Thomson had the good luck to be born in Scotland, and to be brought up by parents remarkable for simplicity and piety of life. Living in the country till he was nearly twenty, he learned to love natural beauty, and must have been an attentive student of scenery. That he had true instincts in poetry is proved by his making Milton and Spenser his models. He was a man of force and originality, and English poetry owes him a large debt as the first who stood out both in precept and practice against the vicious artificial style which then reigned, and led the way back to purer tastes and deeper principles. He was a man perfectly pure in life; the associate of eminent and titled personages, without being ashamed of the little milliner’s shop of his sisters in Edinburgh; a lover of freedom, and a poet who never lost a friend, nor ever wrote a line of which he could repent. The licentiousness of the age could not stain him. His poem of “Winter” was published a year before the appearance of the “Dunciad.” Thomson’s style is not equal to his conceptions. It is generally lumbering and diffuse, and rather stilted than lofty. It is very likely that his Scotch birth had something to do with this, and that he could not write English with that unconsciousness without which elegance is out of the question--for there can be no true elegance without freedom. Burns’s English letters and poems are examples of this. But there are passages in Thomson’s poems full of the truest feelings for nature, and gleams of pure imagination. Mr. Lowell here read a passage from “Summer,” which, he said, illustrated better than almost any other his excellences and defects. It is a description of a storm, beginning: At first heard solemn o’er the verge of Heaven The tempest growls. This is fustian patched with cloth of gold. The picture, fine as it is in parts, is too much frittered with particulars. The poet’s imagination does not seem powerful enough to control the language. There is no autocratic energy, but the sentences are like unruly barons, each doing what he likes in his own province. Many of them are prosaic and thoroughly _un_picturesque, and come under the fatal condemnation of being _flat_. Yet throughout the passage, The unconquerable genius struggles through half-suffocated in a cloud of words. But the metre is hitchy and broken, and seems to have no law but that of five feet to the verse. There is no Pegasean soar, but the unwieldy gallop of an ox. The imagination, which Thomson undoubtedly had, contrasted oddly with the lumbering vehicle of his diction. He takes a bushel-basket to bring home an egg in. In him poetry and prose entered into partnership, and poetry was the sleeping partner who comes down now and then to see how the business is getting on. But he had the _soul_ of a poet, and that is the main thing.