The distinctive character of poetry, it has been said, and credited
almost universally, is _to please_. That they who have studied the laws
of thought and passion should have suffered themselves to be deluded by
an unmeaning word is mortifying enough; but it is more than
mortifying--it perplexes and confounds--to think that poets themselves,
and poets too of the highest order, have declared the same degrading
belief of what is the scope and tendency, the end and aim of their own
divine art--forsooth, _to please_! Pleasure is no more the end of
poetry, than it is the end of knowledge, or of virtue, or of religion,
or of this world. The end of poetry is pleasure, delight, instruction,
expansion, elevation, honour, glory, happiness here and hereafter, or it
is nothing. Is the end of "Paradise Lost" to please? Is the end of
Dante's Divine Comedy to please? Is the end of the Psalms of David to
please? Or of the songs of Isaiah? Yet it is probable that poetry has
often been injured or vitiated by having been written in the spirit of
this creed. It relieved poets from the burden of their duty--from the
responsibility of their endowments--from the conscience that is in
genius. We suspect that this doctrine has borne especially hard on all
sacred poetry, disinclined poets to devoting their genius to it--and
consigned, if not to oblivion, to neglect, much of what is great in that
magnificent walk. For if the masters of the Holy Harp are to strike it
but to please--if their high inspirations are to be deadened and dragged
down by the prevalent power of such a mean and unworthy aim--they will
either be contented to awaken a few touching tones of "those strains
that once did sweet in Zion glide"--unwilling to prolong and deepen them
into the diapason of praise--or they will deposit their lyre within the
gloom of the sanctuary, and leave unawakened "the soul of music sleeping
on its strings."
All arguments, or rather objections to, sacred poetry, dissolve as you
internally look at them, like unabiding mist-shapes, or rather like
imagined mirage where no mirage is, but the mind itself makes ocular
deceptions for its own amusement. By sacred poetry is mostly meant
Scriptural; but there are, and always have been, conceited and callous
critics, who would exclude all religious feelings from poetry, and
indeed from prose too, compendiously calling them all cant. Had such
criticasters been right, all great nations would not have so gloried in
their great bards. Poetry, it is clear, embraces all we can experience;
and every high, impassioned, imaginative, intellectual, and moral state
of being becomes religious before it passes away, provided it be left
free to seek the empyrean, and not adstricted to the glebe by some
severe slavery of condition, which destroys the desire of ascent by the
same inexorable laws that palsy the power, and reconcile the toilers to
the doom of the dust. If all the states of being that poetry illustrates
do thus tend, of their own accord, towards religious elevation, all high
poetry must be religious; and so it is, for its whole language is
breathing of a life "above the smoke and stir of this dim spot which men
call earth;" and the feelings, impulses, motives, aspirations,
obligations, duties, privileges, which it shadows forth or embodies,
enveloping them in solemn shade or attractive light, are all, directly
or indirectly, manifestly or secretly, allied with the sense of the
immortality of the soul, and the belief of a future state of reward and
retribution. Extinguish that sense and that belief in a poet's soul, and
he may hang up his harp.
Among the great living poets, Wordsworth is the one whose poetry is to
us the most inexplicable--with all our reverence for his transcendent
genius, we do not fear to say the most open to the most serious
charges--on the score of its religion. From the first line of the
"Lyrical Ballads" to the last of "The Excursion"--it is avowedly one
system of thought and feeling, embracing his experiences of human life,
and his meditations on the moral government of this world. The human
heart--the human mind--the human soul--to use his own fine words--is
"the haunt and main region of his song." There are few, perhaps none of
our affections--using that term in its largest sense--which have not
been either slightly touched upon, or fully treated, by Wordsworth. In
his poetry, therefore, we behold an image of what, to his eye, appears
to be human life. Is there, or is there not, some great and lamentable
defect in that image, marring both the truth and beauty of the
representation? We think there is--and that it lies in his Religion.
In none of Wordsworth's poetry, previous to his "Excursion," is there
any allusion made, except of the most trivial and transient kind, to
Revealed Religion. He certainly cannot be called a Christian poet. The
hopes that lie beyond the grave--and the many holy and awful feelings in
which on earth these hopes are enshrined and fed, are rarely if ever
part of the character of any of the persons--male or female--old or
young--brought before us in his beautiful Pastorals. Yet all the most
interesting and affecting ongoings of this life are exquisitely
delineated--and innumerable of course are the occasions on which, had
the thoughts and feelings of revealed religion been in Wordsworth's
heart during the hours of inspiration--and he often has written like a
man inspired--they must have found expression in his strains; and the
personages, humble or high, that figure in his representations, would
have been, in their joys or their sorrows, their temptations and their
trials, Christians. But most assuredly this is not the case; the
religion of this great Poet--in all his poetry published previous to
"The Excursion"--is but the "Religion of the Woods."
