A GENERAL SONG OF PRAISE TO ALMIGHTY GOD.

How shall I sing that Majesty Which angels do admire? Let dust in dust and silence lie; Sing, sing, ye heavenly choir. Thousands of thousands stand around Thy throne, O God most high; Ten thousand times ten thousand sound Thy praise; but who am I?

Thy brightness unto them appears, Whilst I thy footsteps trace; A sound of God comes to my ears; But they behold thy face. They sing because thou art their sun: Lord, send a beam on me; For where heaven is but once begun, There hallelujahs be.

Enlighten with faith's light my heart; Enflame it with love's fire; Then shall I sing and bear a part With that celestial choir. I shall, I fear, be dark and cold, With all my fire and light; Yet when thou dost accept their gold, Lord, treasure up my mite.

How great a being, Lord, is thine. Which doth all beings keep! Thy knowledge is the only line To sound so vast a deep. Thou art a sea without a shore, A sun without a sphere; Thy time is now and evermore, Thy place is everywhere.

How good art thou, whose goodness is Our parent, nurse, and guide! Whose streams do water Paradise, And all the earth beside! Thine upper and thy nether springs Make both thy worlds to thrive; Under thy warm and sheltering wings Thou keep'st two broods alive.

Thy arm of might, most mighty king Both rocks and hearts doth break: My God, thou canst do everything But what should show thee weak. Thou canst not cross thyself, or be Less than thyself, or poor; But whatsoever pleaseth thee, That canst thou do, and more.

Who would not fear thy searching eye, Witness to all that's true! Dark Hell, and deep Hypocrisy Lie plain before its view. Motions and thoughts before they grow, Thy knowledge doth espy; What unborn ages are to do, Is done before thine eye.

Thy wisdom which both makes and mends, We ever much admire: Creation all our wit transcends; Redemption rises higher. Thy wisdom guides strayed sinners home, 'Twill make the dead world rise, And bring those prisoners to their doom: Its paths are mysteries.

Great is thy truth, and shall prevail To unbelievers' shame: Thy truth and years do never fail; Thou ever art the same. Unbelief is a raging wave Dashing against a rock: If God doth not his Israel save, Then let Egyptians mock.

Most pure and holy are thine eyes, Most holy is thy name; Thy saints, and laws, and penalties, Thy holiness proclaim. This is the devil's scourge and sting, This is the angels' song, Who holy, holy, holy sing, In heavenly Canaan's tongue.

Mercy, that shining attribute, The sinner's hope and plea! Huge hosts of sins in their pursuit, Are drowned in thy Red Sea. Mercy is God's memorial, And in all ages praised: My God, thine only Son did fall, That Mercy might be raised.

Thy bright back-parts, O God of grace, I humbly here adore: Show me thy glory and thy face, That I may praise thee more. Since none can see thy face and live, For me to die is best: Through Jordan's streams who would not dive, To land at Canaan's rest?

To these Songs of Praise is appended another series called Penitential Cries, by the Rev. Thomas Shepherd, who, for a short time a clergyman in Buckinghamshire, became the minister of the Congregational church at Northampton, afterwards under the care of Doddridge. Although he was an imitator of Mason, some of his hymns are admirable. The following I think one of the best:—

FOR COMMUNION WITH GOD.

Alas, my God, that we should be Such strangers to each other! O that as friends we might agree, And walk and talk together!

Thou know'st my soul does dearly love The place of thine abode; No music drops so sweet a sound As these two words, My God.

* * * * *

May I taste that communion, Lord, Thy people have with thee? Thy spirit daily talks with them, O let it talk with me! Like Enoch, let me walk with God, And thus walk out my day, Attended with the heavenly guards, Upon the king's highway.

When wilt thou come unto me, Lord? O come, my Lord most dear! Come near, come nearer, nearer still: I'm well when thou art near.

* * * * *

When wilt thou come unto me, Lord? For, till thou dost appear, I count each moment for a day, Each minute for a year.

* * * * *

There's no such thing as pleasure here; My Jesus is my all: As thou dost shine or disappear, My pleasures rise and fall. Come, spread thy savour on my frame— No sweetness is so sweet; Till I get up to sing thy name Where all thy singers meet.

In the writings of both we recognize a straight-forwardness of expression equal to that of Wither, and a quaint simplicity of thought and form like that of Herrick; while the very charm of some of the best lines is their spontaneity. The men have just enough mysticism to afford them homeliest figures for deepest feelings.

I turn to the accomplished Joseph Addison.

He was born in 1672. His religious poems are so well known, and are for the greater part so ordinary in everything but their simplicity of composition, that I should hardly have cared to choose one, had it not been that we owe him much gratitude for what he did, in the reigns of Anne and George I., to purify the moral taste of the English people at a time when the influence of the clergy was not for elevation, and to teach the love of a higher literature when Milton was little known and less esteemed. Especially are we indebted to him for his modest and admirable criticism of the Paradise Lost in the Spectator.

Of those few poems to which I have referred, I choose the best known, because it is the best. It has to me a charm for which I can hardly account.

Yet I imagine I see in it a sign of the poetic times: a flatness of spirit, arising from the evanishment of the mystical element, begins to result in a worship of power. Neither power nor wisdom, though infinite both, could constitute a God worthy of the worship of a human soul; and the worship of such a God must sink to the level of that fancied divinity. Small wonder is it then that the lyric should now droop its wings and moult the feathers of its praise. I do not say that God's more glorious attributes are already forgotten, but that the tendency of the Christian lyric is now to laudation of power—and knowledge, a form of the same—as the essential of Godhead. This indicates no recalling of metaphysical questions, such as we have met in foregoing verse, but a decline towards system; a rising passion—if anything so cold may be called a passion—for the reduction of all things to the forms of the understanding, a declension which has prepared the way for the present worship of science, and its refusal, if not denial, of all that cannot be proved in forms of the intellect.

The hymn which has led to these remarks is still good, although, like the loveliness of the red and lowering west, it gives sign of a gray and cheerless dawn, under whose dreariness the child will first doubt if his father loves him, and next doubt if he has a father at all, and is not a mere foundling that Nature has lifted from her path.

The spacious firmament on high, With all the blue etherial sky, And spangled heavens, a shining frame, Their great Original proclaim. The unwearied sun from day to day Does his Creator's power display; And publishes to every land The work of an almighty hand.

Soon as the evening shades prevail, The moon takes up the wondrous tale; And nightly to the listening earth Repeats the story of her birth; Whilst all the stars that round her burn, And all the planets, in their turn, Confirm the tidings as they roll, And spread the truth from pole to pole.

What though in solemn silence all Move round the dark terrestrial ball? What though no real voice nor sound Amidst their radiant orbs be found? In reason's ear they all rejoice, And utter forth a glorious voice, For ever singing as they shine: "The hand that made us is divine."

The very use of the words spangled and frame seems—to my fancy only, it may be—to indicate a tendency towards the unworthy and theatrical. Yet the second stanza is lovely beyond a doubt; and the whole is most artistic, although after a tame fashion. Whether indeed the heavenly bodies teach what he says, or whether we should read divinity worthy of the name in them at all, without the human revelation which healed men, I doubt much. That divinity is there—Yes; that we could read it there without having seen the face of the Son of Man first, I think—No. I do not therefore dare imagine that no revelation dimly leading towards such result glimmered in the hearts of God's chosen amongst Jews and Gentiles before he came. What I say is, that power and order, although of God, and preparing the way for him, are not his revealers unto men. No doubt King David compares the perfection of God's law to the glory of the heavens, but he did not learn that perfection from the heavens, but from the law itself, revealed in his own heart through the life-teaching of God. When he had learned it he saw that the heavens were like it.

To unveil God, only manhood like our own will serve. And he has taken the form of man that he might reveal the manhood in him from awful eternity.



CHAPTER XIX.

THE PLAIN.

But Addison's tameness is wonderfully lovely beside the fervours of a man of honoured name,—Dr. Isaac Watts, born in 1674. The result must be dreadful where fervour will poetize without the aidful restraints of art and modesty. If any man would look upon absurdity in the garb of sobriety, let him search Dryden's Annus Mirabilis: Dr. Watts's Lyrics are as bad; they are fantastic to utter folly. An admiration of "the incomparable Mr. Cowley" did the sense of them more injury than the imitation of his rough-cantering ode could do their rhythm. The sentimentalities of Roman Catholic writers towards our Lord and his mother, are not half so offensive as the courtier-like flatteries Dr. Watts offers to the Most High. To say nothing of the irreverence, the vulgarity is offensive. He affords another instance amongst thousands how little the form in which feeling is expressed has to do with the feeling itself. In him the thought is true, the form of its utterance false; the feeling lovely, the word, often to a degree, repulsive. The ugly web is crossed now and then by a fine line, and even damasked with an occasional good poem: I have found two, and only two, in the whole of his seventy-five Lyrics sacred to Devotion. His objectivity and boldness of thought, and his freedom of utterance, cause us ever and anon to lament that he had not the humility and faith of an artist as well as of a Christian.

Almost all his symbols indicate a worship of power and of outward show.

I give the best of the two good poems I have mentioned, and very good it is.

HAPPY FRAILTY.

"How meanly dwells the immortal mind! How vile these bodies are! Why was a clod of earth designed To enclose a heavenly star?

"Weak cottage where our souls reside! This flesh a tottering wall! With frightful breaches gaping wide, The building bends to fall.

"All round it storms of trouble blow, And waves of sorrow roll; Cold waves and winter storms beat through, And pain the tenant-soul.

"Alas, how frail our state!" said I, And thus went mourning on; Till sudden from the cleaving sky A gleam of glory shone.

My soul all felt the glory come, And breathed her native air; Then she remembered heaven her home, And she a prisoner here.

Straight she began to change her key; And, joyful in her pains, She sang the frailty of her clay In pleasurable strains.

"How weak the prison is where I dwell! Flesh but a tottering wall! The breaches cheerfully foretell The house must shortly fall.

