Alexander Thomson

“ In physique, intellect, and morale, Thomson was an ideal explorer. At first sight he did not impress the observer as peculiarly muscular or robust; but there was an almost boyish ease in his gait, and his powers of endurance were often without parallel. Seventy miles was no infrequent record at the end of a day's march. While his work was mainly that of a geographical pioneer, yet in his most rapid passages through a country he had such a genius for observing that his notebooks were filled with material that most men would have taken months to collect. ”

“ He does not search for any resemblances that are not palpable, and founded in the nature of things. All similes and metaphors which serve to express his own emotions are carefully avoided. The whole is picturesque and life-like in the highest degree, yet every circumstance is mentioned in the cool, unimpassioned way in which we mention any common occurrence.
Thomson accomplishes his purpose by portraying his own feelings; not indeed in so many words, but by the use of those expressions, and by those transitions of thought, which mark a state of emotion. ”

“ The fresh treatment of a simple theme, the warm poetical colouring of commonplace incidents, the freedom and irregularity of the plan, the boldness of the descriptions, the manly and sincere sentiment, the rough vigour of the verse, took by surprise a generation accustomed to witty satire and burlesque, refined diction, translations from the classics, themes valued in proportion to their remoteness from vulgar life. Thomson at once became famous, and, his naturally easy temper roused to full exertion, vigorously followed up his success with Summer and an Ode to the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton. ”

“ Fancy having to stand for an hour and a half bowing, and then to sit with one's cocked hat on, receiving addresses.' In person Thomson was small, slight, elegant, fragile-looking, with a notably handsome face. He was one of those clever, agreeable, plausible, managing little men who seem always to get their own way. They are very adroit and not too scrupulous about the means they use to attain their ends. ”

“ Thomson was extremely beloved by his acquaintance. He was of an open generous disposition; and was sometimes tempted to an excessive indulgence of the social pleasures: A failing too frequently inseparable from men of genius. His exterior appearance was not very engaging, but he grew more and more agreeable, as he entered into conversation: He had a grateful heart, ready to acknowledge every favour he received, and he never forgot his old benefactors, notwithstanding a long absence, new acquaintance, and additional eminence ”

“ This the feeling heart
Would tenderly suggest: but 'tis enough,
In this late age, adventurous to have touch'd,
Light on the numbers of the Samian sage.
High Heaven beside forbids the daring strain,
Whose wisest will has fix'd us in a state,
That must not yet to pure perfection rise.
But yonder breathing prospect bids the muse
Throw all her beauty forth, that daubing all
Will be to what I gaze; for who can paint
Like Nature? Can Imagination boast,
Amid his gay creation, hues like hers? ”

“ Objects so vast and magnificent as planets rolling with even pace through their orbits, comets rushing along their devious track, light springing from its unexhausted source, mighty rivers formed in their subterranean beds, do not require, or even admit, a heightening from the fancy. The most faithful pencil here produces the noblest pictures; and Thomson, by strictly adhering to the character of the poet of Nature, has treated all these topics with a true sublimity, which a writer of less knowledge and accuracy could never have attained. ”

“ Had he followed those practices of healthy activity so finely described in his poem, how much longer and more useful might his life have been! Yet it must be a fact unquestionable, that Thomson, as a boy, rose early, saw both sunrises and all the glories of nature, plunged into the summer flood, and braved the severity of winter. No man could so vividly or so accurately describe what he had not experienced, and they who know best the country know how exact is his knowledge of it. ”

“ Thomson’s blank verse is not harsh, or utterly untuneable; but it is heavy and monotonous; it seems always labouring up-hill. The selections which have been made from his works in Enfield’s Speaker, and other books of extracts, do not convey the most favourable idea of his genius or taste ”

“ Thomson's growing reputation as a logician led the authorities of Queen's College in 1847 to recall him to Oxford to act as college tutor. In this capacity he did much to retrieve the standing of the college. Indefatigable in his attention to its affairs, he filled the office not merely of tutor, but also of chaplain and dean. In 1852 he became junior bursar, and in 1854 bursar. At the same time he was recognised in the university as a preacher of power. In 1848 he was appointed select preacher, and in 1853 he was chosen Bampton lecturer. ”

