CITY OF DREADFUL NIGHT, The. This well-known poem by James Thomson was first published in The National Reformer in 1874, under the initials "B. V.° for Bysshe Vanolis, Thomson's nom-de-plume. The work is the most remarkable example in English literature of the unrestrained expression of intense and overpowering gloom. It has ap propriately been called a "litany of pessimism.' The author writes "Because a cold rage seizes one at whiles To show the bitter, old and wrinkled truth, Stripped naked of all vesture that beguiles, False dreams, false hopes, false masks and modes of youth." His words are addressed not to the happy, not to "those pious spirits with a God above them,' not to optimists who look for a heaven upon earth, but to desolate and Fate-smitten sufferers like himself who see no ray of hope. 'The City) is life,— sombre, desolate, a hell on earth. It is empty, save for wretches who move to and fro in the gloom like spectres, speaking as with one voice the message of despondency and woe. In a succession of vague incidents, which give forward movement to the meditation, the poet encounters one after another of these shadowy figures. He hears a sort of atheistical
sermon preached from the dark pulpit of a cathedral to a vast congregation of "spectral wanderers of unholy night," counseling despair and suicide. The poem closes with a mem orable description of Diirer's 'Melancholia,' whom Thomson makes the presiding goddess of his doleful city.
False as the note of unrelieved pessimism may sound to healthy ears, there is in Thom son's poem an unescapable appeal, due partly to the author's compelling power of imagina tion, partly to his mastery of the cadences of verse and partly to the very intensity of his mood. The atmosphere of gloomy mystery and the deep intonations of language in 'The City' are said to owe something to the poetry of Poe; its melancholy is "compounded of many simples.° Yet Thomson's poem remains not only highly original but unique. Thomson's poems were published in collected form by Reeves and Turner in 1880; for comment con sult Walker, 'The Literature of the Victorian Era,' and Stedman, 'Victorian Poets.'