"No more, my friends, shall I complain, Though all my heart-strings ache; Welcome disease, and every pain That makes the cottage shake!

"Now let the tempest blow all round, Now swell the surges high, And beat this house of bondage down To let the stranger fly!

"I have a mansion built above By the eternal hand; And should the earth's old basis move, My heavenly house must stand.

"Yes, for 'tis there my Saviour reigns— I long to see the God— And his immortal strength sustains The courts that cost him blood.

"Hark! from on high my Saviour calls: I come, my Lord, my Love! Devotion breaks the prison-walls, And speeds my last remove."

His psalms and hymns are immeasurably better than his lyrics. Dreadful some of them are; and I doubt if there is one from which we would not wish stanzas, lines, and words absent. But some are very fine. The man who could write such verses as these ought not to have written as he has written:—

Had I a glance of thee, my God, Kingdoms and men would vanish soon; Vanish as though I saw them not, As a dim candle dies at noon.

Then they might fight and rage and rave: I should perceive the noise no more Than we can hear a shaking leaf While rattling thunders round us roar.

Some of his hymns will be sung, I fancy, so long as men praise God together; for most heartily do I grant that of all hymns I know he has produced the best for public use; but these bear a very small proportion indeed to the mass of his labour. We cannot help wishing that he had written about the twentieth part. We could not have too much of his best, such as this:

Be earth with all her scenes withdrawn; Let noise and vanity begone: In secret silence of the mind My heaven, and there my God, I find;

but there is no occasion for the best to be so plentiful: a little of it will go a great way. And as our best moments are so few, how could any man write six hundred religious poems, and produce quality in proportion to quantity save in an inverse ratio?

Dr. Thomas Parnell, the well-known poet, a clergyman, born in Dublin in 1679, has written a few religious verses. The following have a certain touch of imagination and consequent grace, which distinguishes them above the swampy level of the time.

HYMN FOR EVENING.

The beam-repelling mists arise, And evening spreads obscurer skies; The twilight will the night forerun, And night itself be soon begun. Upon thy knees devoutly bow, And pray the Lord of glory now To fill thy breast, or deadly sin May cause a blinder night within. And whether pleasing vapours rise, Which gently dim the closing eyes, Which make the weary members blest With sweet refreshment in their rest; Or whether spirits[158] in the brain Dispel their soft embrace again, And on my watchful bed I stay, Forsook by sleep, and waiting day; Be God for ever in my view, And never he forsake me too; But still as day concludes in night, To break again with new-born light, His wondrous bounty let me find With still a more enlightened mind.

* * * * *

Thou that hast thy palace far Above the moon and every star; Thou that sittest on a throne To which the night was never known, Regard my voice, and make me blest By kindly granting its request. If thoughts on thee my soul employ, My darkness will afford me joy, Till thou shalt call and I shall soar, And part with darkness evermore.

Many long and elaborate religious poems I have not even mentioned, because I cannot favour extracts, especially in heroic couplets or blank verse. They would only make my book heavy, and destroy the song-idea. I must here pass by one of the best of such poems, The Complaint, or Night Thoughts of Dr. Young; nor is there anything else of his I care to quote.

I must give just one poem of Pope, born in 1688, the year of the Revolution. The flamboyant style of his Messiah is to me detestable: nothing can be more unlike the simplicity of Christianity. All such, equally with those by whatever hand that would be religious by being miserable, I reject at once, along with all that are merely commonplace religious exercises. But this at least is very unlike the rest of Pope's compositions: it is as simple in utterance as it is large in scope and practical in bearing. The name Jove may be unpleasant to some ears: it is to mine—not because it is the name given to their deity by men who had had little outward revelation, but because of the associations which the wanton poets, not the good philosophers, have gathered about it. Here let it stand, as Pope meant it, for one of the names of the Unknown God.

THE UNIVERSAL PRAYER.

Father of all! in every age, In every clime adored, By saint, by savage, and by sage, Jehovah, Jove, or Lord!

Thou great First Cause, least understood! Who all my sense confined To know but this, that thou art good, And that myself am blind

Yet gave me, in this dark estate, To see the good from ill; And, binding Nature fast in Fate, Left free the human will:

What Conscience dictates to be done, Or warns me not to do— This, teach me more than hell to shun, That, more than heaven pursue.

What blessings thy free bounty gives, Let me not cast away; For God is paid when man receives: To enjoy is to obey.

Yet not to earth's contracted span Thy goodness let me bound, Or think thee Lord alone of man, When thousand worlds are round.

Let not this weak, unknowing hand Presume thy bolts to throw, And deal damnation round the land On each I judge thy foe.

If I am right, thy grace impart Still in the right to stay; If I am wrong, O teach my heart To find that better way.

Save me alike from foolish pride Or impious discontent, At aught thy wisdom has denied, Or aught thy goodness lent.

Teach me to feel another's woe, To hide the fault I see: That mercy I to others show, That mercy show to me.

Mean though I am—not wholly so, Since quickened by thy breath:— O lead me wheresoe'er I go, Through this day's life or death.

This day, be bread and peace my lot: All else beneath the sun Thou know'st if best bestowed or not, And let thy will be done.

To thee, whose temple is all space, Whose altar, earth, sea, skies, One chorus let all being raise! All Nature's incense rise!

And now we come upon a strange little well in the desert. Few flowers indeed shine upon its brink, and it flows with a somewhat unmusical ripple: it is a well of the water of life notwithstanding, for its song tells of the love and truth which are the grand power of God.

John Byrom, born in Manchester in the year 1691, a man whose strength of thought and perception of truth greatly surpassed his poetic gifts, yet delighted so entirely in the poetic form that he wrote much and chiefly in it. After leaving Cambridge, he gained his livelihood for some time by teaching a shorthand of his own invention, but was so distinguished as a man of learning generally that he was chosen an F.R.S. in 1723. Coming under the influence, probably through William Law, of the writings of Jacob Boehme, the marvellous shoemaker of Goerlitz in Silesia, who lived in the time of our Shakspere, and heartily adopting many of his views, he has left us a number of religious poems, which are seldom so sweet in music as they are profound in the metaphysics of religion. Here we have yet again a mystical thread running radiant athwart both warp and woof of our poetic web: the mystical thinker will ever be found the reviver of religious poetry; and although some of the seed had come from afar both in time and space, Byrom's verse is of indigenous growth. Much of the thought of the present day will be found in his verses. Here is a specimen of his metrical argumentation. It is taken from a series of Meditations for every Day in Passion Week.

WEDNESDAY.

Christ satisfieth the justice of God by fulfilling all righteousness.

Justice demandeth satisfaction—yes; And ought to have it where injustice is: But there is none in God—it cannot mean Demand of justice where it has full reign: To dwell in man it rightfully demands, Such as he came from his Creator's hands.

Man had departed from a righteous state, Which he at first must have, if God create: 'Tis therefore called God's righteousness, and must Be satisfied by man's becoming just; Must exercise good vengeance upon men, Till it regain its rights in them again.

This was the justice for which Christ became A man to satisfy its righteous claim; Became Redeemer of the human race, That sin in them to justice might give place: To satisfy a just and righteous will, Is neither more nor less than to fulfil.

* * * * *

Here are two stanzas of one of more mystical reflection:

A PENITENTIAL SOLILOQUY.

What though no objects strike upon the sight! Thy sacred presence is an inward light. What though no sounds shall penetrate the ear! To listening thought the voice of truth is clear. Sincere devotion needs no outward shrine; The centre of an humble soul is thine. There may I worship! and there mayst thou place Thy seat of mercy, and thy throne of grace! Yea, fix, if Christ my advocate appear, The dread tribunal of thy justice there! Let each vain thought, let each impure desire Meet in thy wrath with a consuming fire.

And here are two of more lyrical favour.

THE SOUL'S TENDENCY TOWARDS ITS TRUE CENTRE.

Stones towards the earth descend; Rivers to the ocean roll; Every motion has some end: What is thine, beloved soul?

"Mine is, where my Saviour is; There with him I hope to dwell: Jesu is the central bliss; Love the force that doth impel."

Truly thou hast answered right: Now may heaven's attractive grace Towards the source of thy delight Speed along thy quickening pace!

"Thank thee for thy generous care: Heaven, that did the wish inspire, Through thy instrumental prayer, Plumes the wings of my desire.

"Now, methinks, aloft I fly; Now with angels bear a part: Glory be to God on high! Peace to every Christian heart!"

THE ANSWER TO THE DESPONDING SOUL.

Cheer up, desponding soul; Thy longing pleased I see: 'Tis part of that great whole Wherewith I longed for thee.

Wherewith I longed for thee, And left my Father's throne, From death to set thee free, To claim thee for my own.

To claim thee for my own, I suffered on the cross: O! were my love but known, No soul could fear its loss.

No soul could fear its loss, But, filled with love divine, Would die on its own cross, And rise for ever mine.

Surely there is poetry as well as truth in this. But, certainly in general, his thought is far in excess of his poetry.

Here are a few verses which I shall once more entitle

DIVINE EPIGRAMS.

With peaceful mind thy race of duty run God nothing does, or suffers to be done, But what thou wouldst thyself, if thou couldst see Through all events of things as well as he.

* * * * *

Think, and be careful what thou art within, For there is sin in the desire of sin: Think and be thankful, in a different case, For there is grace in the desire of grace.

* * * * *

An heated fancy or imagination May be mistaken for an inspiration; True; but is this conclusion fair to make— That inspiration must be all mistake? A pebble-stone is not a diamond: true; But must a diamond be a pebble too? To own a God who does not speak to men, Is first to own, and then disown again; Of all idolatry the total sum Is having gods that are both deaf and dumb.

* * * * *

What is more tender than a mother's love To the sweet infant fondling in her arms? What arguments need her compassion move To hear its cries, and help it in its harms? Now, if the tenderest mother were possessed Of all the love within her single breast Of all the mothers since the world began, 'Tis nothing to the love of God to man.

