People nowadays will write, because they see so many writing; the
impulse comes upon them from without, not from within; loud voices from
streets and squares of cities call on them to join the throng, but the
still small voice that speaketh in the penetralia of the spirit is mute;
and what else can be the result, but, in place of the song of lark, or
linnet, or nightingale, at the best a concert of mocking-birds, at the
worst an oratorio of ganders and bubbleys?
At this particular juncture or crisis, the disease would fain assume the
symptoms of religious inspiration. The poetasters are all pious--all
smitten with sanctity--Christian all over--and crossing and jostling on
the Course of Time--as they think, on the high road to Heaven and
Immortality. Never was seen before such a shameless set of hypocrites.
Down on their knees they fall in booksellers' shops, and, crowned with
foolscap, repeat to Blue-Stockings prayers addressed in doggrel to the
Deity! They bandy about the Bible as if it were an Album. They forget
that the poorest sinner has a soul to be saved, as well as a set of
verses to be damned; they look forward to the First of the Month with
more fear and trembling than to the Last Day; and beseech a critic to be
merciful upon them with far more earnestness than they ever beseeched
their Maker. They pray through the press--vainly striving to give some
publicity to what must be private for evermore; and are seen wiping
away, at tea-parties, the tears of contrition and repentance for capital
crimes perpetrated but on paper, and perpetrated thereon so paltrily,
that so far from being worthy of hell-fire, such delinquents, it is
felt, would be more suitably punished by being singed like plucked fowls
with their own unsaleable sheets. They are frequently so singed; yet
singeing has not the effect upon them for which singeing is designed;
and like chickens in a shower that have got the pip, they keep still
gasping and shooting out their tongues, and walking on tip-toe with
their tails down, till finally they go to roost in some obscure corner,
and are no more seen among bipeds.
Among those, however, who have been unfortunately beguiled by the spirit
of imitation and sympathy into religious poetry, one or two--who for the
present must be nameless--have shown feeling; and would they but obey
their feeling, and prefer walking on the ground with their own free
feet, to attempting to fly in the air with borrowed and bound wings,
they might produce something really poetical, and acquire a creditable
reputation. But they are too aspiring; and have taken into their hands
the sacred lyre without due preparation. He who is so familiar with his
Bible, that each chapter, open it where he will, teems with household
words, may draw thence the theme of many a pleasant and pathetic song.
For is not all human nature and all human life shadowed forth in those
pages? But the heart, to sing well from the Bible, must be imbued with
religious feelings, as a flower is alternately with dew and sunshine.
The study of THE BOOK must have been begun in the simplicity of
childhood, when it was felt to be indeed divine--and carried on through
all those silent intervals in which the soul of manhood is restored,
during the din of life, to the purity and peace of its early being. The
Bible must be to such a poet even as the sky--with its sun, moon, and
stars--its boundless blue with all its cloud-mysteries--its peace deeper
than the grave, because of realms beyond the grave--its tumult louder
than that of life, because heard altogether in all the elements. He who
begins the study of the Bible late in life, must, indeed, devote himself
to it--night and day--and with a humble and a contrite heart as well as
an awakened and soaring spirit, ere he can hope to feel what he
understands, or to understand what he feels--thoughts and feelings
breathing in upon him, as if from a region hanging, in its mystery,
between heaven and earth. Nor do we think that he will lightly venture
on the composition of poetry drawn from such a source. The very thought
of doing so, were it to occur to his mind, would seem irreverent; it
would convince him that he was still the slave of vanity, and pride, and
the world.
They alone, therefore, to whom God has given genius as well as faith,
zeal, and benevolence--will, of their own accord, fix their Pindus
either on Lebanon or Calvary--and of these but few. The genius must be
high--the faith sure--and human love must coalesce with divine, that the
strain may have power to reach the spirits of men, immersed as they are
in matter, and with all their apprehensions and conceptions blended with
material imagery, and the things of this moving earth and this restless
life.
So gifted and so endowed, a great or good poet, having chosen his
subject well within religion, is on the sure road to immortal fame. His
work, when done, must secure sympathy for ever; a sympathy not dependent
on creeds, but out of which creeds spring, all of them manifestly
moulded by imaginative affections of religion. Christian Poetry will
outlive every other; for the time will come when Christian Poetry will
be deeper and higher far than any that has ever yet been known among
men. Indeed, the sovereign songs hitherto have been either religious or
superstitious; and as "the day-spring from on High that has visited us"
spreads wider and wider over the earth, "the soul of the world, dreaming
of things to come," shall assuredly see more glorified visions than have
yet been submitted to her ken. That poetry has so seldom satisfied the
utmost longings and aspirations of human nature, can only have been
because Poetry has so seldom dealt in its power with the only mysteries
worth knowing--the greater mysteries of religion, into which the
Christian is initiated only through faith, an angel sent from heaven to
spirits struggling by supplications and sacrifices to escape from sin
and death.
These, and many other thoughts and feelings concerning the "Vision and
the Faculty divine," when employed on divine subjects, have arisen
within us, on reading--which we have often done with delight--"The
Christian Year," so full of Christian poetry of the purest character. Mr
Keble is a poet whom Cowper himself would have loved--for in him piety
inspires genius, and fancy and feeling are celestialised by religion. We
peruse his book in a tone and temper of spirit similar to that which is
breathed upon us by some calm day in spring, when all imagery is serene
and still--cheerful in the main--yet with a touch and a tinge of
melancholy, which makes all the blended bliss and beauty at once more
endearing and more profound. We should no more think of criticising such
poetry than of criticising the clear blue skies--the soft green
earth--the "liquid lapse" of an unpolluted stream, that
"Doth make sweet music with the enamell'd stones,
Giving a gentle kiss to every flower
It overtaketh on its pilgrimage."
