English Poetry in the Eighteenth Century [pp. 30-50]

THE PRINCE TON RE VIE W.
Thomson's must rank as one of the chief original models of the
metre to be found in English poetry." Rather we should say
that Thomson's verse is too pompous, too cumbrous, too loaded
with Latinisms and inversions for any such praise. It lacks the
swiftness, the directness, the mobility, the transparency that is
needed to render truly the shores of earth and sky. His subject
and his feeling for it were his own and genuine. His verse and
diction are not free from conventional jargon. The religious
feeling which pervades the poem, tho genuine of its kind, is but
a form of that optimistic deism which was the fashionable creed
of his day.) For better or for worse we feel it difficult to enter
into that facile optimism which sees nothing but the benign in
nature, and passes so easily from nature to a God of nature
"From seeming evil still educing good."
To us nature, if it has a bright side, has also a dark one, suggesting unexplained problems. It requires deeper thought than that
of Thomson or any poet of his time to perform that which is said
to be the essential function of the true poet-" to harmonize the
sadness of the universe."
"In yonder grave a Druid lies,
Where slowly winds the stealing wave;
The year's best sweets still duteous rise
To deck its sylvan poet's grave.
"Remembrance oft shall haunt the shore,
When Thames in summer wreaths is drest,
And oft suspend the dashing oar,
To bid his gentle spirit rest."
That strain is of a higher mood, something quite alien to the
poetry of its time-a worthy prelude to the finest lyric melodies
which this century has heard. ( In Collins there is none of the
wit, the sparkle, the rhetoric of Pope's school, but instead there
is a heart sensitive to natural beauty, a tender human pathos,
clothing itself in language cultivated yet unornate, that is tremulous with an inner melody, surpassing any other music heard
in the last century, except perhaps here and there in a stanza of
Burns) Indeed, that seems not too much which Mr. Swinburne
has recently said in a brief panegyric on Collins, that he was the
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