the commencement of the next. We find Winter personified and in action, in the early edition, thus sublimely:

"Now comes the father of the tempest forth
Striding the gloomy blast. First rains obscure,
Drive through the mingling skies with vapour foul."

In the last edition thus:

"Then comes the father of the tempest forth,
Wrapt in black glooms. First joyless rains obscure
Drive through the mingling sky,

with vapour

foul."

This flattening change obliged the poet to eke out the measure with the superfluous epithet joyless. Line 99, early edition, says the river comes roaring down "from the chapt mountain and the mossy wild." The last edition changes chapt mountain to rude mountain,-not, I think, happily, since, however common the first word in the mouth of the vulgar, it presents to the perception instantly the dry, brown, and cracked state of bare hills in winter, while the epithet rude has no sense which partakes of the influence of the season.

I do not like the spinning out into four lines, in the last edition, this fine line and half, which, in the former, opens the presages of the winter storm':

"Late, in the lowering sky red fiery streaks
Begin to flush around."

The change produces an inharmonious repetition of the word when. Line 125 improves upon the old reading, by substituting for the moon, "blunted horns," instead of sullied orb. It brings her more to the eye, when she is dimmed by the halo; -and the passage is, on the whole, extremely enriched by the multiplication of the symptoms that precede the tempest; but one line is altered for the worse, thus:

"Through the loud night that bids the waves arise."

Early Ed.

"Through the black night that sits immense around."

Last Ed.

Surely the expression sits immense, is not good; and surely the epithet loud for such a night, could not be exchanged to advantage for any word in the language. Again, the early edition says of the crew of the ship in the tempest, shooting down between the waves:

"The full-blown Baltic thundering o'er their heads."

The last edition says, more tamely,

"The wintry Baltic thundering o'er their heads."

When, in pursuing the tempest to its effects on land, Thomson says, the trees" stoop to the bottom of the rocks they shade," it is a plagiarism from Shakespeare, who says of a noble youth incensed :

"Rough as the wind, which takes the mountain pine,
And stoops him to the vale."

Slight and few, but skilful, are the alterations in that fine episode of the cottager perishing in the snow. The circumstances are strongly conceived, and simply pathetic. The poet places us in the drear indistinguishable waste. We shudder, we commiserate, and the mournful sympathy remains long upon the heart. The passage which impressively moralizes the sad scene, received no momentous alteration in the author's final revision. That which mentions the jail committee, is considerably changed. The applause is here confined to the design, and the panegyric, which, in the early edition, hails it as accomplished, is converted into an exhortation not to suffer the spirit of scrutiny and justice to slacken in their exertions. This change proves that the poet perceived he had relied too fondly, and exulted too soon.

Now advance the important transpositions in the local scenery, and those expansive additions

which so highly exalt the final above the early editions of this noble poem. On first comparing them, I was startled to see vanished from the place they originally occupied, the Court of Winter-the sublimely pictured bear-the Russian Laplander, his sledge and his rein-deer; but, on proceeding, I found they had been judiciously removed, and reserved to produce a climax in the circumstances of hybernal dreariness. Those circumstances in the consummate publication, commense with the wintry Alps, Appenines, and Pyrennees, and their wolves; and in that part there is no change from the early edition, except that the involving precipitation of the thundering avalanches is added.

On the temporary dismissal of the scenic muse for the muse of history, we find the list of heroes, sages, and bards, of elder and later time, extremely swelled in this last edition-with perhaps too much display of learning respecting the ancients. We hail, with grateful pleasure, the tribute to the poets of his own day, and his affectionate eulogy to his amiable departed friend, Hammond.

The Attic evening, and its themes, has received little change; nor yet the festal. sports of the village Christmas-night-nor the more elegant, nor the ruinous pleasures of the capital;-but here is Lord Chesterfield introduced, and the

apostrophe to him is not amongst the valuable acquisitions of this the latest revised copy.

In one of the finest parts of the whole collected Seasons, the passage in this, which begins, "What art thou frost," there are only four words changed, and one line omitted. Those few verbal changes are, however, all to good effect.

The description of skating is much improved, from taking in the perfection of that art in Batavia and Russia.

From the line which begins, "But what is this? our infant winter," &c. we meet with a grand accession of hybernal scenery, and perceive also the northern images, which we had missed from the elder copy, restored and interwoven here with more distinctness, and more local propriety.

In the Lapland scenery of the earlier edition, we find great local inaccuracy in one line, the harmony of which is exquisite; it is the last of the following three :

"On sleds reclined, the furry Russian sits,
And, by his rein-deer drawn, behind him throws,
A shining kingdom in a winter's day."

The poet forgot the six months length of a Lapland winter's night; that he was describing an ice