In "The Excursion," his religion is brought forward--prominently and
conspicuously--in many elaborate dialogues between Priest, Pedlar, Poet,
and Solitary. And a very high religion it often is; but is it
Christianity? No--it is not. There are glimpses given of some of the
Christian doctrines; just as if the various philosophical disquisitions,
in which the Poem abounds, would be imperfect without some allusion to
the Christian creed. The interlocutors--eloquent as they all are--say
but little on that theme; nor do they show--if we except the
Priest--much interest in it--any solicitude; they may all, for anything
that appears to the contrary, be deists.
Now, perhaps, it may be said that Wordsworth was deterred from entering
on such a theme by the awe of his spirit. But there is no appearance of
this having been the case in any one single passage in the whole poem.
Nor could it have been the case with such a man--a man privileged, by
the power God has bestowed upon him, to speak unto all the nations of
the earth, on all themes, however high and holy, which the children of
men can feel and understand. Christianity, during almost all their
disquisitions, lay in the way of all the speakers, as they kept
journeying among the hills,
"On man, on nature, and on human life,
Musing in Solitude!"
But they, one and all, either did not perceive it, or, perceiving it,
looked upon it with a cold and indifferent regard, and passed by into
the poetry breathing from the dewy woods, or lowering from the cloudy
skies. Their talk is of "Palmyra central, in the desert," rather than of
Jerusalem. On the mythology of the Heathen much beautiful poetry is
bestowed, but none on the theology of the Christian.
Yet there is no subject too high for Wordsworth's muse. In the preface
to "The Excursion," he says daringly--we fear too daringly,--
"Urania, I shall need
Thy guidance, or a greater muse, if such
Descend to earth, or dwell in highest heaven!
For I must tread on shadowy ground, must sink
Deep--and aloft ascending, breathe in worlds
To which the heaven of heavens is but a veil.
All strength--all terror--single or in bands,
That ever was put forth in personal form,
Jehovah with his thunder, and the choir
Of shouting angels, and the empyreal thrones;
I passed them unalarm'd!"
Has the poet, who believes himself entitled to speak thus of the power
and province given to him to put forth and to possess, spoken in
consonance with such a strain, by avoiding, in part of the very work to
which he so triumphantly appeals, the Christian Revelation? Nothing
could have reconciled us to a burst of such--audacity--we use the word
considerately--but the exhibition of a spirit divinely imbued with the
Christian faith. For what else, we ask, but the truths beheld by the
Christian Faith, can be beyond those "personal forms," "beyond Jehovah,"
"the choirs of shouting angels," and the "empyreal thrones?"
This omission is felt the more deeply--the more sadly--from such
introduction as there is of Christianity; for one of the books of "The
Excursion" begins with a very long, and a very noble eulogy on the
Church Establishment in England. How happened it that he who pronounced
such eloquent panegyric--that they who so devoutly inclined their ear to
imbibe it--should have been all contented with
"That basis laid, these principles of faith
Announced,"
and yet throughout the whole course of their discussions, before and
after, have forgotten apparently that there was either Christianity or a
Christian Church in the world?
We do not hesitate to say, that the thoughtful and sincere student of
this great poet's works, must regard such omission--such inconsistency
or contradiction--with more than the pain of regret; for there is no
relief afforded to our defrauded hearts from any quarter to which we can
look. A pledge has been given, that all the powers and privileges of a
Christian poet shall be put forth and exercised for our behoof--for our
delight and instruction; all other poetry is to sink away before the
heavenly splendour; Urania, or a greater muse, is invoked; and after all
this solemn, and more than solemn preparation made for our initiation
into the mysteries, we are put off with a well-merited encomium on the
Church of England, from Bishop to Curate inclusive; and though we have
much fine poetry, and some high philosophy, it would puzzle the most
ingenious to detect much, or any, Christian religion.
Should the opinion boldly avowed be challenged, we shall enter into
further exposition and illustration of it; meanwhile, we confine
ourselves to some remarks on one of the most elaborate tales of domestic
suffering in "The Excursion." In the story of Margaret, containing, we
believe, more than four hundred lines--a tolerably long poem in
itself--though the whole and entire state of a poor deserted wife and
mother's heart, for year after year of "hope deferred, that maketh the
heart sick," is described, or rather dissected, with an almost cruel
anatomy--not one quivering fibre being left unexposed--all the
fluctuating, and finally all the constant agitations laid bare and naked
that carried her at last lingeringly to the grave--there is not--except
one or two weak lines, that seem to have been afterwards purposely
dropped in--one single syllable about Religion. Was Margaret a
Christian?--Let the answer be yes--as good a Christian as ever kneeled
in the small mountain chapel, in whose churchyard her body now waits for
the resurrection. If she was--then the picture painted of her and her
agonies, is a libel not only on her character, but on the character of
all other poor Christian women in this Christian land. Placed as she
was, for so many years, in the clutches of so many passions--she surely
must have turned sometimes--ay, often, and often, and often, else had
she sooner left the clay--towards her Lord and Saviour. But of such
"comfort let no man speak," seems to have been the principle of Mr
Wordsworth; and the consequence is, that this, perhaps the most
elaborate picture he ever painted of any conflict within any one human
heart, is, with all its pathos, repulsive to every religious
mind--_that_ being wanting without which the entire representation is
vitiated, and necessarily false to nature--to virtue--to resignation--to
life--and to death. These may seem strong words--but we are ready to
defend them in the face of all who may venture to impugn their truth.
