nsion of L100 a year. There was no
certainty in a gift of this nature, and in about ten years it was
withdrawn.

_The Castle of Indolence_ (1748) was the latest labour of Thomson's
life, and in the judgment of many critics takes precedence of _The
Seasons_ in poetical merit. This verdict may be questioned, but the
poem, written in the Spenserian stanza, has a soothing beauty and an
enchanting felicity of expression which show the poet's genius in a new
light. It is unlike any poetry of that age, and when compared with _The
Seasons_, the verse, as Wordsworth justly says, 'is more harmonious and
the diction more pure.' All the imagery of the poem is adopted to the
vague and sleepy action of the characters represented in it. It is a
veritable poet's dream, which carries the reader in its earliest stanzas
into 'a pleasing land of drowsy-head:'

'In lowly dale, fast by a river's side,
With woody hill o'er hill encompassed round,
A most enchanting wizard did abide,
Than whom a fiend more fell is nowhere found.
It was, I ween, a lovely spot of ground;
And there a season atween June and May
Half prankt with Spring, with Summer half embrowned,
A listless climate made, where, sooth to say,
No living wight could work, ne cared even for play.'

There are verbal inspirations in a great poet which satisfy the ear,
capture the imagination, and live in the memory for ever. Milton's pages
are studded with them like stars; Gray has a few, Wordsworth many, and
Keats some not to be surpassed for witchery. Of such poetically
suggestive lines Thomson has his share, and although it seems unfair to
remove them from their context, the excision may be made in a few cases,
since they show not only that a new poet had appeared in an age of
prose, but a poet of a new order, whose inspiration was felt by his
successors. How poetically imaginative is Thomson's imagery of the
'meek-eyed morn, mother of dews;' of

'Ships dim discovered dropping from the clouds;'

of

'Autumn nodding o'er the yellow plain;'

of the summer wind

'Sweeping with shadowy gust the fields of corn;'

and of the Hebrid-Isles

'Placed far amid the melancholy main,'

a line which may have suggested the lovelier verse of Wordsworth
descriptive of the cuckoo:

'Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides.'

Thomson did not live long after the publication of _The Castle o