“ To follow him in his flights is real mental exhilaration.”
In 1852 Thomson married Margaret, daughter of Walter Crum of Thornliebank, who died in 1870; and in 1874 he married Frances Anna, daughter of Charles R. Blandy of Madeira. In 1866, perhaps chiefly in acknowledgment of his services to trans-Atlantic telegraphy, Thomson received the honour of knighthood, and in 1892 he was raised to the peerage with the title of Baron Kelvin of Largs. The Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order was conferred on him in 1896, the year of the jubilee of his professoriate. ”

“ He also took a lively interest in the classics, in music, and in general literature; but the real love, the central passion of his intellectual life, was the pursuit of science. The study of mathematics, physics, and in particular, of electricity, had captivated his imagination, and soon engrossed all the teeming faculties of his mind. At the age of seventeen, when ordinary lads are fond of games, and the cleverer sort are content to learn without attempting to originate, young Thomson had begun to make investigations. ”

“ At twenty-two he was a Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Glasgow. When little more than out of his teens, Sir William Thomson became editor of the Cambridge and Dublin Mathematical Journal, through which a great impetus was given to the study of pure and applied mechanics; and before the era of the Atlantic Cable he contributed many papers on telegraphy to the Royal Society, in connection with which he made the acquaintance and enjoyed the esteem of such men as Faraday and Brewster. ”

“ In his lifetime, Thomson's friends were ready to bestow upon him immortal honors—they declared that his system must finally supersede all other medical means, and live to bless the world forever, and carry the name of its founder in a halo of glory down to the end of time. ”

“ Was more sufficient for itself than thou.
Thomson.
For the strong spirit will at times awake,
Piercing the mists that wrap her clay abode;
And, born of thee, she may not always take
Earth’s accents for the oracles of God;
And ev’n in this—O dust, whose mask is power!
Reed, that wouldst be a scourge thy little hour!
Spark, whereon yet the mighty hath not trod,
And therefore thou destroyest,—where were flown
Our hope, if man were left to man’s decrees alone.
Mrs. Hemans.
O put away thy pride,
Or be ashamed of power,
That cannot turn aside
The breeze that waves a flower. ”

“ Henceforth his residence at St. Paul's brought him still more continually into the world, which he delighted by his 'wise wit.' Most London dinners, he declared, evaporated in whispers to one's next neighbours. He never, however, spoke to his neighbour, but 'fired' across the table. One day, however, he broke his rule, on hearing a lady, who sat next him, say in a sweet low voice, 'No gravy, sir.'—'Madam!' he cried, 'I have all my life been looking for a person who disliked gravy, let us swear immortal friendship.' She looked astonished, but took the oath, and kept it. ”

“ The bare enumeration of these several occasions of introducing draughts of human life and manners, will be sufficient to call to mind the admirable use which Thomson throughout his whole poem has made of them. He, in fact, never appears more truly inspired with his subject, than when giving birth to those sentiments of tenderness and beneficence, which seem to have occupied his whole heart. An universal benevolence, extending to every part of the animal creation, manifests itself in almost every scene he draws ”

“ Even persons somewhat hard of hearing, are not deaf to her waterfalls. In the sublime invocation to Winter, which we have quoted—we hear Thomson recording his own worship of nature in his boyish days, when he roamed among the hills of his father's parish, far away from the manse. In those strange and stormy delights did not thousands of thousands of the Scottish boyhood familiarly live among the mists and snows? Of all that number he alone had the genius to "here eternise on earth" his joy—but many millions have had souls to join religiously in the hymns he chanted. ”

“ No poet has ever been more inspired by the love of external nature, or felt with more keenness and delicacy those analogies between the mind and the things it looks upon, which are the fountains of poetic feeling. The faults of Thomson are triteness of thought when he becomes argumentative and a prevalent pomposity and pedantry of diction ”