This utter absence of Revealed Religion, where it ought to have been
all-in-all--for in such trials in real life it is all-in-all, or we
regard the existence of sin or sorrow with repugnance--shocks far deeper
feelings within us than those of taste, and throws over the whole poem
to which the tale of Margaret belongs, an unhappy suspicion of
hollowness and insincerity in that poetical religion, which at the best
is a sorry substitute indeed for the light that is from heaven. Above
all, it flings, as indeed we have intimated, an air of absurdity over
the orthodox Church-of-Englandism--for once to quote a not inexpressive
barbarism of Bentham--which every now and then breaks out either in
passing compliment--amounting to but a bow--or in eloquent laudation,
during which the poet appears to be prostrate on his knees. He speaks
nobly of cathedrals, and minsters, and so forth, reverendly adorning
all the land; but in none--no, not one of the houses of the humble, the
hovels of the poor into which he takes us--is the religion preached in
those cathedrals and minsters, and chanted in prayer to the pealing
organ, represented as the power that in peace supports the roof-tree,
lightens the hearth, and is the guardian, the tutelary spirit of the
lowly dwelling. Can this be right? Impossible. And when we find the
Christian religion thus excluded from Poetry, otherwise as good as ever
was produced by human genius, what are we to think of the Poet, and of
the world of thought and feeling, fancy and imagination, in which he
breathes, nor fears to declare to all men that he believes himself to be
one of the order of the High Priests of nature?
Shall it be said, in justification of the poet, that he presents a very
interesting state of mind, sometimes found actually existing, and does
not pretend to present a model of virtue?--that there are miseries which
shut some hearts against religion, sensibilities which, being too
severely tried, are disinclined, at least at certain stages of their
suffering, to look to that source for comfort?--that this is human
nature, and the description only follows it?--that when "in peace and
comfort" her best hopes were directed to "the God in heaven," and that
her habit in that respect was only broken up by the stroke of her
calamity, causing such a derangement of her mental power as should
deeply interest the sympathies?--in short, that the poet is an artist,
and that the privation of all comfort from religion completes the
picture of her desolation?
Would that such defence were of avail! But of whom does the poet so
pathetically speak?
"Of one whose stock
Of virtues bloom'd beneath this lowly roof.
She was a woman of a steady mind,
Tender and deep in her excess of love;
Not speaking much--pleased rather with the joy
Of her own thoughts. By some especial care
Her temper had been framed, as if to make
A Being who, by adding love to fear,
Might live on earth a life of happiness.
Her wedded partner lack'd not on his side
The humble worth that satisfied her heart--
Frugal, affectionate, sober, and withal
Keenly industrious. She with pride would tell
That he was often seated at his loom
In summer, ere the mower was abroad
Among the dewy grass--in early spring,
Ere the last star had vanish'd. They who pass'd
At evening, from behind the garden fence
Might hear his busy spade, which he would ply
After his daily work, until the light
Had fail'd, and every leaf and flower were lost
In the dark hedges. So their days were spent
In peace and comfort; and a pretty boy
Was their best hope, next to the God in heaven."
We are prepared by that character, so amply and beautifully drawn, to
pity her to the utmost demand that may be made on our pity--to judge her
leniently, even if in her desertion she finally give way to inordinate
and incurable grief. But we are not prepared to see her sinking from
depth to depth of despair, in wilful abandonment to her anguish, without
oft-repeated and long-continued passionate prayers for support or
deliverance from her trouble, to the throne of mercy. Alas! it is true
that in our happiness our gratitude to God is too often more selfish
than we think, and that in our misery it faints or dies. So is it even
with the best of us--but surely not all life long--unless the heart has
been utterly crushed--the brain itself distorted in its functions, by
some calamity, under which nature's self gives way, and falls into ruins
like a rent house when the last prop is withdrawn.
"Nine tedious years
From their first separation--nine long years
She linger'd in unquiet widowhood--
A wife and widow. Needs must it have been
A sore heart-wasting."
It must indeed, and it is depicted by a master's hand. But even were it
granted that sufferings, such as hers, might, in the course of nature,
have extinguished all heavenly comfort--all reliance on God and her
Saviour--the process and progress of such fatal relinquishment should
have been shown, with all its struggles and all its agonies; if the
religion of one so good was so unavailing, its weakness should have
been exhibited and explained, that we might have known assuredly why, in
the multitude of the thoughts within her, there was no solace for her
sorrow, and how unpitying Heaven let her die of grief.
This tale, too, is the very first told by the Pedlar to the Poet, under
circumstances of much solemnity, and with affecting note of preparation.
It arises naturally from the sight of the ruined cottage near which
they, by appointment, have met; the narrator puts his whole heart into
it, and the listener is overcome by its pathos. No remark is made on
Margaret's grief, except that
"I turn'd aside in weakness, nor had power
To thank him for the tale which he had told.