* * * * *

Faith, Hope, and Love were questioned what they thought Of future glory which Religion taught: Now Faith believed it firmly to be true, And Hope expected so to find it too: Love answered, smiling with a conscious glow, "Believe? Expect? I know it to be so."



CHAPTER XX.

THE ROOTS OF THE HILLS.

In the poems of James Thomson, we find two hymns to the God of Creation—one in blank verse, the other in stanzas. They are of the kind which from him we should look for. The one in blank verse, which is as an epilogue to his great poem, The Seasons, I prefer.

We owe much to Thomson. Born (in Scotland) in the year 1700, he is the leading priest in a solemn procession to find God—not in the laws by which he has ordered his creation, but in the beauty which is the outcome of those laws. I do not say there is much of the relation of man to nature in his writing; but thitherward it tends. He is true about the outsides of God; and in Thomson we begin to feel that the revelation of God as meaning and therefore being the loveliness of nature, is about to be recognized. I do not say—to change my simile—that he is the first visible root in our literature whence we can follow the outburst of the flowers and foliage of our delight in nature: I could show a hundred fibres leading from the depths of our old literature up to the great root. Nor is it surprising that, with his age about him, he too should be found tending to magnify, not God's Word, but his works, above all his name: we have beauty for loveliness; beneficence for tenderness. I have wondered whether one great part of Napoleon's mission was not to wake people from this idolatry of the power of God to the adoration of his love.

The Hymn holds a kind of middle place between the Morning Hymn in the 5th Book of the Paradise Lost and the Hymn in the Vale of Chamouni. It would be interesting and instructive to compare the three; but we have not time. Thomson has been influenced by Milton, and Coleridge by both. We have delight in Milton; art in Thomson; heart, including both, in Coleridge.

HYMN.

These, as they change, Almighty Father, these Are but the varied God. The rolling year Is full of thee. Forth in the pleasing Spring Thy beauty walks, thy tenderness and love. Wide flush the fields; the softening air is balm; Echo the mountains round; the forest smiles; And every sense and every heart is joy. Then comes thy glory in the Summer months, With light and heat refulgent. Then thy sun Shoots full perfection through the swelling year And oft thy voice in dreadful thunder speaks, And oft at dawn, deep noon, or falling eve, By brooks and groves, in hollow-whispering gales.[159] A yellow-floating pomp, thy bounty shines In Autumn unconfined. Thrown from thy lap, Profuse o'er nature, falls the lucid shower Of beamy fruits; and, in a radiant stream, Into the stores of sterile Winter pours. In winter awful thou! with clouds and storms Around thee thrown—tempest o'er tempest rolled. Majestic darkness! on the whirlwind's wing Riding sublime, thou bidst the world adore,[160] And humblest nature with thy northern blast.

Mysterious round! what skill, what force divine Deep felt, in these appear! a simple train, Yet so delightful mixed, with such kind art, Such beauty and beneficence combined! Shade unperceived so softening into shade! And all so forming an harmonious whole, That, as they still succeed, they ravish still.

* * * * *

Nature attend! Join, every living soul, Beneath the spacious temple of the sky— In adoration join; and, ardent, raise One general song! To him, ye vocal gales, Breathe soft, whose spirit in your freshness breathes; Oh! talk of him in solitary glooms, Where, o'er the rock, the scarcely waving pine Fills the brown shade with a religious awe; And ye, whose bolder note is heard afar, Who shake the astonished world, lift high to heaven The impetuous song, and say from whom you rage. His praise, ye brooks, attune,—ye trembling rills, And let me catch it as I muse along. Ye headlong torrents, rapid and profound; Ye softer floods, that lead the humid maze Along the vale; and thou, majestic main, A secret world of wonders in thyself, Sound his stupendous praise, whose greater voice Or bids you roar, or bids your roarings fall. Soft roll your incense, herbs, and fruits, and flowers, In mingled clouds to him whose sun exalts, Whose breath perfumes you, and whose pencil paints. Ye forests, bend, ye harvests, wave to him; Breathe your still song into the reaper's heart, As home he goes beneath the joyous moon.

* * * * *

Bleat out afresh, ye hills! ye mossy rocks, Retain the sound; the broad responsive low, Ye valleys raise; for the great Shepherd reigns, And his unsuffering kingdom yet will come.

* * * * *

Ye chief, for whom the whole creation smiles, At once the head, the heart, and tongue of all, Crown the great hymn! in swarming cities vast, Assembled men, to the deep organ join The long-resounding voice, oft breaking clear, At solemn pauses, through the swelling base; And, as each mingling flame increases each, In one united ardour rise to heaven.

* * * * *

Should fate command me to the farthest verge Of the green earth, to distant barbarous climes, Rivers unknown to song, where first the sun Gilds Indian mountains, or his setting beam Flames on the Atlantic isles, 'tis nought to me, Since God is ever present, ever felt, In the void waste as in the city full; And where he vital breathes there must be joy.

* * * * *

The worship of intellectual power in laws and inventions is the main delight of the song; not the living presence of creative love, which never sings its own praises, but spends itself in giving. Still, although there has passed away a glory from the world of song, although the fervour of childlike worship has vanished for a season, there are signs in these verses of a new dawn of devotion. Even the exclusive and therefore blind worship of science will, when it has turned the coil of the ascending spiral, result in a new song to "him that made heaven and earth and the sea and the fountains of waters." But first, for a long time, the worship of power will go on. There is one sonnet by Kirke White, eighty-five years younger than Thomson, which is quite pagan in its mode of glorifying the power of the Deity.

But about the same time when Thomson's Seasons was published, which was in 1730, the third year of George II., that life which had burned on in the hidden corners of the church in spite of the worldliness and sensuality of its rulers, began to show a flame destined to enlarge and spread until it should have lighted up the mass with an outburst of Christian faith and hope. I refer to the movement called Methodism, in the midst of which, at an early stage of its history, arose the directing energies of John Wesley, a man sent of God to deepen at once and purify its motive influences. What he and his friends taught, would, I presume, in its essence, amount mainly to this: that acquiescence in the doctrines of the church is no fulfilment of duty—or anything, indeed, short of an obedient recognition of personal relation to God, who has sent every man the message of present salvation in his Son. A new life began to bud and blossom from the dry stem of the church. The spirit moved upon the waters of feeling, and the new undulation broke on the shores of thought in an outburst of new song. For while John Wesley roused the hearts of the people to sing, his brother Charles put songs in their mouths.

I do not say that many of these songs possess much literary merit, but many of them are real lyrics: they have that essential element, song, in them. The following, however, is a very fine poem. That certain expressions in it may not seem offensive, it is necessary to keep the allegory of Jacob and the Angel in full view—even better in view, perhaps, than the writer does himself.

WRESTLING JACOB.

Come, O thou traveller unknown, Whom still I hold, but cannot see! My company before is gone, And I am left alone with thee! With thee all night I mean to stay, And wrestle till the break of day!

I need not tell thee who I am, My misery or sin declare; Thyself hast called me by my name: Look on my hands, and read it there! But who, I ask thee, who art thou? Tell me thy name, and tell me now.

In vain thou struggles! to get free: I never will unloose my hold. Art thou the man that died for me? The secret of thy love unfold. Wrestling, I will not let thee go Till I thy name, thy nature know.

* * * * *

What though my sinking flesh complain, And murmur to contend so long! I rise superior to my pain: When I am weak, then I am strong; And when my all of strength shall fail, I shall with the God-man prevail.

My strength is gone; my nature dies; I sink beneath thy weighty hand: Faint to revive, and fall to rise; I fall, and yet by faith I stand— I stand, and will not let thee go Till I thy name, thy nature know.

Yield to me now, for I am weak, But confident in self-despair; Speak to my heart, in blessings speak; Be conquered by my instant[161] prayer. Speak, or thou never hence shalt move, And tell me if thy name is Love.

'Tis Love! 'tis Love! Thou diedst for me! I hear thy whisper in my heart! The morning breaks; the shadows flee: Pure universal Love thou art! To me, to all, thy bowels move: Thy nature and thy name is Love!

My prayer hath power with God; the grace Unspeakable I now receive; Through faith I see thee face to face— I see thee face to face, and live: In vain I have not wept and strove; Thy nature and thy name is Love.

I know thee, Saviour—who thou art— Jesus, the feeble sinner's friend! Nor wilt thou with the night depart, But stay and love me to the end! Thy mercies never shall remove: Thy nature and thy name is Love!

* * * * *

Contented now, upon my thigh I halt till life's short journey end; All helplessness, all weakness, I On thee alone for strength depend; Nor have I power from thee to move: Thy nature and thy name is Love.

Lame as I am, I take the prey; Hell, earth, and sin, with ease o'ercome; I leap for joy, pursue my way, And as a bounding hart fly home; Through all eternity to prove Thy nature and thy name is Love.

It seems to me that the art with which his very difficult end in the management of the allegory is reached, is admirable. I have omitted three stanzas.

I cannot give much from William Cowper. His poems—graceful always, and often devout even when playful—have few amongst them that are expressly religious, while the best of his hymns are known to every reader of such. Born in 1731, he was greatly influenced by the narrow theology that prevailed in his circle; and most of his hymns are marred by the exclusiveness which belonged to the system and not to the man. There is little of it in the following:—

Far from the world, O Lord, I flee, From strife and tumult far; From scenes where Satan wages still His most successful war.

The calm retreat, the silent shade, With prayer and praise agree, And seem by thy sweet bounty made For those who follow thee.

There if thy spirit touch the soul, And grace her mean abode, Oh with what peace, and joy, and love, She communes with her God!

There, like the nightingale, she pours Her solitary lays, Nor asks a witness of her song, Nor thirsts for human praise.

Author and guardian of my life, Sweet source of light divine, And—all harmonious names in one— My Saviour, thou art mine!

What thanks I owe thee, and what love— A boundless, endless store— Shall echo through the realms above When time shall be no more.

