Page:The city of dreadful night - and other poems (IA cityofdreadfulni00thomrich).pdf/201

 posthumous volume of fugitive pieces, issued in 1884, and the fine but almost unbearably painful "Insomnia" date from this period. The reader of the last-mentioned poem will not judge Thomson too harshly because of the intemperance to which he became a victim during the later years of his life. His biographer lays stress upon the fact that he did not willingly yield himself up to drink, but in the solitude and despair depicted so faithfully in "The City of Dreadful Night," with the terrors of sleeplessness added, the temptation to seek relief in the forgetfulness alcohol could give, finally grew too strong to be resisted. But in June of 1882 the struggle ended, and Thomson met his death exactly as the sole author with whom he can be said to claim any literary kinship—Edgar Allan Poe—had done thirty-three years before. Few literary lives have less brightness to set against the shadow, but it is through the very desolation of his life that Thomson has gained his sad eminence, since a happier man could not have portrayed despair so faithfully.

In these days of Kipling worship, Thomson's poems may gain additional interest from the fact that Kipling's writings show that their author knows his Thomson well. In "The Light That Failed" the artist-heroine paints a picture suggested by Thomson's marvelous description of the "melencolia that transcends all wit" in "The City of Dreadful Night." Eustace Cleever, in one of the "Plain Tales," mutters a quotation that is very evidently Thomson's:

To the gruesome "Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes" is prefaced the refrain, "As I came through the desert thus it was,"' from "The City of Dreadful Night," which Mr. Stedman has compared to "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came," and the phrase "The City of Dreadful Night" has no doubt become familiar to us all since Kipling has used it as a title for a collection of sketches of Calcutta in its darker aspects.

"Shall not the wise as well as the witless have their poet?" asks Mr. Stedman, apropos of Landor. Thomson will never be popular—the character of his subjects is such as to render popularity impossible, but to adapt the critic's query: "Shall not the sad, as well as the merry, have their poet?"