The World's Greatest Books [Volumes 1-15, 17-20]

After the dewy dawning's cold grey air;

The moon and stars may shine with scorn or pity;

The sun has never visited that city,

For it dissolveth in the daylight fair.

Dissolveth like a dream of night away; Though present in distempered gloom of thought And deadly weariness of heart all day. But when a dream night after night is brought Throughout a week, and such weeks few or many, Recur each year for several years, can any Discern that dream from real life in aught?

James Thomson (who is not to be confounded with his fellowScot of the same name, the poet of " The Seasons ") was born at Port Glasgow, Renfrewshire, on November 23, 1834. After being brought up in an orphan asylum, he was sent to Ireland as an assistant army schoolmaster, and while there fell ardently in love with the beautiful daughter of an armourer sergeant of the regiment. Her death two years later cast a gloom on Thomson's life from which he never properly recovered, and no doubt intensified that sombre imagination which he already had from his deeply religious mother. He now formed his first literary connection with Charles Bradlaugh, the famous English political freethinker, in whose journal, " The National Reformer," his best work appeared, including " To our Ladies of Death " in 1872 and " The City of Dreadful Night" in 1874. Between these dates he paid a visit to the western states of America, and subsequently to Spain as special correspondent for the New

293

The City is r»ot ruinous, although

Great ruins of an unremembered past,

With others of a few short years ago

More sad, are found within its precincts vast.

The street lamps always burn, but scarce a casement

In house or palace front from roof to basement

Doth glow or gleam across the mirk air cast.

The street lamps burn amidst the baleful glooms,

Amidst the soundless solitudes immense

Of ranged mansions dark and still as tombs.

The silence which benumbs or strains the sense

Fulfils with awe the soul's despair unweeping:

Myriads of habitants are ever sleeping,

Or dead, or fled, from nameless pestilence!

Mature men chiefly, few in age or youth,

A woman rarely, now and then a child:

A child! if here the heart turns sick with ruth

To see a little one from birth defiled,

Or lame, or blind, as preordained to languish

Through youthless life, think how it bleeds with anguish

To meet one erring in that homeless wild.

They often murmur to thenioJives, they speak

To one another seldom, for their woe

Broods maddening inwardly, and scorns to wreak

Itself abroad; and if at whiles it grow

To frenzy which must wake, none heeds the clamour,

Unless there waits some victim of like glamour,

To rave in turn, who lends attentive show.

York " World" with the Carlists, and on his return home his writings, both in prose and in verse, most of which appeared under the pseudonym of Bysshe Vanolis, or " B. V.," began to receive more attention. There were but few incidents, however, to relieve the settled gloom and poverty of his existence, save what he now sought for himself in drugs, and he died in London on June OI 1882, leaving behind him a small body of work from which time has only more securely rescued the better part.

294

The City is of Night, but not of Sleep;

There sweet sleep is not for the weary brain;

The pitiless hours like years and ages creep,

A night seems termless hell. This dreadful strain

Of thought and consciousness which never ceases,

Of which some moments' stupour but increases,

This, more than woe, makes wretches there insane.

//

He stood alone within the spacious square Declaiming from the central grassy mound, With head uncovered and with streaming hair, As if large multitudes were gathered round: A stalwart shape, the gestures full of might, The glances burning with unnatural light:

" As I came through the desert thus it was,

As I came through the desert: all was black,

In heaven no single star, on earth no track;

A brooding hush without a stir or note,

The air so thick it clotted in my throat;

And thus for hours; then some enormous things

Swooped past with savage cries and clanking wings:

But I strode on austere;

No hope could have no fear.

" As I came through the desert thus it was, As I came through the desert: eyes of fire Glared at me, throbbing with a starved desire; The hoarse and heavy and carnivorous breath Was hot upon me from deep jaws of death; Sharp claws, swift talons, fleshless fingers cold Plucked at me from the bushes, tried to hold:

But I strode on austere;

No hope could have no fear. 295

" As I came through the desert thus it was, As I came through the desert: lo you, there, That hillock burning with a brazen glare; Those myriad dusky flames with points aglow Which writhed and hissed and darted to and fro; A Sabbath of the Serpents, heaped pell-mell For Devil's roll-call and some fete of Helclass="underline"

But I strode on austere;

No hope could have no fear.

" As I came through the desert thus it was,

As I came through the desert: meteors ran

And crossed their javelins on the black sky-pan;

The zenith opened to a gulf of flame,

The dreadful thunderbolts jarred earth's fixed frame;

The ground all heaved in waves of fire that surged