Sad as was Cowper's history, with the vapours of a low insanity, if not always filling his garden, yet ever brooding on the hill-tops of his horizon, he was, through his faith in God, however darkened by the introversions of a neat, poverty-stricken theology, yet able to lead his life to the end. It is delightful to discover that, when science, which is the anatomy of nature, had poisoned the theology of the country, in creating a demand for clean-cut theory in infinite affairs, the loveliness and truth of the countenance of living nature could calm the mind which this theology had irritated to the very borders of madness, and give a peace and hope which the man was altogether right in attributing to the Spirit of God. How many have been thus comforted, who knew not, like Wordsworth, the immediate channel of their comfort; or even, with Cowper, recognized its source! God gives while men sleep.



CHAPTER XXI.

THE NEW VISION.

William Blake, the painter of many strange and fantastic but often powerful—sometimes very beautiful pictures—wrote poems of an equally remarkable kind. Some of them are as lovely as they are careless, while many present a curious contrast in the apparent incoherence of the simplest language. He was born in 1757, towards the close of the reign of George II. Possibly if he had been sent to an age more capable of understanding him, his genius would not have been tempted to utter itself with such a wildness as appears to indicate hopeless indifference to being understood. We cannot tell sometimes whether to attribute the bewilderment the poems cause in us to a mysticism run wild, or to regard it as the reflex of madness in the writer. Here is a lyrical gem, however, although not cut with mathematical precision.

DAYBREAK.

To find the western path, Right through the gates of wrath I urge my way; Sweet morning leads me on: With soft repentant moan, I see the break of day

The war of swords and spears, Melted by dewy tears, Exhales on high; The sun is freed from fears, And with soft grateful tears, Ascends the sky.

The following is full of truth most quaintly expressed, with a homeliness of phrase quite delicious. It is one of the Songs of Innocence, published, as we learn from Gilchrist's Life of Blake, in the year 1789. They were engraved on copper with illustrations by Blake, and printed and bound by his wife. When we consider them in respect of the time when they were produced, we find them marvellous for their originality and simplicity.

ON ANOTHER'S SORROW.

Can I see another's woe, And not be in sorrow too? Can I see another's grief, And not seek for kind relief?

Can I see a falling tear, And not feel my sorrow's share? Can a father see his child Weep, nor be with sorrow filled?

Can a mother sit and hear An infant groan, an infant fear? No, no; never can it be! Never, never can it be!

And can he, who smiles on all, Hear the wren, with sorrows small— Hear the small bird's grief and care, Hear the woes that infants bear,

And not sit beside the nest, Pouring pity in their breast? And not sit the cradle near, Weeping tear on infant's tear?

And not sit both night and day, Wiping all our tears away? Oh, no! never can it be! Never, never can it be!

He doth give his joy to all; He becomes an infant small; He becomes a man of woe; He doth feel the sorrow too.

Think not thou canst sigh a sigh, And thy Maker is not by; Think not thou canst weep a tear, And thy Maker is not near.

Oh! he gives to us his joy, That our grief he may destroy: Till our grief is fled and gone, He doth sit by us and moan.

There is our mystic yet again leading the way.

A supreme regard for science, and the worship of power, go hand in hand: that knowledge is power has been esteemed the grandest incitement to study. Yet the antidote to the disproportionate cultivation of science, is simply power in its crude form—breaking out, that is, as brute force. When science, isolated and glorified, has produced a contempt, not only for vulgar errors, but for the truths which are incapable of scientific proof, then, as we see in the French Revolution, the wild beast in man breaks from its den, and chaos returns. But all the noblest minds in Europe looked for grand things in the aurora of this uprising of the people. To the terrible disappointment that followed, we are indebted for the training of Wordsworth to the priesthood of nature's temple. So was he possessed with the hope of a coming deliverance for the nations, that he spent many months in France during the Revolution. At length he was forced to seek safety at home. Dejected even to hopelessness for a time, he believed in nothing. How could there be a God that ruled in the earth when such a rising sun of promise was permitted to set in such a sea! But for man to worship himself is a far more terrible thing than that blood should flow like water: the righteous plague of God allowed things to go as they would for a time. But the power of God came upon Wordsworth—I cannot say as it had never come before, but with an added insight which made him recognize in the fresh gift all that he had known and felt of such in the past. To him, as to Cowper, the benignities of nature restored peace and calmness and hope—sufficient to enable him to look back and gather wisdom. He was first troubled, then quieted, and then taught. Such presence of the Father has been an infinitely more active power in the redemption of men than men have yet become capable of perceiving. The divine expressions of Nature, that is, the face of the Father therein visible, began to heal the plague which the worship of knowledge had bred. And the power of her teaching grew from comfort to prayer, as will be seen in the poem I shall give. Higher than all that Nature can do in the way of direct lessoning, is the production of such holy moods as result in hope, conscience of duty, and supplication. Those who have never felt it have to be told there is in her such a power—yielding to which, the meek inherit the earth.

NINTH EVENING VOLUNTARY.

Composed upon an evening of extraordinary splendour and beauty.

I.

Had this effulgence disappeared With flying haste, I might have sent Among the speechless clouds a look Of blank astonishment; But 'tis endued with power to stay, And sanctify one closing day, That frail Mortality may see— What is?—ah no, but what can be! Time was when field and watery cove With modulated echoes rang, While choirs of fervent angels sang Their vespers in the grove; Or, crowning, star-like, each some sovereign height, Warbled, for heaven above and earth below, Strains suitable to both.—Such holy rite, Methinks, if audibly repeated now From hill or valley could not move Sublimer transport, purer love, Than doth this silent spectacle—the gleam— The shadow—and the peace supreme!

II.

No sound is uttered,—but a deep And solemn harmony pervades The hollow vale from steep to steep, And penetrates the glades. Far distant images draw nigh, Called forth by wondrous potency Of beamy radiance, that imbues Whate'er it strikes with gem-like hues. In vision exquisitely clear, Herds range along the mountain side, And glistening antlers are descried, And gilded flocks appear. Thine is the tranquil hour, purpureal Eve! But long as godlike wish or hope divine Informs my spirit, ne'er can I believe That this magnificence is wholly thine! From worlds nor quickened by the sun A portion of the gift is won; An intermingling of heaven's pomp is spread On ground which British shepherds tread!

III.

And if there be whom broken ties Afflict, or injuries assail, Yon hazy ridges to their eyes Present a glorious scale[162] Climbing suffused with sunny air, To stop—no record hath told where; And tempting Fancy to ascend, And with immortal spirits blend! —Wings at my shoulders seem to play! But, rooted here, I stand and gaze On those bright steps that heavenward raise Their practicable way. Come forth, ye drooping old men, look abroad, And see to what fair countries ye are bound! And if some traveller, weary of his road, Hath slept since noontide on the grassy ground, Ye genii, to his covert speed, And wake him with such gentle heed As may attune his soul to meet the dower Bestowed on this transcendent hour.

IV.

Such hues from their celestial urn Were wont to stream before mine eye Where'er it wandered in the morn Of blissful infancy. This glimpse of glory, why renewed? Nay, rather speak with gratitude; For, if a vestige of those gleams Survived, 'twas only in my dreams. Dread Power! whom peace and calmness serve No less than nature's threatening voice, If aught unworthy be my choice, From THEE if I would swerve; Oh, let thy grace remind me of the light Full early lost, and fruitlessly deplored; Which, at this moment, on my waking sight Appears to shine, by miracle restored: My soul, though yet confined to earth, Rejoices in a second birth! —'Tis past; the visionary splendour fades; And night approaches with her shades.

Although I have mentioned Wordsworth before Coleridge because he was two years older, yet Coleridge had much to do with the opening of Wordsworth's eyes to such visions; as, indeed, more than any man in our times, he has opened the eyes of the English people to see wonderful things. There is little of a directly religious kind in his poetry; yet we find in him what we miss in Wordsworth, an inclined plane from the revelation in nature to the culminating revelation in the Son of Man. Somehow, I say, perhaps because we find it in his prose, we feel more of this in Coleridge's verse.

Coleridge is a sage, and Wordsworth is a seer; yet when the sage sees, that is, when, like the son of Beor, he falls into a trance having his eyes open, or, when feeling and sight are one and philosophy is in abeyance, the ecstasy is even loftier in Coleridge than in Wordsworth. In their highest moods they seem almost to change places—Wordsworth to become sage, and Coleridge seer. Perhaps the grandest hymn of praise which man, the mouth-piece of Nature, utters for her, is the hymn of Mont Blanc.

HYMN

Before sunrise, in the Vale of Chamouni.

Hast thou a charm to stay the morning star In his steep course—so long he seems to pause On thy bald awful head, O sovran Blanc? The Arve and Arveiron at thy base Rave ceaselessly; but thou, most awful Form! Risest from forth thy silent sea of pines, How silently! Around thee and above Deep is the air and dark, substantial, black, An ebon mass: methinks thou piercest it As with a wedge! But when I look again, It is thine own calm home, thy crystal shrine, Thy habitation from eternity! O dread and silent Mount! I gazed upon thee Till thou, still present to the bodily sense, Didst vanish from my thought: entranced in prayer I worshipped the Invisible alone.

Yet, like some sweet beguiling melody, So sweet, we know not we are listening to it, Thou, the meanwhile, wast blending with my thought, Yea, with my life and life's own secret joy; Till the dilating soul, enwrapt, transfused, Into the mighty vision passing—there As in her natural form, swelled vast to Heaven!

Awake, my soul! Not only passive praise Thou owest! Not alone these swelling tears, Mute thanks and secret ecstasy! Awake, Voice of sweet song! Awake, my heart, awake! Green vales and icy cliffs, all join my hymn.

Thou first and chief, sole sovran[163] of the Vale! O struggling with the darkness all the night, And visited all night by troops of stars,[164] Or when they climb the sky or when they sink! Companion of the morning-star at dawn, Thyself earth's rosy star, and of the dawn[165] Co-herald! wake, O wake, and utter praise! Who sank thy sunless pillars deep in earth? Who filled thy countenance with rosy light? Who made thee parent of perpetual streams?