“ He thinks in a peculiar train, and he thinks always as a man of genius; he looks round on Nature and on Life with the eye which Nature bestows only on a poet; the eye that distinguishes, in every thing presented to its view, whatever there is on which imagination can delight to be detained, and with a mind that at once comprehends the vast, and attends to the minute. The reader of the "Seasons" wonders that he never saw before what Thomson shews him, and that he never yet has felt what Thomson impresses. ”

“ He learnt there some Latin, but with, difficulty, and the earliest recorded utterance of the future poet was " Confound the building of Babel." He began very soon to write verses, and we are told that every January he destroyed almost all the productions of the preceding year. And this was just as well, for the little that has escaped the fire contains no promise of his future powers. In 1715 he went to the university of Edinburgh. ”

“ But if Thomson sometimes lacks the true vision for things human, he retains it always for things mute and material, and whilst the critical estimate of his powers and influence will vary from age to age, all who have read him will concur in the colloquial judgment which only candour could have extorted from the prejudice of Dr Johnson—“Thomson had as much of the poet about him as most writers. ”

“ In Germany, the authority of wise men is supreme. Their words, when they speak, are heard with reverence and attention. In America, wisdom is not wisdom till the common man has examined it and pronounced it to be such. The conclusions of the scholar are revised by the daily newspaper. The readers of these papers care little for messages from Utopia.
No college opened its doors to Thomson, and he saw with dismay that the life before him was one of discomfort and insignificance, his ideals having no exchangeable value in luxuries or comforts. ”

“ Like vivid blossoms glowing from afar,
Thick-swarm the brighter birds. For Nature's hand, ⁠735
That with a sportive vanity has deck'd
The plumy nations, there her gayest hues
Profusely pours. [5] But, if she bids them shine,
Array'd in all the beauteous beams of day,
Yet frugal still, she humbles them in song. ⁠740
Nor envy we the gaudy robes they lent
Proud Montezuma's realm, whose legions cast
A boundless radiance waving on the sun,
While Philomel is ours; while in our shades,
Thro' the soft silence of the listening night,⁠745
The sober-suited songstress trills her lay. ”

“ Even a man as great as Huxley was obviously pleased at being made a privy councilor and being granted an audience with the Queen. Sir William Thomson was willing to give up the name of his father, himself a professor of mathematics, to become Lord Kelvin, even though he has no heir. ”

“ Such are seldom very dose in their discourse when they meet and junket together, and Thomson, then a boy, was so much pleased with their jovial manner of life, eating well and drinking hard, that he had ever a bias that way, even when he was otherways employed, till he was fifteen years old, leading such an idle and debauched life that, as he himself expressed it, he had never heard of or read a Bible or other good book throughout all that space. ”

“ By antient learning to th' enlightened love ⁠1525
Of antient freedom warm'd. Fair thy renown
In awful Sages and in noble Bards;
Soon as the light of dawning Science spread
Her orient ray, and wak'd the Muses' song.
Thine is a Bacon, hapless in his choice, ⁠1530
Unfit to stand the civil storm of state,
And thro' the smooth barbarity of courts,
With firm but pliant virtue, forward still
To urge his course. Him for the studious shade
Kind Nature form'd, deep, comprehensive, clear, ⁠1535
Exact, and elegant; in one rich soul,
Plato, the Stagyrite, and Tully join'd. ”

“ Heaps pour'd on Heaps, and yet they slip'd along
In silent Ease: as when beneath the Beam
Of Summer-Moons, the distant Woods among,
Or by some Flood all silver'd with the Gleam,
The soft-embodied Fays through airy Portal stream.
XXI.
By the smooth Demon so it order'd was,
And here his baneful Bounty first began:
Though some there were who would not further pass,
And his alluring Baits suspected han.
The Wise distrust the too fair-spoken Man.
Yet through the Gate they cast a wishful Eye:
Not to move on, perdie, is all they can ”