It may not be uninstructive to note the occurrence of the word romantic at several points in the poem: 

            “glimmering shades and sympathetic glooms,
    Where the dim umbrage o’er the falling stream
    Romantic hangs."[25]

This is from a passage in which romantic love once more comes back into poetry, after its long eclipse; and in which the lover is depicted as wandering abroad at “pensive dusk,” or by moonlight, through groves and along brooksides.[26] The word is applied likewise to clouds, “rolled into romantic shapes, the dream of waking fancy”; and to the scenery of Scotland—­“Caledonia in romantic view.”  In a subtler way, the feeling of such lines as these is romantic: 

“Breathe your still song into the reaper’s heart,
As home he goes beneath the joyous moon;”

or these, of the comparative lightness of the summer night: 

            “A faint, erroneous ray,
    Glanced from the imperfect surfaces of things,
    Flings half an image on the straining eye.”

In a letter to Stonehewer (June 29, 1760), Gray comments thus upon a passage from Ossian: 

“’Ghosts ride on the tempest to-night: 
Sweet is their voice between the gusts of wind: 
Their songs are of other worlds.’

“Did you never observe (while rocking winds are piping loud) that pause, as the gust is re-collecting itself, and rising upon the ear in a shrill and plaintive note, like the soul of an Aeolian harp?  I do assure you, there is nothing in the world so like the voice of a spirit.  Thomson had an ear sometimes; he was not deaf to this, and has described it gloriously, but given it another, different turn, and of more horror.  I cannot repeat the lines:  it is in his ‘Winter.’” The lines that Gray had in mind were probably these (191-94): 

    “Then, too, they say, through all the burdened air,
    Long groans are heard, shrill sounds and distant sighs
    That, uttered by the demon of the night,
    Warn the devoted wretch of woe and death.”

Thomson appears to have been a sweet-tempered, indolent man, constant in friendship and much loved by his friends.  He had a little house and grounds in Kew Lane where he used to compose poetry on autumn nights and loved to listen to the nightingales in Richmond Garden; and where, sang Collins, in his ode on the poet’s death (1748),

    “Remembrance oft shall haunt the shore,
      When Thames in summer wreaths is drest,
    And oft suspend the dashing oar
      To bid his gentle spirit rest.”

Collins had been attracted to Richmond by Thomson’s residence there, and forsook the neighborhood after his friend’s death.