And you, ye five wild torrents fiercely glad! Who called you forth from night and utter death, From dark and icy caverns called you forth,[166] Down those precipitous, black, jagged rocks, For ever shattered, and the same for ever? Who gave you your invulnerable life, Your strength, your speed, your fury, and your joy, Unceasing thunder, and eternal foam? And who commanded—and the silence came— Here let the billows stiffen, and have rest?[167]

Ye ice-falls! ye that from the mountain's brow Adown enormous ravines slope amain— Torrents, methinks, that heard a mighty voice, And stopped at once amid their maddest plunge!— Motionless torrents! silent cataracts! Who made you glorious as the gates of heaven Beneath the keen full moon? Who bade the sun Clothe you with rainbows? Who, with living flowers Of loveliest blue, spread garlands at your feet?— God! let the torrents, like a shout of nations, Answer! and let the ice-plains echo, God! God! sing, ye meadow-streams, with gladsome voice! Ye pine-groves, with your soft and soul-like sounds! And they too have a voice, yon piles of snow, And in their perilous fall shall thunder, God! Ye living flowers that skirt the eternal frost! Ye wild goats sporting round the eagle's nest! Ye eagles, playmates of the mountain-storm! Ye lightnings, the dread arrows of the clouds! Ye signs and wonders of the element! Utter forth God, and fill the hills with praise.

Thou too, hoar Mount! with thy sky-pointing peaks, Oft from whose[168] feet the avalanche, unheard, Shoots downward, glittering through the pure serene Into the depth of clouds that veil thy breast— Thou too again, stupendous Mountain! thou That, as I raise my head, awhile bowed low In adoration—upward from thy base Slow-travelling with dim eyes suffused with tears— Solemnly seemest, like a vapoury cloud, To rise before me! rise, O ever rise; Rise like a cloud of incense from the earth! Thou kingly spirit throned among the hills! Thou dread ambassador from earth to heaven! Great hierarch! tell thou the silent sky, And tell the stars, and tell yon rising sun, Earth, with her thousand voices, praises God.

Here is one little poem I think most valuable, both from its fulness of meaning, and the form, as clear as condensed, in which that is embodied.

ON AN INFANT

Which died before baptism.

"Be rather than be called a child of God," Death whispered. With assenting nod, Its head upon its mother's breast The baby bowed without demur— Of the kingdom of the blest Possessor, not inheritor.

Next the father let me place the gifted son, Hartley Coleridge. He was born in 1796, and died in 1849. Strange, wayward, and in one respect faulty, as his life was, his poetry—strange, and exceedingly wayward too—is often very lovely. The following sonnet is all I can find room for:—

"SHE LOVED MUCH."

She sat and wept beside his feet. The weight Of sin oppressed her heart; for all the blame, And the poor malice of the worldly shame, To her was past, extinct, and out of date; Only the sin remained—the leprous state. She would be melted by the heat of love, By fires far fiercer than are blown to prove And purge the silver ore adulterate. She sat and wept, and with her untressed hair Still wiped the feet she was so blest to touch; And he wiped off the soiling of despair From her sweet soul, because she loved so much. I am a sinner, full of doubts and fears: Make me a humble thing of love and tears.



CHAPTER XXII.

THE FERVOUR OF THE IMPLICIT. INSIGHT OF THE HEART.

The late Dean Milman, born in 1791, best known by his very valuable labours in history, may be taken as representing a class of writers in whom the poetic fire is ever on the point, and only on the point, of breaking into a flame. His composition is admirable—refined, scholarly, sometimes rich and even gorgeous in expression—yet lacking that radiance of the unutterable to which the loftiest words owe their grandest power. Perhaps the best representative of his style is the hymn on the Incarnation, in his dramatic poem, The Fall of Jerusulem. But as an extract it is tolerably known. I prefer giving one from his few Hymns for Church Service.

EIGHTEENTH SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY.

When God came down from heaven—the living God— What signs and wonders marked his stately way? Brake out the winds in music where he trod? Shone o'er the heavens a brighter, softer day?

The dumb began to speak, the blind to see, And the lame leaped, and pain and paleness fled; The mourner's sunken eye grew bright with glee, And from the tomb awoke the wondering dead.

When God went back to heaven—the living God— Rode he the heavens upon a fiery car? Waved seraph-wings along his glorious road? Stood still to wonder each bright wandering star?

Upon the cross he hung, and bowed his head, And prayed for them that smote, and them that curst; And, drop by drop, his slow life-blood was shed, And his last hour of suffering was his worst.

The Christian Year of the Rev. John Keble (born in 1800) is perhaps better known in England than any other work of similar church character. I must confess I have never been able to enter into the enthusiasm of its admirers. Excellent, both in regard of their literary and religious merits, true in feeling and thorough in finish, the poems always remind me of Berlin work in iron—hard and delicate. Here is a portion of one of the best of them.

ST. MATTHEW.

Ye hermits blest, ye holy maids, The nearest heaven on earth, Who talk with God in shadowy glades, Free from rude care and mirth; To whom some viewless teacher brings The secret lore of rural things, The moral of each fleeting cloud and gale, The whispers from above, that haunt the twilight vale:

Say, when in pity ye have gazed On the wreath'd smoke afar, That o'er some town, like mist upraised, Hung hiding sun and star; Then as ye turned your weary eye To the green earth and open sky, Were ye not fain to doubt how Faith could dwell Amid that dreary glare, in this world's citadel?

But Love's a flower that will not die For lack of leafy screen, And Christian Hope can cheer the eye That ne'er saw vernal green: Then be ye sure that Love can bless Even in this crowded loneliness, Where ever-moving myriads seem to say, Go—thou art nought to us, nor we to thee—away!

There are in this loud stunning tide Of human care and crime, With whom the melodies abide Of the everlasting chime; Who carry music in their heart Through dusky lane and wrangling mart, Plying their daily task with busier feet, Because their secret souls a holy strain repeat.

There are here some indications of that strong reaction of the present century towards ancient forms of church life. This reaction seems to me a further consequence of that admiration of power of which I have spoken. For, finding the progress of discovery in the laws of nature constantly bring an assurance most satisfactory to the intellect, men began to demand a similar assurance in other matters; and whatever department of human thought could not be subjected to experiment or did not admit of logical proof began to be regarded with suspicion. The highest realms of human thought—where indeed only grand conviction, and that the result not of research, but of obedience to the voice within, can be had—came to be by such regarded as regions where, no scientific assurance being procurable, it was only to his loss that a man should go wandering: the whole affair was unworthy of him. And if there be no guide of humanity but the intellect, and nothing worthy of its regard but what that intellect can isolate and describe in the forms peculiar to its operations,—that is, if a man has relations to nothing beyond his definition, is not a creature of the immeasurable,—then these men are right. But there have appeared along with them other thinkers who could not thus be satisfied—men who had in their souls a hunger which the neatest laws of nature could not content, who could not live on chemistry, or mathematics, or even on geology, without the primal law of their many dim-dawning wonders—that is, the Being, if such there might be, who thought their laws first and then embodied them in a world of aeonian growth. These indeed seek law likewise, but a perfect law—a law they can believe perfect beyond the comprehension of powers of whose imperfection they are too painfully conscious. They feel in their highest moments a helplessness that drives them to search after some Power with a heart deeper than his power, who cares for the troubled creatures he has made. But still under the influence of that faithless hunger for intellectual certainty, they look about and divide into two parties: both would gladly receive the reported revelation in Jesus, the one if they could have evidence enough from without, the other if they could only get rid of the difficulties it raises within. I am aware that I distinguish in the mass, and that both sides would be found more or less influenced by the same difficulties—but more and less, and therefore thus classified by the driving predominance. Those of the one party, then, finding no proof to be had but that in testimony, and anxious to have all they can—delighting too in a certain holy wilfulness of intellectual self-immolation, accept the testimony in the mass, and become Roman Catholics. Nor is it difficult to see how they then find rest. It is not the dogma, but the contact with Christ the truth, with Christ the man, which the dogma, in pacifying the troubles of the intellect—if only by a soporific, has aided them in reaching, that gives them peace: it is the truth itself that makes them free.

The worshippers of science will themselves allow, that when they cannot gain observations enough to satisfy them upon any point in which a law of nature is involved, they must, if possible, institute experiments. I say therefore to those whose observation has not satisfied them concerning the phenomenon Christianity,—"Where is your experiment? Why do you not thus try the utterance claiming to be the law of life? Call it a hypothesis, and experiment upon it. Carry into practice, well justified of your conscience, the words which the Man spoke, for therein he says himself lies the possibility of your acceptance of his mission; and if, after reasonable time thus spent, you are not yet convinced enough to give testimony—I will not annoy you by saying to facts, but—to conviction, I think neither will you be ready to abandon the continuous experiment." These Roman Catholics have thus met with Jesus, come into personal contact with him: by the doing of what he tells us, and by nothing else, are they blessed. What if their theories show to me like a burning of the temple and a looking for the god in the ashes? They know in whom they have believed. And if some of us think we have a more excellent way, we shall be blessed indeed if the result be no less excellent than in such men as Faber, Newman, and Aubrey de Vere. No man needs be afraid that to speak the truth concerning such will hasten the dominance of alien and oppressive powers; the truth is free, and to be just is to be strong. Should the time come again when Liberty is in danger, those who have defended the truth even in her adversaries, if such there be, will be found the readiest to draw the sword for her, and, hating not, yet smite for the liberty to do even them justice. To give the justice we claim for ourselves is, if there be a Christ, the law of Christ, to obey which is eternally better than truest theory.

I should like to give many of the hymns of Dr. Faber. Some of them are grand, others very lovely, and some, of course, to my mind considerably repulsive. He seems to me to go wrong nowhere in originating—he produces nothing unworthy except when he reproduces what he never could have entertained but for the pressure of acknowledged authority. Even such things, however, he has enclosed in pearls, as the oyster its incommoding sand-grains.

