and anon his eye extensive roamed over the phenomena of nature in foreign climes, the arctic night, the tropic summer, etc.  Wordsworth asserts that these sentimental passages “are the parts of the work which were probably most efficient in first recommending the author to general notice."[14] They strike us now as insipid enough.  But many coming attitudes cast their shadows before across the page of “The Seasons.”  Thomson’s denunciation of the slave trade, and of cruelty to animals, especially the caging of birds and the coursing of hares; his preference of country to town; his rhapsodies on domestic love and the innocence of the Golden Age; his contrast between the misery of the poor and the heartless luxury of the rich; all these features of the poem foretoken the sentimentalism of Sterne and Goldsmith, and the humanitarianism of Cowper and Burns.  They anticipate, in particular, that half affected itch of simplicity which titillated the sensibilities of a corrupt and artificial society in the writings of Rousseau and the idyllic pictures of Bernardin de St. Pierre’s “Paul and Virginia.”  Thomson went so far in this vein as to decry the use of animal food in a passage which recalls Goldsmith’s stanza:[15]

    “No flocks that range the valley free
      To slaughter I condemn: 
    Taught by the power that pities me,
      I learn to pity them.”

This sort of thing was in the air.  Pope was not a sentimental person, yet even Pope had written

    “The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed to-day,
    Had he thy reason, would he skip and play? 
    Pleased to the last, he crops the flowery food. 
    And licks the hand just raised to shed his blood."[16]

It does not appear that Thomson was personally averse to a leg of mutton.  His denunciations of luxury, and his praise of early rising[17] and cold bathing[18] sound rather hollow from the lips of a bard—­“more fat than bard beseems"-who used to lie abed till noon, and who, as Savage told Johnson, “was perhaps never in cold water in his life.”  Johnson reports, not without some spice of malice, that the Countess of Hertford, “whose practice it was to invite every summer some poet into the country, to hear her verses and assist her studies,” extended this courtesy to Thomson, “who took more delight in carousing with Lord Hertford and his friends than assisting her ladyship’s poetical operations, and therefore never received another summons."[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]