176 XVI. JAMES THOMSON: THE BARD OF RICHMOND.* HE region that lies around Richmond is not only celebrated for the surpassing beauty of its scenery, amidst which lovers of Nature find their truest recreation or enjoyment, but it can also boast of undying associations connected with poets, two of whom lived, about the same time, on opposite banks of the neighbouring Thames. Neither of them was born in the district, but they both came to it in the maturity of their powers: here they spent the best years of their lives; here they enjoyed their fame, and gathered round them famous friends and admirers; with the district their names have been inseparably associated; here they died and here they lie buried. One of these was Alexander Pope, the illustrious chief of the classical school of poetry; the other James Thomson, the pioneer or reviver of the romantic school of Nature - poetry which now reigns supreme. The one lies buried in the parish church of Twickenham; the other, whose remains lie in the neighbouring parish church, may be appropriately called the Bard of Richmond. While Pope, the poet of men and manners and town life, was born in the busy scenes of Lombard Street, Thomson, the bard of Nature, was nurtured amid pastoral scenes far removed from the busy haunts of men. As, from Carlisle, we cross the Scottish border and pass up pleasant Liddisdale, we have, on our immediate right, the land of Thomson's youth; while further on, by the same route, we come to Dryburgh Abbey, Melrose, and Abbotsford, all sacred to Sir Walter Scott; and therefrom, by way of Selkirk, we may visit the poetic Yarrow, with its memories of Wordsworth and the Ettrick Shepherd. It was in this way, when desirous of visiting the land of Scott and Thomson, that I first entered Scotland, walking, finally, westward to Moffat, past the house where Burns's "Willie brewed a peck o' maut," and therefrom onwards to the land of Burns. All about here the mountains largely bear the Norse name of fells; Windfell and Hartfell in the Moffat region, Peel Fell and Carter Fell among the Cheviots. It was under the broad-shouldered majesty of Carter Fell that Thomson passed the first fifteen years of his life. There, * A lecture delivered to the members of the Richmond Literary Society in January, 1893. in the south of Roxburgh, a county remarkable for the unevenness of its surface, an unexpected depression of considerable area bears the appropriate name of Southdean, locally called Soudan. It lies at the foot of the Cheviots, five miles from Carter Fell, and it is enlivened, and was probably created by, the river Jed, which, increased by the tribute of a hundred torrents, sweeps on past red banks overhung with adventurous verdure to its union with silver Teviot, the noblest affluent of Tweed. From the centre of this "dene" or hollow (for such the word denotes) the open view all round gives to the mind a sense of freedom, which the narrow winding dales of the county deny; at the same time, there is the charming accompaniment of a feeling of restful seclusion, as of a prying and clamorous world shut out behind and below the horizon of distant mountains. Here are neither mines nor manufactures, towns nor trade. The nearest railway-at Hawick on the west, at Jedburgh on the north-is some eight or ten miles away, and not likely soon to come nearer. It is a happy valley, still retaining, at the close of the nineteenth century, uncontaminated by art, undisturbed by avarice, the peace and purity of its primitive pastoralism. Previous to its possession by shepherds, this district formed part of the great forest of Jedwood, was the haunt of boars and wolves, and afforded a refuge to runaways and outlaws, and a sylvan home to robbers; while its solitudes of glade and greenwood were, from time to time, alarmed by an invasion of hounds and hunting horns, or by the sterner cries of border warfare. Not unfrequently the hunt was merely a prelude to the battle. Here was Chevy Chase, and here the Douglas was wont to exercise his limbs and replenish his larder, to the envy of his English neighbour and rival, the gallant Percy. From coveting Percy took to claiming a share in the pleasures and treasures of the chase; and he bravely vowed, according to the old ballad, that he would hunt in the mountains of Cheviot, within three days, in spite of all the opposition that could be offered by the doughty Douglas and his men. Douglas swore he would "let" that hunting. The place where, five hundred years ago, the Scottish Earl mustered his men in defence of his exclusive rights to the chase and in redemption of his oath, is still pointed out, and is, strange to say, identified with the churchyard of Southdean. With the Union came peaceful times; the hollow was gradually cleared of its beeches and oaks and more prevailing pines; rural industry settled among farms and bleating folds, where of old there had passed by the hasty foot of the forayer and the hunter; and the true golden age, thus timidly inaugurated, tarries in Southdean still. The last year of the seventeenth century was wearing to its close-it was the sixth of November, 1700-when to this happy hollow among the uplands of the south of Scotland, there came as minister of peace to its pastoral people the Rev. Thomas Thomson, bringing with him a child just two months old, who was destined to become the poet of Nature and bard of Richmond. They came from Ednam, a parish in the north of the shire, where the poet was born, and where the father had just passed the first eight years of his professional life. A more likely region in respect of natural capabilities for the creation of a poet of Nature it would not be easy to find. It has been remarked by a careful observer that the scenery around Southdean bears in summer a striking resemblance to the scenery around Virgil's birthplace, at Andes, near Mantua. The remark is an interesting one, and we can well believe that the spirit that pervades the "Georgics" and the kindred spirit that animates "The Seasons" derived their common bent and bias, their inspiration and aspiration, from early and close acquaintance with scenery similar in beauty, variety, and the charm of pastoral repose. The interest that would fain effect a connection between Mantua and Southdean is increased when we consider that Virgil was probably the first