“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 depth of winter, while without
    The ceaseless winds blow ice, be my retreat
    Between the groaning forest and the shore,
    Beat by the boundless multitude of waves,
    A rural, sheltered, solitary scene;
    Where ruddy fire and beaming tapers join
    To cheer the gloom.  There studious let me sit
    And hold high converse with the mighty dead."[24]

The revival again, of the preternatural and of popular superstitions as literary material, after a rationalizing and skeptical age, is signalized by such a passage as this: 

    “Onward they pass, o’er many a panting height,
    And valley sunk and unfrequented, where
    At fall of eve the fairy people throng,
    In various game and revelry to pass
    The summer night, as village stories tell. 
    But far around they wander from the grave
    Of him whom his ungentle fortune urged
    Against his own sad breast to life the hand
    Of impious violence.  The lonely tower
    Is also shunned, whose mournful chambers hold,
    So night-struck fancy dreams, the yelling ghost.”