I stood, and leaning o'er the garden wall,
Review'd that woman's sufferings; and it seem'd
To comfort me, while, with a brother's love,
I bless'd her in the impotence of grief.
Then towards the cottage I return'd, and traced
Fondly, though with an interest more mild,
The sacred spirit of humanity,
Which, 'mid the calm, oblivious tendencies
Of nature--'mid her plants, and weeds, and flowers,
And silent overgrowings, still survived."
Such musings receive the Pedlar's approbation, and he says,--
"My friend! enough to sorrow you have given.
The purposes of wisdom ask no more.
Be wise and cheerful, and no longer read
The forms of things with an unworthy eye.
She sleeps in the calm earth, and peace is here."
As the Poet, then, was entirely satisfied with the tale, so ought to be
all readers. No hint is dropped that there was anything to blame in the
poor woman's nine years' passion--no regret breathed that she had sought
not, by means offered to all, for that peace of mind which passeth all
understanding--no question asked, how it was that she had not communed
with her own afflicted heart, over the pages of that Book where it is
written, "Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I
will give you rest!" The narrator had indeed said, that on revisiting
her during her affliction,--
"Her humble lot of books,
Which in her cottage window, heretofore,
Had been piled up against the corner panes
In seemly order, now, with straggling leaves,
Lay scatter'd here and there, open or shut,
As they had chanced to fall."
But he does not mention the Bible.
What follows has always seemed to us of a questionable character:--
"I well remember that those very plumes,
Those weeds, and the high spear-grass on that wall,
By mist and silent rain-drops silver'd o'er,
As once I pass'd, into my heart convey'd
So still an image of tranquillity,
So calm and still, and look'd so beautiful
Amid the uneasy thoughts which filled my mind,
_That what we feel of sorrow and despair
From ruin and from change, and all the griefs
The passing shows of Being leave behind_,
Appear'd an idle dream, that could not live
Where meditation was. I turn'd away,
And walk'd along my road in happiness."
These are fine lines; nor shall we dare, in face of them, to deny the
power of the beauty and serenity of nature to assuage the sorrow of us
mortal beings, who live for awhile on her breast. Assuredly there is
sorrow that may be so assuaged; and the sorrow here spoken of--for poor
Margaret, many years dead--was of that kind. But does not the heart of a
man beat painfully, as if violence were offered to its most sacred
memories, to hear from the lips of wisdom, that "sorrow and despair from
ruin and from change, and all the griefs" that we can suffer here below,
appear an idle dream among plumes, and weeds, and spear-grass, and
mists, and rain-drops? "Where meditation is!" What meditation? Turn
thou, O child of a day! to the New Testament, and therein thou mayest
find comfort. It matters not whether a spring-bank be thy seat by Rydal
Mere, "while heaven and earth do make one imagery," or thou sittest in
the shadow of death, beside a tomb.
We said, that for the present we should confine our remarks on this
subject to the story of Margaret; but they are, more or less,
applicable to almost all the stories in "The Excursion." In many of the
eloquent disquisitions and harangues of the Three Friends, they carry
along with them the sympathies of all mankind; and the wisest may be
enlightened by their wisdom. But what we complain of is, that neither in
joy nor grief, happiness nor misery, is religion the dominant principle
of thought and feeling in the character of any one human being with whom
we are made acquainted, living or dead. Of not a single one, man or
woman, are we made to feel the beauty of holiness--the power and the
glory of the Christian Faith. Beings are brought before us whom we pity,
respect, admire, love. The great poet is high-souled and
tender-hearted--his song is pure as the morning, bright as day, solemn
as night. But his inspiration is not drawn from the Book of God, but
from the Book of Nature. Therefore it fails to sustain his genius when
venturing into the depths of tribulation and anguish. Therefore
imperfect are his most truthful delineations of sins and sorrows; and
not in his philosophy, lofty though it be, can be found alleviation or
cure of the maladies that kill the soul. Therefore never will "The
Excursion" become a bosom-book, endeared to all ranks and conditions of
a Christian People, like "The Task" or the "Night Thoughts." Their
religion is that of revelation--it acknowledges no other source but the
word of God. To that word, in all difficulty, distress, and dismay,
these poets appeal; and though they may sometimes, or often,
misinterpret its judgment, that is an evil incident to finite
intelligence; and the very consciousness that it is so, inspires a
perpetual humility that is itself a virtue found to accompany only a
Christian's Faith.
We have elsewhere vindicated the choice of a person of low degree as
Chief of "The Excursion," and exult to think that a great poet should
have delivered his highest doctrines through the lips of a Scottish
Pedlar.
"Early had he learn'd
To reverence the volume that displays
The mystery of life that cannot die."