His hymn on The Greatness of God is profound; that on The Will of God is very wise; that to The God of my Childhood is full of quite womanly tenderness: all are most simple in speech, reminding us in this respect of John Mason. In him, no doubt, as in all of his class, we find traces of that sentimentalism in the use of epithets—small words, as distinguished from homely, applied to great things—of which I have spoken more than once; but criticism is not to be indulged in the reception of great gifts—of such a gift as this, for instance:—

THE ETERNITY OF GOD.

O Lord! my heart is sick, Sick of this everlasting change; And life runs tediously quick Through its unresting race and varied range: Change finds no likeness to itself in Thee, And wakes no echo in Thy mute eternity.

Dear Lord! my heart is sick Of this perpetual lapsing time, So slow in grief, in joy so quick, Yet ever casting shadows so sublime: Time of all creatures is least like to Thee, And yet it is our share of Thine eternity.

Oh change and time are storms For lives so thin and frail as ours; For change the work of grace deforms With love that soils, and help that overpowers; And time is strong, and, like some chafing sea, It seems to fret the shores of Thine eternity.

Weak, weak, for ever weak! We cannot hold what we possess; Youth cannot find, age will not seek,— Oh weakness is the heart's worst weariness: But weakest hearts can lift their thoughts to Thee; It makes us strong to think of Thine eternity.

Thou hadst no youth, great God! An Unbeginning End Thou art; Thy glory in itself abode, And still abides in its own tranquil heart: No age can heap its outward years on Thee: Dear God! Thou art Thyself Thine own eternity!

Without an end or bound Thy life lies all outspread in light; Our lives feel Thy life all around, Making our weakness strong, our darkness bright; Yet is it neither wilderness nor sea, But the calm gladness of a full eternity.

Oh Thou art very great To set Thyself so far above! But we partake of Thine estate, Established in Thy strength and in Thy love: That love hath made eternal room for me In the sweet vastness of its own eternity.

Oh Thou art very meek To overshade Thy creatures thus! Thy grandeur is the shade we seek; To be eternal is Thy use to us: Ah, Blessed God! what joy it is to me To lose all thought of self in Thine eternity.

Self-wearied, Lord! I come; For I have lived my life too fast: Now that years bring me nearer home Grace must be slowly used to make it last; When my heart beats too quick I think of Thee, And of the leisure of Thy long eternity.

Farewell, vain joys of earth! Farewell, all love that it not His! Dear God! be Thou my only mirth, Thy majesty my single timid bliss! Oh in the bosom of eternity Thou dost not weary of Thyself, nor we of Thee!

How easily his words flow, even when he is saying the deepest things! The poem is full of the elements of the finest mystical metaphysics, and yet there is no effort in their expression. The tendency to find God beyond, rather than in our daily human conditions, is discernible; but only as a tendency.

What a pity that the sects are so slow to become acquainted with the grand best in each other!

I do not find in Dr. Newman either a depth or a precision equal to that of Dr. Faber. His earlier poems indicate a less healthy condition of mind. His Dream of Gerontius is, however, a finer, as more ambitious poem than any of Faber's. In my judgment there are weak passages in it, with others of real grandeur. But I am perfectly aware of the difficulty, almost impossibility, of doing justice to men from some of whose forms of thought I am greatly repelled, who creep from the sunshine into every ruined archway, attracted by the brilliance with which the light from its loophole glows in its caverned gloom, and the hope of discovering within it the first steps of a stair winding up into the blue heaven. I apologize for the unavoidable rudeness of a critic who would fain be honest if he might; and I humbly thank all such as Dr. Newman, whose verses, revealing their saintship, make us long to be holier men.

Of his, as of Faber's, I have room for no more than one. It was written off Sardinia.

DESOLATION.

O say not thou art left of God, Because His tokens in the sky Thou canst not read: this earth He trod To teach thee He was ever nigh.

He sees, beneath the fig-tree green, Nathaniel con His sacred lore; Shouldst thou thy chamber seek, unseen He enters through the unopened door.

And when thou liest, by slumber bound, Outwearied in the Christian fight, In glory, girt with saints around, He stands above thee through the night.

When friends to Emmaus bend their course, He joins, although He holds their eyes: Or, shouldst thou feel some fever's force, He takes thy hand, He bids thee rise.

Or on a voyage, when calms prevail, And prison thee upon the sea, He walks the waves, He wings the sail, The shore is gained, and thou art free.

Sir Aubrey de Vere is a poet profound in feeling, and gracefully tender in utterance. I give one short poem and one sonnet.

REALITY.

Love thy God, and love Him only: And thy breast will ne'er be lonely. In that one great Spirit meet All things mighty, grave, and sweet. Vainly strives the soul to mingle With a being of our kind: Vainly hearts with hearts are twined: For the deepest still is single. An impalpable resistance Holds like natures still at distance. Mortal! love that Holy One! Or dwell for aye alone.

I respond most heartily to the last two lines; but I venture to add, with regard to the preceding six, "Love that holy One, and the impalpable resistance will vanish; for when thou seest him enter to sup with thy neighbour, thou wilt love that neighbour as thyself."

SONNET.

Ye praise the humble: of the meek ye say, "Happy they live among their lowly bowers; "The mountains, and the mountain-storms are ours." Thus, self-deceivers, filled with pride alway, Reluctant homage to the good ye pay, Mingled with scorn like poison sucked from flowers— Revere the humble; godlike are their powers: No mendicants for praise of men are they. The child who prays in faith "Thy will be done" Is blended with that Will Supreme which moves A wilderness of worlds by Thought untrod; He shares the starry sceptre, and the throne: The man who as himself his neighbour loves Looks down on all things with the eyes of God!

Is it a fancy that, in the midst of all this devotion and lovely thought, I hear the mingled mournful tone of such as have cut off a right hand and plucked out a right eye, which had not caused them to offend? This is tenfold better than to have spared offending members; but the true Christian ambition is to fill the divine scheme of humanity—abridging nothing, ignoring nothing, denying nothing, calling nothing unclean, but burning everything a thank-offering in the flame of life upon the altar of absolute devotion to the Father and Saviour of men. We must not throw away half his gifts, that we may carry the other half in both hands to his altar.

But sacred fervour is confined to no sect. Here it is of the profoundest, and uttered with a homely tenderness equal to that of the earliest writers. Mrs. Browning, the princess of poets, was no partisan. If my work were mainly critical, I should feel bound to remark upon her false theory of English rhyme, and her use of strange words. That she is careless too in her general utterance I cannot deny; but in idea she is noble, and in phrase magnificent. Some of her sonnets are worthy of being ranged with the best in our language—those of Milton and Wordsworth.

BEREAVEMENT.

When some Beloveds, 'neath whose eyelids lay The sweet lights of my childhood, one by one Did leave me dark before the natural sun, And I astonied fell, and could not pray, A thought within me to myself did say, "Is God less God that thou art left undone? Rise, worship, bless Him! in this sackcloth spun, As in that purple!"—But I answer, Nay! What child his filial heart in words can loose, If he behold his tender father raise The hand that chastens sorely? Can he choose But sob in silence with an upward gaze? And my great Father, thinking fit to bruise, Discerns in speechless tears both prayer and praise.

COMFORT.

Speak low to me, my Saviour, low and sweet, From out the hallelujahs sweet and low, Lest I should fear and fall, and miss thee so, Who art not missed by any that entreat. Speak to me as to Mary at thy feet— And if no precious gums my hands bestow, Let my tears drop like amber, while I go In reach of thy divinest voice complete In humanest affection—thus, in sooth To lose the sense of losing! As a child, Whose song-bird seeks the wood for evermore, Is sung to in its stead by mother's mouth; Till sinking on her breast, love-reconciled, He sleeps the faster that he wept before.

Gladly would I next give myself to the exposition of several of the poems of her husband, Robert Browning, especially the Christmas Eve and Easter Day; in the first of which he sets forth in marvellous rhymes the necessity both for widest sympathy with the varied forms of Christianity, and for individual choice in regard to communion; in the latter, what it is to choose the world and lose the life. But this would take many pages, and would be inconsistent with the plan of my book.

When I have given two precious stanzas, most wise as well as most lyrical and lovely, from the poems of our honoured Charles Kingsley, I shall turn to the other of the classes into which the devout thinkers of the day have divided.

A FAREWELL.

My fairest child, I have no song to give you; No lark could pipe to skies so dull and grey; Yet, ere we part, one lesson I can leave you For every day.

Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever; Do noble things, not dream them, all day long; And so make life, death, and that vast for-ever One grand, sweet song.

Surely these last, who have not accepted tradition in the mass, who believe that we must, as our Lord demanded of the Jews, of our own selves judge what is right, because therein his spirit works with our spirit,—worship the Truth not less devotedly than they who rejoice in holy tyranny over their intellects.



CHAPTER XXIII.

THE QUESTIONING FERVOUR.

And now I turn to the other class—that which, while the former has fled to tradition for refuge from doubt, sets its face towards the spiritual east, and in prayer and sorrow and hope looks for a dawn—the noble band of reverent doubters—as unlike those of the last century who scoffed, as those of the present who pass on the other side. They too would know; but they know enough already to know further, that it is from the hills and not from the mines their aid must come. They know that a perfect intellectual proof would leave them doubting all the same; that their high questions cannot be answered to the intellect alone, for their whole nature is the questioner; that the answers can only come as questioners and their questions grow towards them. Hence, growing hope, blossoming ever and anon into the white flower of confidence, is their answer as yet; their hope—the Beatific Vision—the happy-making sight, as Milton renders the word of the mystics.

