The Life of James Thomson (B. V.); With a Selection from His Letters and a Study of His Writings by Henry Stephens Salt
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1889 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER XII. GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS. Hav1ng now traced the course of Thomson's life, and studied his chief works in verse and prose, we may conclude by taking a general view of his position as thinker and writer, pessimist and poet, examining first his philosophical opinions, and then his literary characteristics. He had been brought up, as we have seen, in the strictest Presbyterian doctrines, and in the opening period of his authorship he had not altogether lost belief in the tenets of Christianity, though his keen and trenchant intellect, sharpened by early misfortunes, had cut him adrift from much to which he had previously clung. Two distinct phases of religious opinion are therefore observable in his writings. We see him, at the outset of his literary career, in that painful state of hesitation and doubt, through which so many powerful thinkers have had to pass with labour and misgiving of mind, before emerging into the comparative calm of affirmative or negative conviction. In some lines written in 1855, "suggested by Matthew Arnold's stanzas from the 'Grande Chartreuse, '" he gives expression to the regret which he still felt at the parting, inevitable though he saw it to be, from the central doctrine of Christianity; while in the "Doom of a City," written two years later, and even in the gloomy " Mater Tenebrarum " of 1859, there are still signs of a belief, or half-belief, in the immortality of the soul and the benevolence of an overruling Deity. Apparently connected with this change of religious faith was that period of hesitation between alternate moods of self-reproach and self-confidence of which, and of his final deliverance, Thomson has left a record in "Vane's Story: "--I half remember, years ago, Fits of despair that...
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