Throughout the poem he shows that he does reverence it, and that his
whole being has been purified and elevated by its spirit. But fond as he
is of preaching, and excellent in the art or gift, a Christian Preacher
he is not--at best a philosophical divine. Familiar by his parentage and
nurture with all most hallowed round the poor man's hearth, and guarded
by his noble nature from all offence to the sanctities there enshrined;
yet the truth must be told, he speaks not, he expounds not the Word as
the servant of the Lord, as the follower of Him Crucified. There is very
much in his announcements to his equals wide of the mark set up in the
New Testament. We seem to hear rather of a divine power and harmony in
the universe than of the Living God. The spirit of Christianity as
connected with the Incarnation of the Deity, the Human-God, the link
between heaven and earth, between helplessness and omnipotence, ought to
be everywhere visible in the religious effusions of a Christian
Poet--wonder and awe for the greatness of God, gratitude and love for
his goodness, humility and self-abasement for his own unworthiness.
Passages may perhaps be found in "The Excursion" expressive of that
spirit, but they are few and faint, and somewhat professional, falling
not from the Pedlar but from the Pastor. If the mind, in forming its
conceptions of divine things, is prouder of its own power than humbled
in the comparison of its personal inferiority; and in enunciating them
in verse, more rejoices in the consciousness of the power of its own
genius than in the contemplation of Him from whom cometh every good and
perfect gift--it has not attained Piety, and its worship is not an
acceptable service. For it is self-worship--worship of the creature's
own conceptions, and an overweening complacency with his own greatness,
in being able to form and so to express them as to win or command the
praise and adoration of his fellow-mortals. Those lofty speculations,
alternately declaimed among the mountains, with an accompaniment of
waterfalls, by men full of fancies and eloquent of speech, elude the
hold of the earnest spirit longing for truth; disappointment and
impatience grow on the humblest and most reverent mind, and escaping
from the multitude of vain words, the neophyte finds in one chapter of a
Book forgotten in that babblement, a light to his way and a support to
his steps, which, following and trusting, he knows will lead him to
everlasting life.
Throughout the poem there is much talk of the light of nature, little of
the light of revelation, and they all speak of the theological
doctrines of which our human reason gives us assurance. Such expressions
as these may easily lead to important error, and do, indeed, seem often
to have been misconceived and misemployed. What those truths are which
human reason, unassisted, would discover to us on these subjects, it is
impossible for us to know, for we have never seen it left absolutely to
itself. Instruction, more or less, in wandering tradition, or in
express, full, and recorded revelation, has always accompanied it; and
we have never had other experience of the human mind than as exerting
its powers under the light of imparted knowledge. In these
circumstances, all that can be properly meant by those expressions which
regard the power of the human mind to guide, to enlighten, or to satisfy
itself in such great inquiries is, not that it can be the discoverer of
truth, but that, with the doctrines of truth set before it, it is able
to deduce arguments from its own independent sources which confirm it in
their belief; or that, with truth and error proposed to its choice, it
has means, to a certain extent, in its own power, of distinguishing one
from the other. For ourselves, we may understand easily that it would be
impossible for us so to shut out from our minds the knowledge which has
been poured in upon them from our earliest years, in order to ascertain
what self-left reason could find out. Yet this much we are able to do in
the speculations of our philosophy: We can inquire, in this light, what
are the grounds of evidence which nature and reason themselves offer for
belief in the same truths. A like remark must be extended to the
morality which we seem now to inculcate from the authority of human
reason. We no longer possess any such independent morality. The spirit
of a higher, purer, moral law than man could discover, has been breathed
over the world, and we have grown up in the air and the light of a
system so congenial to the highest feelings of our human nature, that
the wisest spirits amongst us have sometimes been tempted to forget that
its origin is divine.
Had "The Excursion" been written in the poet's later life, it had not
been so liable to such objections as these; for much of his poetry
composed since that era is imbued with a religious spirit, answering the
soul's desire of the devoutest Christian. His Ecclesiastical Sonnets are
sacred Poetry indeed. How comprehensive the sympathy of a truly pious
heart! How religion reconciles different forms, and modes, and signs,
and symbols of worship, provided only they are all imbued with the
spirit of faith! This is the toleration Christianity sanctions--for it
is inspired by its own universal love. No sectarian feeling here, that
would exclude or debar from the holiest chamber in the poet's bosom one
sincere worshipper of our Father which is in heaven. Christian brethren!
By that mysterious bond our natures are brought into more endearing
communion--now more than ever brethren, because of the blood that was
shed for us all from His blessed side! Even of that most awful mystery
in some prayer-like strains the Poet tremblingly speaks, in many a
strain, at once so affecting and so elevating--breathing so divinely of
Christian charity to all whose trust is in the Cross! Who shall say what
form of worship is most acceptable to the Almighty? All are holy in
which the soul seeks to approach him--holy
"The chapel lurking among trees,
Where a few villagers on bended knees
Find solace which a busy world disdains;"
we feel as the poet felt when he breathed to the image of some old
abbey,--
"Once ye were holy, ye are holy still!"
And what heart partakes not the awe of his
"Beneath that branching roof
Self-poised and scoop'd into ten thousand cells
Where light and shade repose, where music dwells
Lingering--and wandering on as loth to die"?
