THOMSON, Jame THE SEASONS AND THE CASTLE OF INDOLENCE EDITED WITH BIOGRAPHICAL NOTICE, introduCTIONS, BY J. LOGIE ROBERTSON, M.A. EDITOR OF 'SELECTIONS FROM BURNS' Oxford AT THE CLARENDON PRESS 1891 [All rights reserved] sotherm 12-22-3/ 248157 add.cap. PREFACE THOMSON has special recommendations as a British classic for the use of youth. Not only does he look upon Nature with the eye of a poet-and there is hardly an aspect of Nature that he has failed to note—but his descriptions possess such a power of freshness and fidelity, conveyed for the most part in language of astonishing felicity, that the heart must be dull indeed which they cannot inspire with interest and even rouse to enthusiasm. It is not too much to say that a love for Thomson's poetry in early life implies a permanent delight in the phenomena of rural Nature and an unfailing response to her restorative influences. It might be added that Thomson furnishes in The Seasons the best introduction to the study of Wordsworth's poetry,-if indeed the heart that has felt the charm of the earlier and more ingenuous poet be not satisfied to rest content with his teaching and to seek no farther. In The Castle of Indolence the same love of Nature and rural life which animates The Seasons is continually revealed in passages of exquisite beauty, and in the second Canto there is, more particularly, much sympathetic writing on the advantages of an open-air life of active industry which is surely very capable of inspiring and directing the energies of healthy youth. The text of The Seasons adopted in the present edition is of course that of the year 1746, which was the last to receive the author's personal revision. At the same time the earlier |