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, profound and striking as it is, is not free from those faults of style which I have already noticed. ‘—— ——Breath’d hot From all the boundless furnace of the sky, And the wide-glitt’ring waste of burning sand, A suffocating wind the pilgrim smites With instant death. Patient of thirst and toil, Son of the desert, ev’n the camel feels Shot through his wither’d heart the fiery blast. Or from the black-red ether, bursting broad, Sallies the sudden whirlwind. Straight the sands, Commov’d around, in gath’ring eddies play; Nearer and nearer still they dark’ning come, Till with the gen’ral all-involving storm Swept up, the whole continuous wilds arise, And by their noon-day fount dejected thrown, Or sunk at night in sad disastrous sleep, Beneath descending hills the caravan Is buried deep. In Cairo’s crowded streets, Th’ impatient merchant, wond’ring, waits in vain; And Mecca saddens at the long delay.’ There are other passages of equal beauty with these; such as that of the hunted stag, followed by ‘the inhuman rout,’