William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin

“ His private tutor was William Hopkins, "best of all private tutors," one of the most eminent of his pupils called him, a man of great attainment and of distinction as an original investigator in a subject which had always deeply interested Thomson—the internal rigidity of the earth. But the curriculum for the tripos did not exhaust Thomson's energy, nor was it possible to keep him entirely to the groove of mastering and writing out book-work, and to the solution of problems of the kind dear to the heart of the mathematical examiner. ”

“ CHAPTER XVI LORD KELVIN IN HIS CLASS-ROOM AND LABORATORY
It is impossible to convey to those who never studied at Glasgow any clear conception of Thomson as he appeared to students whom he met daily during the session. ”

“ The circumstances of Sir William Thomson's election to the presidential chair of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and the remarkably able address which he delivered in opening the late Edinburgh meeting, are of such recent occurrence that they need not be recapitulated.
Sir William Thomson married, in 1852, a daughter of the late Walter Crum, Esq., F.R.S., who has predeceased him. He is a Liberal in politics, and no one has taken a more active part than he in forwarding the interests of the Liberal candidates for the representation of the Universities. ”

“ I understand, sir, you knew Thomson long?
I became acquainted with him in the year 1726, when he published his poem of Winter. He lived opposite to me, in Lancaster-court, in the Strand. I went to the East Indies soon after, which caused a chasm in our acquaintance; but, on my return, our intimacy was strengthened, and continued to the hour of his death. I do not know any man, living or dead, I ever esteemed more highly, and he was attached to me. I had once a complaint of a consumptive nature, which confined me much at home, and he was so good as to come often from Kew-lane to sit with me. ”

“ Professor Thomson was, it must be admitted, too discursive for the ordinary student, and perhaps did not91 study the art of boiling down physical theories to the form most easily digestible. His eagerness of mind and width of mental outlook gave his lectures a special value to the advanced student, so that there was a compensating advantage.
The teacher of natural philosophy is really placed in a position of extraordinary difficulty. The fabric of nature is woven without seam, and to take it to pieces is in a manner to destroy it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Sir William Thomson's hypothesis seems strangely improbable in itself, though it has, in comparison with the views of others, the somewhat rare merit of being not inconsistent with his notions concerning the experiments of to-day. He does not reject the supernatural in the past, while resorting to it for the present—he resorts to it in the present and in the past alike, and curiously evades the problem of origin altogether. ”

“ But the danger, which is a very real one, can only be fully avoided by the precautions of a skilful teacher, who in those small classes will draw out and direct the ideas of his students, rather than impart knowledge directly.
After a few years Thomson found it necessary to appoint an assistant, and Mr. Donald McFarlane, who had distinguished himself in the Mathematics and Natural Philosophy classes, was chosen. Mr. McFarlane was originally a block-printer, and seems to have been an apprentice at Alexandria in the Vale of Leven, at the time of the passing of the first Reform Bill. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In Thomson, for the first time, a poet of considerable eminence appeared, to whom external nature was all sufficient, and who succeeded in conducting a long poem to its close by a single appeal to landscape, and to the emotions which it directly evokes. Coleridge, somewhat severely, described The Seasons as the work of a good rather than of a great poet, and it is an indisputable fact that, at its very best, descriptive poetry fails to awaken the highest powers of the imagination. A great part of Thomson’s poem is nothing more nor less than a skilfully varied catalogue of natural phenomena. ”

“ His Excursion, an imitation of Thomson, was pub. in 1728. At the request of the Prince of Wales, whose sec. he had become, he wrote with Thomson a masque, Alfred (1740) , in which Rule Britannia first appeared, which, although he claimed the authorship, is now generally attributed to Thomson. He also wrote a Life of Bacon; and on Bolingbroke bequeathing to him his manuscripts and library, he pub. an ed. of his works (1754) . On the accession of George III., M. became a zealous supporter of Lord Bute, and was rewarded with a sinecure. ”

“ The moderators on the occasion were Robert Leslie Ellis and Harvey Goodwin, both distinguished men. Ellis had been Senior Wrangler and first Smith's Prizeman a few years before, and was a mathematician of original power and promise, who had already27 written memoirs of great merit. Goodwin had been Second Wrangler when Ellis was Senior, and became known to a later generation as Bishop of Carlisle. In a life of Ellis prefixed to a volume of his collected papers, Goodwin says:—"It was in this year that Professor W. Thomson took his degree ”

“ It would be a pity if old friends like you and me, Peter, couldn't help one another to a trifling loan of provisions without making a fuss over it." And old John, taking up the scoop, went on filling the bag as if that were a matter of course.
Peter did not speak; he could not.
"I was going round to your place to-morrow," resumed John, cheerfully, "to see if I couldn't hire you again. There's a job of hewing for you in the Conlonge shanty,—a man gone off sick. But I can't give more 'n twenty-two, or say twenty-three, seeing you're an old neighbor. What do you say?" ”

“ So little idea had they of a poet, that they informed me that another poet had been born there besides Thomson. I asked whom that might be. They said, "One White, a decrepit old man who used to write under the trees of the church-yard;" and this they thought having another poet! Such—as we are often obliged to exclaim—is fame!
An old woman, into whose cottage I stepped, on returning, to avoid a shower, was more intelligent. She told me that her mother had lived at the old manse, and frequently heard what had been told to inquirers. The manse in which Thomson was born, she said, was of mud ”

“ 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 ”