It is strange how gentle a certain large class of the priesthood will be with those who, believing there is a God, find it hard to trust him, and how fierce with those who, unable, from the lack of harmony around and in them, to say they are sure there is a God, would yet, could they find him, trust him indeed. "Ah, but," answer such of the clergy and their followers, "you want a God of your own making." "Certainly," the doubters reply, "we do not want a God of your making: that would be to turn the universe into a hell, and you into its torturing demons. We want a God like that man whose name is so often on your lips, but whose spirit you understand so little—so like him that he shall be the bread of life to all our hunger—not that hunger only already satisfied in you, who take the limit of your present consciousness for that of the race, and say, 'This is all the world needs:' we know the bitterness of our own hearts, and your incapacity for intermeddling with its joy. We

have another mountain-range, from whence Bursteth a sun unutterably bright;

nor for us only, but for you also, who will not have the truth except it come to you in a system authorized of man."

I have attributed a general utterance to these men, widely different from each other as I know they are.

Here is a voice from one of them, Arthur Hugh Clough, who died in 1861, well beloved. It follows upon two fine poems, called The Questioning Spirit, and Bethesda, in which is represented the condition of many of the finest minds of the present century. Let us receive it as spoken by one in the foremost ranks of these doubters, men reviled by their brethren who dare not doubt for fear of offending the God to whom they attribute their own jealousy. But God is assuredly pleased with those who will neither lie for him, quench their dim vision of himself, nor count that his mind which they would despise in a man of his making.

Across the sea, along the shore, In numbers more and ever more, From lonely hut and busy town, The valley through, the mountain down, What was it ye went out to see, Ye silly folk of Galilee? The reed that in the wind doth shake? The weed that washes in the lake? The reeds that waver, the weeds that float?— young man preaching in a boat.

What was it ye went out to hear By sea and land, from far and near? A teacher? Rather seek the feet Of those who sit in Moses' seat. Go humbly seek, and bow to them, Far off in great Jerusalem. From them that in her courts ye saw, Her perfect doctors of the law, What is it came ye here to note?— A young man preaching in a boat

A prophet! Boys and women weak! Declare, or cease to rave: Whence is it he hath learned to speak? Say, who his doctrine gave? A prophet? Prophet wherefore he Of all in Israel tribes?— He teacheth with authority, And not as do the Scribes.

Here is another from one who will not be offended if I class him with this school—the finest of critics as one of the most finished of poets—Matthew Arnold. Only my reader must remember that of none of my poets am I free to choose that which is most characteristic: I have the scope of my volume to restrain me.

THE GOOD SHEPHERD WITH THE KID.

He saves the sheep; the goats he doth not save! So rang Tertullian's sentence, on the side Of that unpitying Phrygian sect which cried: "Him can no fount of fresh forgiveness lave, Who sins, once washed by the baptismal wave!" So spake the fierce Tertullian. But she sighed, The infant Church: of love she felt the tide Stream on her from her Lord's yet recent grave. And then she smiled, and in the Catacombs, With eye suffused but heart inspired true, On those walls subterranean, where she hid Her head in ignominy, death, and tombs, She her Good Shepherd's hasty image drew; And on his shoulders, not a lamb, a kid.

Of these writers, Tennyson is the foremost: he has written the poem of the hoping doubters, the poem of our age, the grand minor organ-fugue of In Memoriam. It is the cry of the bereaved Psyche into the dark infinite after the vanished Love. His friend is nowhere in his sight, and God is silent. Death, God's final compulsion to prayer, in its dread, its gloom, its utter stillness, its apparent nothingness, urges the cry. Meanings over the dead are mingled with profoundest questionings of philosophy, the signs of nature, and the story of Jesus, while now and then the star of the morning, bright Phosphor, flashes a few rays through the shifting cloudy dark. And if the sun has not arisen on the close of the book, yet the Aurora of the coming dawn gives light enough to make the onward journey possible and hopeful: who dares say that he walks in the full light? that the counsels of God are to him not a matter of faith, but of vision?

Bewildered in the perplexities of nature's enigmas, and driven by an awful pain of need, Tennyson betakes himself to the God of nature, thus:

LIV.

The wish, that of the living whole No life may fail beyond the grave; Derives it not from what we have The likest God within the soul?

Are God and Nature then at strife, That Nature lends such evil dreams, So careful of the type she seems, So careless of the single life;

That I, considering everywhere Her secret meaning in her deeds, And finding that of fifty seeds She often brings but one to bear;

I falter where I firmly trod, And falling with my weight of cares Upon the great world's altar-stairs That slope thro' darkness up to God;

I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope, And gather dust and chaff, and call To what I feel is Lord of all, And faintly trust the larger hope.



Once more, this is how he uses the gospel-tale: Mary has returned home from the sepulchre, with Lazarus so late its prey, and her sister and Jesus:—

XXXII.

Her eyes are homes of silent prayer, Nor other thought her mind admits But, he was dead, and there he sits, And he that brought him back is there.

Then one deep love doth supersede All other, when her ardent gaze Roves from the living brother's face, And rests upon the Life indeed.

All subtle thought, all curious fears, Borne down by gladness so complete, She bows, she bathes the Saviour's feet With costly spikenard and with tears.

Thrice blest whose lives are faithful prayers, Whose loves in higher love endure; What souls possess themselves so pure, Or is there blessedness like theirs?

* * * * *

I have thus traced—how slightly!—the course of the religious poetry of England, from simple song, lovingly regardful of sacred story and legend, through the chant of philosophy, to the full-toned lyric of adoration. I have shown how the stream sinks in the sands of an evil taste generated by the worship of power and knowledge, and that a new growth of the love of nature—beauty counteracting not contradicting science—has led it by a fair channel back to the simplicities of faith in some, and to a holy questioning in others; the one class having for its faith, the other for its hope, that the heart of the Father is a heart like ours, a heart that will receive into its noon the song that ascends from the twilighted hearts of his children.

Gladly would I have prayed for the voices of many more of the singers of our country's psalms. Especially do I regret the arrival of the hour, because of the voices of living men and women. But the time is over and gone. The twilight has already embrowned the gray glooms of the cathedral arches, and is driving us forth to part at the door.

But the singers will yet sing on to him that hath ears to hear. When he returns to seek them, the shadowy door will open to his touch, the long-drawn aisles receding will guide his eye to the carven choir, and there they still stand, the sweet singers, content to repeat ancient psalm and new song to the prayer of the humblest whose heart would join in England's Antiphon.



THE END.



[1] The rhymes of the first and second and of the fourth and fifth lines throughout the stanzas, are all, I think, what the French call feminine rhymes, as in the words "sleeping," "weeping." This I think it better not to attempt retaining, because the final unaccented syllable is generally one of those e's which, having first become mute, have since been dropped from our spelling altogether.

[2] For the grammatical interpretation of this line, I am indebted to Mr. Richard Morris. Shall is here used, as it often is, in the sense of must, and rede is a noun; the paraphrase of the whole being, "Son, what must be to me for counsel?" "What counsel must I follow?"

[3] "Do not blame me, it is my nature."

[4] Mon is used for man or woman: human being. It is so used in Lancashire still: they say mon to a woman.

[5] "They weep quietly and becomingly." I think there must be in this word something of the sense of gently,-uncomplainingly.

[6] "And are shrunken (clung with fear) like the clay." So here is the same as as. For this interpretation I am indebted to Mr. Morris.

[7] "It is no wonder though it pleases me very ill."

[8] I think the poet, wisely anxious to keep his last line just what it is, was perplexed for a rhyme, and fell on the odd device of saying, for "both day and night," "both day and the other."

[9] "All as if it were not never, I wis."

[10] "So that many men say—True it is, all goeth but God's will."

[11] I conjecture "All that grain (me) groweth green."

[12] Not is a contraction for ne wat, know not. "For I know not whither I must go, nor how long here I dwell." I think y is omitted by mistake before duelle.

[13] This is very poor compared with the original.

[14] I owe almost all my information on the history of these plays to Mr. Collier's well-known work on English Dramatic Poetry.

[15] Able to suffer, deserving, subject to, obnoxious to, liable to death and vengeance.

[16] The word harry is still used in Scotland, but only in regard to a bird's nest.

[17] Do-well, Do-better, and Do-best.

[18] Complexion.

[19] Ruddiness—complexion.

[20] Twig.

[21] Life (?).—I think she should be he.

[22] Field.

[23] "Carry you beyond this region."

[24] For the knowledge of this poem I am indebted to the Early English Text Society, now printing so many valuable manuscripts.

[25] The for here is only an intensive.

[26] Pref is proof. Put in pref seems to stand for something more than being tested. Might it not mean proved to be a pearl of price?

[27] A word acknowledged to be obscure. Mr. Morris suggests on the left hand, as unbelieved.

[28] "Except that which his sole wit may judge."

[29] "Be equal to thy possessions:" "fit thy desires to thy means."

[30] "Ambition has uncertainty." We use the word ticklish still.

[31] "Is mingled everywhere."

[32] To relish, to like. "Desire no more than is fitting for thee."

[33] For.

[34] "Let thy spiritual and not thine animal nature guide thee."

[35] "And I dare not falsely judge the reverse."

[36] A poem so like this that it may have been written immediately after reading it, is attributed to Robert Henryson, the Scotch poet. It has the same refrain to every verse as Lydgate's.

[37] "Mourning for mishaps that I had caught made me almost mad."

[38] "Led me all one:" "brought me back to peace, unity, harmony." (?)

[39] "That I read on (it)."

[40] Of in the original, as in the title.

[41] Does this mean by contemplation on it?

[42] "I paid good attention to it."

[43] "Greeted thee"—in the very affliction.

[44] "For Christ's love let us do the same."

[45] "Whatever grief or woe enslaves thee." But thrall is a blunder, for the word ought to have rhymed with make.

[46] "The precious leader that shall judge us."

[47] "When thou art in sorry plight, think of this."

[48] "And death, beyond renewal, lay hold upon their life."

[49] Sending, message: "whatever varying decree God sends thee."

[50] "Receives his message;" "accepts his will."

[51] Recently published by the Early English Text Society. S.L. IV.

[52] "Child born of a bright lady." Bird, berd, brid, burd, means lady originally: thence comes our bride.

[53] In Chalmers' English Poets, from which I quote, it is selly-worme; but I think this must be a mistake. Silly would here mean weak.