Read the first of these sonnets with the last--and then once more the
strains that come between--and you will be made to feel how various and
how vast beneath the sky are the regions set apart by the soul for
prayer and worship; and that all places become consecrated--the high and
the humble--the mean and the magnificent--in which Faith and Piety have
sought to hold communion with Heaven.
But they who duly worship God in temples made with hands, meet every
hour of their lives "Devotional Excitements" as they walk among His
works; and in the later poetry of Wordsworth these abound--age having
solemnised the whole frame of his being, that was always alive to
religious emotions--but more than ever now, as around his paths in the
evening of life longer fall the mysterious shadows. More fervid lines
have seldom flowed from his spirit in its devoutest mood, than some
awakened by the sounds and sights of a happy day in May--to him--though
no church-bell was heard--a Sabbath. His occasional poems are often felt
by us to be linked together by the finest affinities, which perhaps are
but affinities between the feelings they inspire. Thus we turn from
those lines to some on a subject seemingly very different, from a
feeling of such fine affinities--which haply are but those subsisting
between all things and thoughts that are pure and good. We hear in them
how the Poet, as he gazes on a Family that holds not the Christian
Faith, embraces them in the folds of Christian Love--and how religion as
well as nature sanctifies the tenderness that is yearning at his heart
towards them--"a Jewish Family"--who, though outcasts by Heaven's
decree, are not by Heaven, still merciful to man, left forlorn on earth.
How exquisite the stanzas composed in one of the Catholic Chapels in
Switzerland,--
"Doom'd as we are our native dust
To wet with many a bitter shower,
It ill befits us to disdain
The Altar, to deride the Fane,
Where patient sufferers bend, in trust
To win a happier hour.
I love, where spreads the village lawn,
Upon some knee-worn Cell to gaze;
Hail to the firm unmoving Cross,
Aloft, where pines their branches toss!
And to the Chapel far withdrawn,
That lurks by lonely ways!
Where'er we roam--along the brink
Of Rhine--or by the sweeping Po,
Through Alpine vale, or champaign wide,
_Whate'er we look on, at our side
Be Charity--to bid us think
And feel, if we would know._"
How sweetly are interspersed among them some of humbler mood, most
touching in their simple pathos--such as a Hymn for the boatmen as they
approach the Rapids--Lines on hearing the song of the harvest damsels
floating homeward on the lake of Brientz--the Italian Itinerant and the
Swiss Goat-herd--and the Three Cottage Girls, representatives of
Italian, of Helvetian, and of Scottish beauty, brought together, as if
by magic, into one picture, each breathing in her natural grace the
peculiar spirit and distinctive character of her country's charms! Such
gentle visions disappear, and we sit by the side of the Poet as he gazes
from his boat floating on the Lake of Lugano, on the Church of San
Salvador, which was almost destroyed by lightning a few years ago, while
the altar and the image of the patron saint were untouched, and devoutly
listen while he exclaims,--
"Cliffs, fountains, rivers, seasons, times,
Let all remind the soul of heaven;
Our slack devotion needs them all;
And faith, so oft of sense the thrall,
While she, by aid of Nature, climbs,
May hope to be forgiven."
We do not hesitate to pronounce "Eclipse of the Sun, 1820," one of the
finest lyrical effusions of combined thought, passion, sentiment, and
imagery, within the whole compass of poetry. If the beautiful be indeed
essentially different from the sublime, we here feel that they may be
made to coalesce so as to be in their united agencies one divine power.
We called it lyrical, chiefly because of its transitions. Though not an
ode, it is ode-like in its invocations; and it might be set and sung to
music if Handel were yet alive, and St Cecilia to come down for an hour
from heaven. How solemn the opening strain! and from the momentary
vision of Science on her speculative Tower, how gently glides
Imagination down, to take her place by the Poet's side, in his bark
afloat beneath Italian skies--suddenly bedimmed, lake, land, and all,
with a something between day and night. In a moment we are conscious of
Eclipse. Our slight surprise is lost in the sense of a strange
beauty--solemn not sad--settling on the face of nature and the abodes of
men. In a single stanza filled with beautiful names of the beautiful, we
have a vision of the Lake, with all its noblest banks, and bays, and
bowers, and mountains--when in an instant we are wafted away from a
scene that might well have satisfied our imagination and our heart--if
high emotions were not uncontrollable and omnipotent--wafted away by
Fancy with the speed of Fire--lakes, groves, cliffs, mountains, all
forgotten--and alight amid an aerial host of figures, human and divine,
on a spire that seeks the sky. How still those imaged sanctities and
purities, all white as snows of Apennine, stand in the heavenly region,
circle above circle, and crowned as with a zone of stars! They are
imbued with life. In their animation the figures of angels and saints,
insensate stones no more, seem to feel the Eclipse that shadows them,
and look awful in the portentous light. In his inspiration he transcends
the grandeur even of that moment's vision--and beholds in the visages of
that aerial host those of the sons of heaven darkening with celestial
sorrow at the Fall of Man--when
"Throngs of celestial visages,
Darkening like water in the breeze,
A holy sadness shared."