poet to engage the fancy of young Thomson; that, while a student on holiday in the long vacations, a copy of Virgil's poems was his pocket-companion in angling excursions on the Jed; and that when, later in life, Thomson was travelling in Italy, "the fields where the bard of Mantua gathered his immortal honey" were a principal object of his quest. With Thomson, all his life long, Virgil was, indeed, a first favourite; and he was quite willing to take him for the god of poetry. It is thus he writes of Virgil: "Behold who yonder comes in sober state, Fair, mild and strong as is the vernal sun! Students of Thomson will allow that to the qualities which he so much admired in the genius of Virgil we owe no inconsiderable part of the charms of his own verse. And what he was as a poet he was as a man. His sober state, his fairness, his mildness, and his easy strength were sufficiently pronounced to be characteristic of his conduct and of his disposition. Amidst such scenes, fit nurse for a youthful poet, Thomson spent his early and most impressionable years. His years of fruition, when he was finally moulding his poems, and issuing them in the form we now have them, were passed in a district lovelier and more poetic than even his native region. Thus, with a few years between, our Nature-poet spent the two extremes of his life under influences the very best and happiest that ever poet could desire. Both sets of influences, the earliest and the latest, are reflected in Thomson's poetry, and both are well worthy of our attention. It was unquestionably in his native Jed, that ran past his father's garden, or some other affluent of Teviot or Tweed, that the poet had seen the mountain-spate-that sudden and disastrous flood caused by heavy rainfall, bearing all before it-which he. sketches in those wonderfully vigorous lines, which are so bold and graphic as to be instantly suggestive of the whole Scene: "Wide o'er the brim, with many a torrent swelled, Tumbling through rocks abrupt, and sounding far; Calm, sluggish, silent; till, again constrained, Where rocks and woods o'erhang the turbid streams : It boils, and wheels, and foams, and thunders through." Contrast these verses from "Winter," the earliest written of the " Seasons," with the following finer lines written after the poet had been several years in Richmond, and mark the difference. Of the lines I am now going to cite, we can fix the exact date by their reference to the illness of the writer's friend, the bard of Twickenham, who was then lying, in 1744, on what proved to be his deathbed. It is also noteworthy that in the same lovely passage, one of the finest bits of pure descriptive poetry in our language, a fitting tribute of respect is paid to another local poet, who had died, not long before, at the home of the Duke and Duchess of Queensberry (the " Kitty beautiful and young "of so many poetic eulogies) at Petersham. These are a few lines from that charming passage: "In lovely contrast to this glorious view, Calmly magnificent, then will we turn To where the silver Thames first rural grows: In Twick'n'am's bowers, and for their Pope implore Some descriptive passages are common to the vales both of the Tweed and the Thames. The dear little picture of the robin and other birds in "Winter was a reminiscence, no doubt, of what the poet had seen in the manse at Southdean; yet it is one which may be seen at our own doors. During the first twelve years of his life, young Thomson had mainly that best of all training, home training; then, again fortunate in his surrounding influences, he went to school in the wonderfully poetic place of a chapel in Jedburgh Abbey, a few miles down the river Jed from the paternal manse. With such preliminary education, the boy, when fifteen years old, was sent to the University of Edinburgh, with a view to his studying for the ministry of the Scottish Church. There, as in his previous school days, in the good old times of Scotch learning, when schoolboys cultivated what were called the Humanities at times on a little oatmeal, the embryo poet learnt a little Greek and the much and accurate Latin which it has always been the glory of Scotland to bestow as a precious boon on the very poorest of her sons. Throughout the whole of his school and college life he wrote verses, partly stimulated thereto by the example and comradeship of a neighbouring poetic farmer, who, himself college-bred, helped the young poet in his classical studies, and cultivated versification-or as it was then called, wooed the Muses-along with him. Of this early verse hardly a line has been preserved; for the young poet, wiser than most versifiers, made a point of destroying at the beginning of each year all such verse as he had written the year before. Scarcely had Thomson begun his studies at Edinburgh when his father died, struck by a ball of fire it was said and believed, but more probably seized with a fit of apoplexy, while he was occupied with the extraordinary duty of exorcising a ghost! At the University of Edinburgh Thomson remained, in all, nine years. He did not take a degree, few then did (in 1749, for instance, only three graduated), but he passed well through all the Arts' curriculum, pursued his classical and literary studies, and took a deep and especial interest in those mathematical researches which the University, then enamoured with the recent Newtonian philosophy, cultivated assiduously, along with that moral and metaphysical philosophy which she especially regarded as her own. Thomson's love of these subjects appears throughout his "Seasons." The whole system of the Universe had not long before been entirely reconstructed by the wonderful discoveries that we owe to the genius of Sir Isaac Newton, on whom, in a noble poem, Thomson has passed a glowing eulogy. Up to this time of his life, Thomson had been a youth of active and energetic habits, fond of bathing and fishing, living the thoroughly healthy life of a student of Nature, by no means averse to society, but loving solitude more, and possessed by a strong relish for humour and fun. That in those days he was, moreover, an early riser, we have ample testimony; indeed no one can doubt it who has often seen a sunrise in summer, and can recall the glorious description of it by Thomson :— "The meek-eyed morn appears, mother of dews, |