“ Among those who have used the voice of poetry given them of God to rouse their fellow-men to a life of beneficence, none have done it more zealously or more eloquently than Thomson. For this we pass over here the mere charms of his poetic achievements; over those great pictures which he has painted of the world, and its elements of forests, tempests, plagues, earthquakes; of the views of active life at home and abroad; the hunter's perils and the hunter's carouse
"In ghostly halls of gray renown;" ”

“ An eminent physicist once remarked that Thomson was perhaps the only living man who made discoveries while lecturing. That was hardly true; in the glow of action and stress of expression the mind of every intense thinker often sees new relations, and finds new points of view, which amount to discoveries. But fecundity of mind has, of course, its disadvantages: the unexpected cannot happen without causing distractions to all concerned. ”

“ That pois'd, impels, and rules the steady Whole.
⁠When now no more th' alternate Twins are fir'd,
And Cancer reddens with the solar blaze,
Short is the doubtful empire of the night:⁠45
And soon, observant of approaching day,
The meek-ey'd Morn appears, mother of dews,
At first faint-gleaming in the dappled east:
Till far o'er ether spreads the widening glow;
And, from before the lustre of her face,⁠50
White break the clouds away. With quicken'd step,
Brown Night retires: Young Day pours in apace,
And opens all the lawny prospect wide. ”

“ From that to twelve they like to read the Pilgrim’s Progress and Robinson Crusoe, and then Fielding’s Novels and Don Quixote: from twenty to thirty books of poetry, Milton, Pope, Shakspeare: and from thirty history and philosophy—what suits us then will serve us for the rest of our lives. For boarding-school girls Thomson’s Seasons has an immense attraction, though I never could read it. Some people cannot get beyond a newspaper or a geographical dictionary. ”

“ To taste the lucid coolness of the flood.
Ah then! not Paris on the piny top
Of Ida panted stronger, when aside ⁠1300
The rival-goddesses the veil divine
Cast unconfin'd, and gave him all their charms,
Than, Damon, thou; as from the snowy leg,
And slender foot, th' inverted silk she drew;
As the soft touch dissolv'd the virgin zone;⁠1305
And, thro' the parting robe, th' alternate breast,
With youth wild-throbbing, on thy lawless gaze
In full luxuriance rose. But, desperate youth,
How durst thou risque the soul-distracting view ”

“ It was in this room that we found a little worn-out copy of the Seasons, lying in a window-seat, on which Coleridge exclaimed, "That is true fame!" He said Thomson was a great poet, rather than a good one; his style was as meretricious as his thoughts were natural. He spoke of Cowper as the best modern poet. He said the Lyrical Ballads were an experiment about to be tried by him and Wordsworth, to see how far the public taste would endure poetry written in a more natural and simple style than had hitherto been attempted ”

“ LITTLE BAPTISTE. A STORY OF THE OTTAWA RIVER.
Ma'ame Baptiste Larocque peered again into her cupboard and her flour barrel, as though she might have been mistaken in her inspection twenty minutes earlier.
"No, there is nothing, nothing at all!" said she to her old mother-in-law. "And no more trust at the store. Monsieur Conolly was too cross when I went for corn-meal yesterday. For sure, Baptiste stays very long at the shanty this year."
"Fear nothing, Delima," answered the bright-eyed old woman. "The good God will send a breakfast for the little ones, and for us. ”

“ He seems afraid of elevating nature, lest she should be ashamed of him. Bloomfield very beautifully describes the lambs in springtime as racing round the hillocks of green turf: Thomson, in describing the same image, makes the mound of earth the remains of an old Roman encampment. Bloomfield never gets beyond his own experience; and that is somewhat confined. He gives the simple appearance of nature, but he gives it naked, shivering, and unclothed with the drapery of a moral imagination. ”

“ I. James Thomson, the author of the Seasons and other Poems of merit, was born in Roxburgshire, Scotland, in September, 1700. His father, a clergyman of small estate, died while the Poet was yet a boy; and, after a few years spent in obscurity, the son went to London as a literary adventurer. "By what gradation of indigence he became reduced to a Poet it would be vain to inquire." He did become "reduced to a Poet," however, and, after a season of want, he succeeded in selling his "Winter." Mr. ”

“ Old poets grow exclusive. As Wordsworth nowadays says he reads no new poets—he leaves them to their cotemporaries—it is enough for him to stick to his old loves; so, in the correspondence of Pope, you find no further mention of Thomson than that "Thomson and some other young men have published lately some creditable things;" and Gray, writing to one of his friends, says, "Thomson has just published a poem called 'The Castle of Indolence,' which contains some good stanzas." ”

“ ON THOMSON AND COWPER Thomson, the kind-hearted Thomson, was the most indolent of mortals and of poets. But he was also one of the best both of mortals and of poets. Dr. Johnson makes it his praise that he wrote ‘no line which dying he would wish to blot.’ Perhaps a better proof of his honest simplicity, and inoffensive goodness of disposition, would be that he wrote no line which any other person living would wish that he should blot. ”

“ Absolute life is indefinitely superior to the highest art; yet life as we see it in the men living actively around us is so poor and mean, that he who takes refuge in art must be impuissant indeed if he cannot amply vindicate his choice. ”

“ No Dogs, no Babes, no Wives, to stun your Ear;
“No Hammers thump; no horrid Blacksmith sear,
“Ne noisy Tradesman your sweet Slumbers start,
“With Sounds that are a Misery to hear:
“But all is calm, as would delight the Heart
“Of Sybarite of old, all Nature, and all Art.
XV.
“Here nought but Candour reigns, indulgent Ease,
“Good-natur'd Lounging, Sauntering up and down:
“They who are pleas'd themselves must always please;
“On Others' Ways they never squint a Frown,
“Nor heed what haps to Hamlet or in Town. ”