"[19]

The romantic note is not absent from "The Seasons," but it is not
prominent. Thomson's theme was the changes of the year as they affect
the English landscape, a soft, cultivated landscape of lawns, gardens,
fields, orchards, sheep-walks, and forest preserves. Only now and then
that attraction toward the savage, the awful, the mysterious, the
primitive, which marks the romantic mood in naturalistic poetry, shows
itself in touches like these.

"High from the summit of a craggy cliff,
Hung o'er the deep, such as amazing frowns
On utmost Kilda's shore, whose lonely race
Reigns the setting sun to Indian worlds."[20]

"Or where the Northern Ocean, in vast whirls,
Boils round the naked, melancholy isles
Of farthest Thule, and the Atlantic surge
Pours in among the stormy Hebrides."[21]

Compare also the description of the thunderstorm in the mountains
("Summer," 1156-68), closing with the lines:

"Far seen the heights of heathy Cheviot blaze,
And Thule bellows through her utmost isles."

The Western Islands appear to have had a peculiar fascination for
Thomson. The passages above quoted, and the stanza from "The Castle of
Indolence," cited on page 94, gave Collins the clew for his "Ode on the
Superstitions of the Scottish Highlands," which contained, says Lowell,
the whole romantic school in the germ. Thomason had perhaps found the
embryon atom in Milton's "stormy Hebrides," in "Lycidas," whose echo is
prolonged in Wordsworth's "Solitary Reaper"--

"Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides."

Even Pope--he had a soul--was not unsensitive to this, as witness his

"Loud as the wolves, on Orcas' stormy steep,
Howl to the roarings of the Northern deep."[22]

The melancholy which Victor Hugo pronounces a distinguishing badge of
romantic art, and which we shall see gaining more and more upon English
poetry as the century advanced, is also discernible in "The Seasons" in a
passage like the following:

"O bear me then to vast embowering shades,
To twilight groves and visionary vales,
To weeping grottos and prophetic glooms;
Where angel-forms athwart the solemn dusk
Tremendous sweep, or seem to sweep along;
And voices more than human, through the void,
Deep-sounding, seize the enthusiastic ear;"[23]

or this, which recalls "Il Penseroso":

"Now all amid the rigors of the year,
In the wild de