the forest deep,"

"That drowsy rustled to the sighing gale"--

are in the most perfect and delightful keeping. But still there are no
passages in this exquisite little production of sportive ease and fancy,
equal to the best of those in the Seasons. Warton, in his Essay on Pope,
was the first to point out and do justice to some of these; for
instance, to the description of the effects of the contagion among our
ships at Carthagena--"of the frequent corse heard nightly plunged amid
the sullen waves," and to the description of the pilgrims lost in the
deserts of Arabia. This last passage,