, neither deserve nor are
likely to receive long remembrance, being for the most part critical
studies, animated by a real love for literature and informed by
respectable knowledge, but of necessity lacking in strict scholarship,
distinguished by more acuteness than wisdom, and marred by the sectarian
violence and narrowness of a small anti-orthodox clique. They may
perhaps be not unfairly compared to the work of a clever but
ill-conditioned schoolboy. The verse is very different. He began to
write it early, and it chiefly appeared in Mr. Bradlaugh's _National
Reformer_ with the signature "B. V.," the initials of "Bysshe Vanolis,"
a rather characteristic _nom de guerre_ which Thomson had taken to
express his admiration for Shelley directly, and for Novalis by anagram.
Some of it, however, emerged into a wider hearing, and attracted the
favourable attention of men like Kingsley and Froude. But Thomson did
nothing of importance till 1874, when "The City of Dreadful Night"
appeared in the _National Reformer_, to the no small bewilderment
probably of its readers. Six years later the poem was printed with
others in a volume, quickly followed by a second, _Vane's Story_,
_etc._ Thomson's melancholy death attracted fresh attention to him, and
much--perhaps a good deal too much--of his writings has been
republished since. His claims, however, must rest on a comparatively
small body of work, which will no doubt one day be selected and issued
alone. "The City of Dreadful Night" itself, incomparably the best of the
longer poems, is a pessimist and nihilist effusion of the deepest gloom
amounting to despair, but couched in stately verse of an absolute
sincerity and containing some splendid passages. With this is connected
one of the latest pieces, the terrible "Insomnia." Of lighter strain,
written when the poet could still be happy, are "Sunday at Hampstead"
and "Sunday up the River," "The Naked Goddess," and one or two others;
while other things, such as "The fire that filled my heart of old," must
also be cited. Even against these the charge of a monotonous, narrow,
and irrational misery has been brought. But what saves Thomson is the
perfection with which he expresses, the negative and hopeless side of
the sense of mystery, of the Unseen; just as Miss Rossetti expresses the
positive and hopeful one. No two contemporary poets perhaps ever
completed each other in a more curious way than this Bohemian atheist
and this devout lady.