Summer and Winter Hours

Summer and Winter Hours is a collection of poetry by Henry Glassford Bell, the Scottish lawyer, sheriff, and writer who lived from 1803 to 1874. Bell produced poetry alongside his more famous prose biography of Mary Queen of Scots and his various professional and editorial activities in Edinburgh literary life across the second quarter of the nineteenth century. The poetry collections appeared at intervals during his career and gathered the verse he had been writing for occasional publication in magazines and annuals.

The collection mixes various kinds of poetry that were characteristic of the Scottish romantic tradition in which Bell worked. There are ballads on historical and legendary subjects, drawing on the kind of Border ballad material that Walter Scott had made fashionable and that several generations of Scottish poets continued to work with throughout the nineteenth century. There are nature pieces describing the Scottish landscape in various seasons and moods, with the kind of detailed observation that the Scottish romantic poets had developed in response to the work of Wordsworth and the English Lake poets. There are personal pieces about love, friendship, and the small recurring questions of a thoughtful life. There are occasional poems on public subjects, including some on the political and social questions that interested Bell in his role as a Scottish lawyer and citizen.

The quality of the verse is uneven, as is normal in a single author collection covering many years of occasional work. The strongest pieces are generally the historical ballads and the more personal lyric poems. The weakest are some of the occasional political pieces, which are tied closely to circumstances of the moment that have long since lost their immediate interest. Bell himself thought of poetry as an avocation alongside his serious legal and biographical work, and the collection is best approached in that spirit.

The book is short, perhaps a hundred and fifty pages in the typical printing, and is best read in small selections rather than straight through. For readers interested in the Scottish romantic poetry tradition that continued through the middle decades of the nineteenth century, this is a representative example by a competent if not first rank practitioner of the genre. It pairs naturally with the poetry of Bell’s contemporaries Allan Cunningham and James Hogg.