Never since the day on which the wondrous edifice, in its consummate
glory, first saluted the sun, had it inspired in the soul of kneeling
saint a thought so sad and so sublime--a thought beyond the reaches of
the soul of him whose genius bade it bear up all its holy adornments so
far from earth, that the silent company seem sometimes, as light and
shadow moves among them, to be in ascension to heaven. But the Sun
begins again to look like the Sun, and the poet, relieved by the joyful
light from that awful trance, delights to behold
"Town and Tower,
The Vineyard and the Olive Bower,
Their lustre re-assume;"
and "breathes there a man with soul so dead," that it burns not within
him as he hears the heart of the husband and the father breathe forth
its love and its fear, remembering on a sudden the far distant whom it
has never forgotten--a love and a fear that saddens, but disturbs not,
for the vision he saw had inspired him with a trust in the tender
mercies of God? Commit to faithful memory, O Friend! who may some time
or other be a traveller over the wide world, the sacred stanzas that
bring the Poem to a close--and it will not fail to comfort thee when
sitting all alone by the well in the wilderness, or walking along the
strange streets of foreign cities, or lying in thy cot at midnight
afloat on far-off seas.
"O ye, who guard and grace my Home
While in far-distant lands we roam,
Was such a vision given to you?
Or, while we look'd with favour'd eyes,
Did sullen mist hide lake and skies
And mountains from your view?
"I ask in vain--and know far less,
If sickness, sorrow, or distress
Have spared my Dwelling to this hour;
Sad blindness! but ordained to prove
Our faith in Heaven's unfailing love,
And all-controlling power."
Let us fly from Rydal to Sheffield. James Montgomery is truly a
religious poet. His popularity, which is great, has, by some scribes
sitting in the armless chairs of the scorners, been attributed chiefly
to the power of sectarianism. He is, we believe, a sectary; and, if all
sects were animated by the spirit that breathes throughout his poetry,
we should have no fears for the safety and stability of the Established
Church; for in that self-same spirit was she built, and by that
self-same spirit were her foundations dug in a rock. Many are the
lights--solemn and awful all--in which the eyes of us mortal creatures
may see the Christian dispensation. Friends, looking down from the top
of a high mountain on a city-sprinkled plain, have each his own vision
of imagination--each his own sinking or swelling of heart. They urge no
inquisition into the peculiar affections of each other's secret
breasts--all assured, from what each knows of his brother, that every
eye there may see God--that every tongue that has the gift of lofty
utterance may sing His praises aloud--that the lips that remain silent
may be mute in adoration--and that all the distinctions of habits,
customs, professions, modes of life, even natural constitution and form
of character, if not lost, may be blended together in mild amalgamation
under the common atmosphere of emotion, even as the towers, domes, and
temples, are all softly or brightly interfused with the huts, cots, and
homesteads--the whole scene below harmonious because inhabited by beings
created by the same God--in his own image--and destined for the same
immortality.
It is base therefore, and false, to attribute, in an invidious sense,
any of Montgomery's fame to any such cause. No doubt many persons read
his poetry on account of its religion, who, but for that, would not have
read it; and no doubt, too, many of them neither feel nor understand it.
But so, too, do many persons read Wordsworth's poetry on account of its
religion--the religion of the woods--who, but for that, would not have
read it; and so, too, many of them neither feel nor understand it. So is
it with the common-manners-painting poetry of Crabbe--the
dark-passion-painting poetry of Byron--the high-romance-painting poetry
of Scott--and so on with Moore, Coleridge, Southey, and the rest. But it
is to the _mens divinior_, however displayed, that they owe all their
fame. Had Montgomery not been a true poet, all the Religious Magazines
in the world could not have saved his name from forgetfulness and
oblivion. He might have flaunted his day like the melancholy
Poppy--melancholy in all its ill-scented gaudiness; but as it is, he is
like the Rose of Sharon, whose balm and beauty shall not wither, planted
on the banks of "that river whose streams make glad the city of the
Lord."
Indeed, we see no reason why poetry, conceived in the spirit of a most
exclusive sectarianism, may not be of a very high order, and powerfully
impressive on minds whose religious tenets are most irreconcilable and
hostile to those of the sect. Feelings, by being unduly concentrated,
are not thereby necessarily enfeebled--on the contrary, often
strengthened; and there is a grand austerity which the imagination more
than admires--which the conscience scarcely condemns. The feeling, the
conviction from which that austerity grows, is in itself right; for it
is a feeling--a conviction of the perfect righteousness of God--the
utter worthlessness of self-left man--the awful sanctity of duty--and
the dreadfulness of the judgment-doom, from which no soul is safe till
the seals have been broken, and the Archangel has blown his trumpet. A
religion planted in such convictions as these, may become dark and
disordered in its future growth within the spirit; and the tree, though
of good seed and in a strong soil, may come to be laden with bitter
fruit, and the very droppings of its leaves may be pernicious to all who
rest within its shade. Still, such shelter is better in the blast than
the trunk of a dead faith; and such food, unwholesome though it be, is
not so miserable as famine to a hungry soul.
