Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 66, No 405, July 1849

I swear to defend – at the pen's point – against all Comers – this position – that the line is, where it stands – and looking before and after – a perfect line; and that to strike out "implentur fossæ" would be an outrage on it – just equal, Buller, to my knocking out, without hesitation, your brains – for your brains do not contribute more to the flow of our conversation – than do the Ditches to that other Spate.

"Diluit: implentur fossæ, cava flumina crescunt
Cum sonitu – "

BULLER.

That will do – you may stop.

NORTH.

I ask no man's permission – I obey no man's mandate – to stop. Now Virgil takes wing – now he blazes and soars. Now comes the power and spirit of the Storm gathered in the Person of the Sire – of him who wields the thunderbolt into which the Cyclops have forged storms of all sorts – wind and rain together – "Tres Imbri torti radios!" &c. You remember the magnificent mixture. And there we have Virgilius versus Homerum.

BULLER.

You may sit down, sir.

NORTH.

I did not know I had stood up. Beg pardon.

BULLER.

I am putting Swing to rights for you, Sir.

NORTH.

Methinks Jupiter is twice apparent – the first time, as the President of the Storm, which is agreeable to the dictates of reason and necessity; – the second – to my fancy – as delighting himself in the conscious exertion of power. What is he splintering Athos, or Rhodope, or the Acroceraunians for? The divine use of the Fulmen is to quell Titans, and to kill that mad fellow who was running up the ladder at Thebes, Capaneus. Let the Great Gods find out their enemies now– find out and finish them – and enemies they must have not a few among those prostrate crowds – "per gentes humilis stravit pavor." But shattering and shivering the mountain tops – which, as I take it, is here the prominent affair – and, as I said, the true meaning of "dejicit" – is mere pastime – as if Jupiter Tonans were disporting himself on a holiday.

BULLER.

Oh! sir, you have exhausted the subject – if not yourself – and us; – I beseech you sit down; – see, Swing solicits you – and oh! sir, you – we – all of us will find in a few minutes' silence a great relief after all that thunder.

NORTH.

You remember Lucretius?

BULLER.

No, I don't. To you I am not ashamed to confess that I read him with some difficulty. With ease, sir, do you?

NORTH.

I never knew a man who did but Bobus Smith; and so thoroughly was he imbued with the spirit of the great Epicurean, that Landor – himself the best Latinist living – equals him with Lucretius. The famous Thunder passage is very fine, but I cannot recollect every word; and the man who, in recitation, haggles and boggles at a great strain of a great poet deserves death without benefit of clergy. I do remember, however, that he does not descend from his elevation with such ease and grace as would have satisfied Henry Home and Hugh Blair – for he has so little notion of true dignity as to mention rain, as Virgil afterwards did, in immediate connexion with thunder.

"Quo de concussu sequitur gravis imber et uber,
Omnis utei videatur in imbrem vortier æther,
Atque ita præcipitans ad diluviem revocare."

BULLER.

What think you of the thunder in Thomson's Seasons?

NORTH.

What all the world thinks – that it is our very best British Thunder. He gives the Gathering, the General engagement, and the Retreat. In the Gathering there are touches and strokes that make all mankind shudder – the foreboding – the ominous! And the terror, when it comes, aggrandises the premonitory symptoms. "Follows the loosened aggravated roar" is a line of power to bring the voice of thunder upon your soul on the most peaceable day. He, too – prevailing poet – feels the grandeur of the Rain. For instant on the words "convulsing heaven and earth," ensue,

"Down comes a deluge of sonorous hail,
Or prone-descending rain."

Thomson had been in the heart of thunder-storms many a time before he left Scotland; and what always impresses me is the want of method – the confusion, I might almost say – in his description. Nothing contradictory in the proceedings of the storm; they all go on obediently to what we know of Nature's laws. But the effects of their agency on man and nature are given – not according to any scheme – but as they happen to come before the Poet's imagination, as they happened in reality. The pine is struck first – then the cattle and the sheep below – and then the castled cliff – and then the

"Gloomy woods
Start at the flash, and from their deep recess
Wide-flaming out, their trembling inmates shake."

No regular ascending – or descending scale here; but wherever the lightning chooses to go, there it goes – the blind agent of indiscriminating destruction.

BULLER.

Capricious Zig-zag.

NORTH.

Jemmy was overmuch given to mouthing in the Seasons; and in this description – matchless though it be – he sometimes out-mouths the big-mouthed thunder at his own bombast. Perhaps that is inevitable – you must, in confabulating with that Meteor, either imitate him, to keep him and yourself in countenance, or be, if not mute as a mouse, as thin-piped as a fly. In youth I used to go sounding to myself among the mountains the concluding lines of the Retreat.

"Amid Carnarvon's mountains rages loud
The repercussive roar; with mighty crush,
Into the flashing deep, from the rude rocks
Of Penmanmaur heap'd hideous to the sky,
Tumble the smitten cliffs, and Snowdon's peak,
Dissolving, instant yields his wintry load:
Far seen, the heights of heathy Cheviot blaze,
And Thule bellows through her utmost isles."

Are they good – or are they bad? I fear – not good. But I am dubious. The previous picture has been of one locality – a wide one – but within the visible horizon – enlarged somewhat by the imagination, which, as the schoolmen said, inflows into every act of the senses – and powerfully, no doubt, into the senses engaged in witnessing a thunder-storm. Many of the effects so faithfully, and some of them so tenderly painted, interest us by their picturesque particularity.

"Here the soft flocks, with that same harmless look
They wore alive, and ruminating still
In fancy's eye; and there the frowning bull,
And ox half-raised."

We are here in a confined world – close to us and near; and our sympathies with its inhabitants – human or brute – comprehend the very attitudes or postures in which the lightning found and left them; but the final verses waft us away from all that terror and pity – the geographical takes place of the pathetic – a visionary panorama of material objects supersedes the heart-throbbing region of the spiritual – for a mournful song instinct with the humanities, an ambitious bravura displaying the power and pride of the musician, now thinking not at all of us, and following the thunder only as affording him an opportunity for the display of his own art.

BULLER.

Are they good – or are they bad? I am dubious.

NORTH.