[54] The first poem he wrote, a very fine one, The Shepheard's Calender, is so full of old and provincial words, that the educated people of his own time required a glossary to assist them in the reading of it.

[55] Eyas is a young hawk, whose wings are not fully fledged.

[56] "What less than that is fitting?"

[57] For, even in Collier's edition, but certainly a blunder.

[58] Was, in the editions; clearly wrong.

[59] "Of the same mould and hand as we."

[60] There was no contempt in the use of this word then.

[61] Simple-hearted, therefore blessed; like the German selig.

[62] A shell plentiful on the coast of Palestine, and worn by pilgrims to show that they had visited that country.

[63] Evil was pronounced almost as a monosyllable, and was at last contracted to ill.

[64] "Come to find a place." The transitive verb stow means to put in a place: here it is used intransitively.

[65] The list of servants then kept in large houses, the number of such being far greater than it is now.

[66] There has been some blundering in the transcription of the last two lines of this stanza. In the former of the two I have substituted doth for dost, evidently wrong. In the latter, the word cradle is doubtful. I suggest cradled, but am not satisfied with it. The meaning is, however, plain enough.

[67] "The very blessing the soul needed."

[68] An old English game, still in use in Scotland and America, but vanishing before cricket.

[69] Silly means innocent, and therefore blessed; ignorant of evil, and in so far helpless. It is easy to see how affection came to apply it to idiots. It is applied to the ox and ass in the next stanza, and is often an epithet of shepherds.

[70] See Poems by Sir Henry Wotton and others. Edited by the Rev. John Hannah.

[71] "Know thyself."

[72] "And I have grown their map."

[73] The guilt of Adam's first sin, supposed by the theologians of Dr. Donne's time to be imputed to Adam's descendants.

[74] The past tense: ran.

[75] Their door to enter into sin—by his example.

[76] He was sent by James I. to assist an embassy to the Elector Palatine, who had married his daughter Elizabeth.

[77] He had lately lost his wife, for whom he had a rare love.

[78] "If they know us not by intuition, but by judging from circumstances and signs."

[79] "With most willingness."

[80] "Art proud."

[81] A strange use of the word; but it evidently means recovered, and has some analogy with the French repasser.

[82] To understood: to sweeten.

[83] He plays upon the astrological terms, houses and schemes. The astrologers divided the heavens into twelve houses; and the diagrams by which they represented the relative positions of the heavenly bodies, they called schemes.

[84] The tree of knowledge.

[85] Dyce, following Seward, substitutes curse.

[86] A glimmer of that Platonism of which, happily, we have so much more in the seventeenth century.

[87] Should this be "in fees;" that is, in acknowledgment of his feudal sovereignty?

[88] Warm is here elongated, almost treated as a dissyllable.

[89] "He ought not to be forsaken: whoever weighs the matter rightly, will come to this conclusion."

[90] The Eridan is the Po.—As regards classical allusions in connexion with sacred things, I would remind my reader of the great reverence our ancestors had for the classics, from the influence they had had in reviving the literature of the country.—I need hardly remind him of the commonly-received fancy that the swan does sing once—just as his death draws nigh. Does this come from the legend of Cycnus changed into a swan while lamenting the death of his friend Phaeton? or was that legend founded on the yet older fancy? The glorious bird looks as if he ought to sing.

[91] The poet refers to the singing of the hymn before our Lord went to the garden by the brook Cedron.

[92] The construction is obscure just from the insertion of the to before breathe, where it ought not to be after the verb hear. The poet does not mean that he delights to hear that voice more than to breathe gentle airs, but more than to hear gentle airs (to) breathe. To hear, understood, governs all the infinitives that follow; among the rest, the winds (to) chide.

[93] Rut is used for the sound of the tide in Cheshire. (See Halliwell's Dictionary.) Does rutty mean roaring? or does it describe the deep, rugged shores of the Jordan?

[94] A monosyllable, contracted afterwards into bloom.

[95] Willows.

[96] Groom originally means just a man. It was a word much used when pastoral poetry was the fashion. Spenser has herd-grooms in his Shepherd's Calendar. This last is what it means here: shepherds.

[97] Obtain, save.

[98] Equivalent to "What are those hands of yours for?"

[99] He was but thirty-nine when he died.

[100] To rhyme with pray in the second line.

[101] Bunch of flowers. He was thinking of Aaron's rod, perhaps.

[102] To correspond to that of Christ.

[103] Again a touch of holy humour: to match his Master's predestination, he will contrive something three years beforehand, with an if.

[104] The here in the preceding line means his book; hence the thy book is antithetical.

[105] Concent is a singing together, or harmoniously.

[106] Music depends all on proportions.

[107] The diapason is the octave. Therefore "all notes true." See note 2, p. 205.

[108] An intransitive verb: he was wont.

[109] The birds called halcyons were said to build their nests on the water, and, while they were brooding, to keep it calm.

[110] The morning star.

[111] The God of shepherds especially, but the God of all nature—the All in all, for Pan means the All.

[112] Milton here uses the old Ptolemaic theory of a succession of solid crystal concentric spheres, in which the heavenly bodies were fixed, and which revolving carried these with them. The lowest or innermost of these spheres was that of the moon. "The hollow round of Cynthia's seat" is, therefore, this sphere in which the moon sits.

[113] That cannot be expressed or described.

[114] By hinges he means the axis of the earth, on which it turns as on a hinge. The origin of hinge is hang. It is what anything hangs on.

[115] This is an apostrophe to the nine spheres (see former note), which were believed by the ancients to send forth in their revolutions a grand harmony, too loud for mortals to hear. But no music of the lower region can make up full harmony without the bass of heaven's organ. The music of the spheres was to Milton the embodiment of the theory of the universe. He uses the symbol often.

[116] Consort is the right word scientifically. It means the fitting together of sounds according to their nature. Concert, however, is not wrong. It is even more poetic than consort, for it means a striving together, which is the idea of all peace: the strife is together, and not of one against the other. All harmony is an ordered, a divine strife. In the contest of music, every tone restrains its foot and bows its head to the rest in holy dance.

[117] Symphony is here used for chorus, and quite correctly; for symphony is a voicing together. To this symphony of the angels the spheres and the heavenly organ are the accompaniment.

[118] Die of the music.

[119] Not merely swings, but lashes about.

[120] Full of folds or coils.

[121] The legend concerning this cessation of the oracles associates it with the Crucifixion. Milton in The Nativity represents it as the consequence of the very presence of the infant Saviour. War and lying are banished together.

[122] The genius is the local god, the god of the place as a place.

[123] The Lars were the protecting spirits of the ancestors of the family; the Lemures were evil spirits, spectres, or bad ghosts. But the notions were somewhat indefinite.

[124] Flamen was the word used for priest when the Romans spoke of the priest of any particular divinity. Hence the peculiar power in the last line of the stanza.

[125] Jupiter Ammon, worshipped in Libya, in the north of Africa, under the form of a goat. "He draws in his horn."

[126] The Syrian Adonis.

[127] Frightful, horrible, as, a grisly bear.

[128] Isis, Orus, Anubis, and Osiris, all Egyptian divinities—the last worshipped in the form of a bull.

[129] No rain falls in Egypt.

[130] Last-born: the star in the east.

[131] Bright-armoured.

[132] Ready for what service may arise.

[133] The with we should now omit, for when we use it we mean the opposite of what is meant here.

[134] It is the light of the soul going out from the eyes, as certainly as the light of the world coming in at the eyes that makes things seen.

[135] The action by which a body attacked collects force by opposition.

[136] Cut roughly through.

[137] Intransitively used. They touch each other.

[138] Self-desire, which is death's pit, &c.

[139] Which understood.

[140] How unpleasant conceit can become. The joy of seeing the Saviour was stolen because they gained it in the absence of the sun!

[141] A trisyllable.

[142] His garland.

[143] The "sunny seed" in their hearts.

[144] From tine or tind, to set on fire. Hence tinder.

[145] The body of Jesus.

[146] Mark i. 35; Luke xxi. 37. The word time must be associated both with progress and prayer—his walking-time and prayer-time.

[147] This is an allusion to the sphere-music: the great heavens is a clock whose hours are those when Jesus retires to his Father; and to these hours the sphere-music gives the chime.

[148] He continues his poetic synonyms for the night.

[149] "Behold I stand at the door and knock."

[150] A monosyllable.

[151] Often used for chambers.

[152] "The creation looks for the light, thy shadow?" Or, "The light looks for thy shadow, the sun"?

[153] Perforce: of necessity.

[154] He does not mean his fellows, but his bodily nature.

[155] Savourest?

[156] The first I ever saw of its hymns was on a broad-sheet of Christmas Carols, with coloured pictures, printed in Seven Dials.

[157] They passed through twenty editions, not to mention one lately published (by Daniel Sedgwick, of 81, Sun-street, Bishopsgate, a man who, concerning hymns and their writers, knows more than any other man I have met), from which, carefully edited, I have gathered all my information, although I had known the book itself for many years.

[158] The animal spirits of the old physiologists.

[159] In the following five lines I have adopted the reading of the first edition, which, although a little florid, I prefer to the scanty two lines of the later.

[160] False in feeling, nor like God at all, although a ready pagan representation of him. There is much of the pagan left in many Christians—poets too.

[161] Insisting—persistent.

[162] Great cloudy ridges, one rising above the other, like a grand stair up to the heavens. See Wordsworth's note.

[163] The mountain.

[164] These two lines are just the symbol for the life of their author.

[165] From the rose-light on the snow of its peak.

[166] They all flow from under the glaciers, fed by their constant melting.

[167] Turning for contrast to the glaciers, which he apostrophizes in the next line.

[168] Antecedent, peaks.



[Transcriber's Note: In this electronic edition, the footnotes have been numbered and relocated to the end of the work. In chapter 14, the word "Iris", which appears in our print copy, seems to be a misprint for "Isis" and was corrected as such.]