Grant, then, that there may be in Mr Montgomery's poetry certain
sentiments, which, in want of a better word, we call Sectarian. They are
not necessarily false, although not perfectly reconcilable to our own
creed, which, we shall suppose, is true. On the contrary, we may be made
much the better and the wiser men by meditating upon them; for while
they may, perhaps (and we are merely making a supposition), be too
strongly felt by him, they may be too feebly felt by us--they may,
perhaps, be rather blots on the beauty of his poetry than of his
faith--and if, in some degree, offensive in the composition of a poem,
far less so, or not at all, in that of a life.
All his shorter poems are stamped with the character of the man. Most of
them are breathings of his own devout spirit, either delighted or awed
by a sense of the Divine goodness and mercy towards itself, or
tremblingly alive--not in mere sensibility to human virtues and joys,
crimes and sorrows, for that often belongs to the diseased and
depraved--but in solemn, moral, and religious thought, to all of good or
evil befalling his brethren of mankind. "A sparrow cannot fall to the
ground"--a flower of the field cannot wither immediately before his
eyes--without awakening in his heart such thoughts as we may believe God
intended should be awakened even by such sights as these; for the fall
of a sparrow is a Scriptural illustration of His providence, and His
hand framed the lily, whose array is more royal than was that of Solomon
in all his glory. Herein he resembles Wordsworth--less profound
certainly--less lofty; for in its highest moods the genius of Wordsworth
walks by itself--unapproachable--on the earth it beautifies. But
Montgomery's poetical piety is far more prevalent over his whole
character; it belongs more essentially and permanently to the man.
Perhaps, although we shall not say so, it may be more simple, natural,
and true. More accordant it certainly is, with the sympathies of
ordinary minds. The piety of his poetry is far more Christian than that
of Wordsworth. It is in all his feelings, all his thoughts, all his
imagery; and at the close of most of his beautiful compositions, which
are so often avowals, confessions, prayers, thanksgivings, we feel, not
the moral, but the religion of his song. He "improves" all the
"occasions" of this life, because he has an "eye that broods on its own
heart;" and that heart is impressed by all lights and shadows, like a
river or lake whose waters are pure--pure in their sources and in their
course. He is, manifestly, a man of the kindliest home-affections; and
these, though it is to be hoped the commonest of all, preserved to him
in unabated glow and freshness by innocence and piety, often give vent
to themselves in little hymns and ode-like strains, of which the rich
and even novel imagery shows how close is the connection between a pure
heart and a fine fancy, and that the flowers of poetry may be brought
from afar, nor yet be felt to be exotics--to intertwine with the very
simplest domestic feelings and thoughts--so simple, so perfectly human,
that there is a touch of surprise on seeing them capable of such
adornment, and more than a touch of pleasure on feeling how much that
adornment becomes them--brightening without changing, and adding
admiration to delight--wonder to love.
Montgomery, too, is almost as much of an egotist as Wordsworth; and
thence, frequently, his power. The poet who keeps all the appearances of
external nature, and even all the passions of humanity, at arm's length,
that he may gaze on, inspect, study, and draw their portraits, either in
the garb they ordinarily wear, or in a fancy dress, is likely to produce
a strong likeness indeed; yet shall his pictures be wanting in ease and
freedom--they shall be cold and stiff--and both passion and imagination
shall desiderate something characteristic in nature, of the mountain or
the man. But the poet who hugs to his bosom everything he loves or
admires--themselves, or the thoughts that are their shadows--who is
himself still the centre of the enchanted circle--who, in the delusion
of a strong creative genius, absolutely believes that were he to die,
all that he now sees and hears delighted would die with him--who not
only sees
"Poetic visions swarm on every bough,"
but the history of all his own most secret emotions written on the very
rocks--who gathers up the many beautiful things that in the prodigality
of nature lie scattered over the earth, neglected or unheeded, and the
more dearly, the more passionately loves them, because they are now
appropriated to the uses of his own imagination, who will by her alchymy
so further brighten them that the thousands of eyes that formerly passed
them by unseen or scorned, will be dazzled by their rare and
transcendent beauty--he is the "prevailing Poet!" Montgomery neither
seeks nor shuns those dark thoughts that will come and go, night and
day, unbidden, forbidden, across the minds of all men--fortified
although the main entrances may be; but when they do invade his secret,
solitary hours, he turns even such visitants to a happy account, and
questions them, ghost-like as they are, concerning both the future and
the past. Melancholy as often his views are, we should not suppose him a
man of other than a cheerful mind; for whenever the theme allows or
demands it, he is not averse to a sober glee, a composed gaiety that,
although we cannot say it ever so far sparkles out as to deserve to be
called absolutely brilliant, yet lends a charm to his lighter-toned
compositions, which it is peculiarly pleasant now and then to feel in
the writings of a man whose genius is naturally, and from the course of
life, not gloomy indeed, but pensive, and less disposed to indulge
itself in smiles than in tears.
SACRED POETRY.