All is purity and peace; as we look and listen, we partake of the
universal calm, and feel in nature the presence of Him from whom it
emanated. Indeed, we do not remember any poetry nearly so beautiful as
this, which reminds one so seldom of the poet's art. We read it without
ever thinking of the place which its author may hold among poets, just
as we behold a "lily of the field" without comparing it with other
flowers, but satisfied with its own pure and simple loveliness; or each
separate poem may be likened, in its
unostentatious--unambitious--unconscious beauty--to
"A violet by a mossy stone,
Half hidden to the eye."
Of all the flowers that sweeten this fair earth, the violet is indeed
the most delightful in itself--form, fragrance, and colour--nor less in
the humility of its birthplace, and its haunts in the "sunshiny shade."
Therefore, 'tis a meet emblem of those sacred songs that may be said to
blossom on Mount Sion.
The most imaginative poetry inspired by Nature, and dedicated to her
praise, is never perfectly and consummately beautiful till it ascends
into the religious; but then religion breathes from, and around, and
about it, only at last when the poet has been brought, by the leading of
his own aroused spirit, to the utmost pitch of his inspiration. He
begins, and continues long, unblamed in mere emotions of beauty; and he
often pauses unblamed, and brings his strain to a close, without having
forsaken this earth, and the thoughts and feelings which belong alone to
this earth. But poetry like that of the "Christian Year" springs at
once, visibly and audibly, from religion as its fount. If it, indeed,
issue from one of the many springs religion opens in the human heart, no
fear of its ever being dried up. Small indeed may seem the silver line,
when first the rill steals forth from its sacred source! But how soon it
begins to sing with a clear loud voice in the solitude! Bank and
brae--tree, shrub, and flower--grow greener at each successive
waterfall--the rains no more disturb that limpid element than the
dews--and never does it lose some reflection of the heavens.
In a few modest words, Mr Keble states the aim and object of his volume.
He says truly, that it is the peculiar happiness of the Church of
England to possess in her authorised formularies an ample and secure
provision, both for a sound rule of faith and a sober standard of
feeling in matters of practical religion. The object of his publication
will be attained, if any person find assistance from it in bringing his
own thoughts and feelings into more entire unison with those recommended
and exemplified in the Prayer-Book. We add, that its object has been
attained. In England, "The Christian Year" is already placed in a
thousand homes among household books. People are neither blind nor deaf
yet to lovely sights and sounds--and a true poet is as certain of
recognition now as at any period of our literature. In Scotland we have
no prayer-book printed on paper--perhaps it would be better if we had;
but the prayer-book which has inspired Mr Keble, is compiled and
composed from another Book, which, we believe, is more read in Scotland
than in any other country. Here the Sabbath reigns in power, that is
felt to be a sovereign power over all the land. We have, it may be said,
no prescribed holydays; but all the events recorded in the Bible, and
which in England make certain days holy in outward as well as inward
observances, are familiar to our knowledge and our feeling _here_; and
therefore the poetry that seeks still more to hallow them to the heart,
will find every good heart recipient of its inspiration--for the
Christian creed is "wide and general as the casing air," and felt as
profoundly in the Highland heather-glen, where no sound of psalms is
heard but on the Sabbath, as in the cathedral towns and cities of
England, where so often
"Through the long-drawn aisle and fretted vault,
The pealing anthem swells the note of praise."
Poetry, in our age, has been made too much a thing to talk about--to
show off upon--as if the writing and the reading of it were to be
reckoned among what are commonly called accomplishments. Thus, poets
have too often sacrificed the austere sanctity of the divine art to most
unworthy purposes, of which, perhaps, the most unworthy--for it implies
much voluntary self-degradation--is mere popularity. Against all such
low aims he is preserved, who, with Christian meekness, approaches the
muse in the sanctuaries of religion. He seeks not to force his songs on
the public ear; his heart is free from the fever of fame; his poetry is
praise and prayer. It meets our ear like the sound of psalms from some
unseen dwelling among the woods or hills, at which the wayfarer or
wanderer stops on his journey, and feels at every pause a holier
solemnity in the silence of nature. Such poetry is indeed _got by
heart_; and memory is then tenacious to the death, for her hold on what
she loves is strengthened as much by grief as by joy; and, when even
hope itself is dead--if, indeed, hope ever dies--the trust is committed
to despair. Words are often as unforgetable as voiceless thoughts; they
become very thoughts themselves, and _are_ what they represent. How are
many of the simply, rudely, but fervently and beautifully rhymed Psalms
of David, very part and parcel of the most spiritual treasures of the
Scottish peasant's being!
"The Lord's my shepherd, I'll not want.
He makes me down to lie
In pastures green: he leadeth me
The quiet waters by."
These four lines sanctify to the thoughtful shepherd on the braes every
stream that glides through the solitary places--they have often given
colours to the greensward beyond the brightness of all herbage and of
all flowers. Thrice hallowed is that poetry which makes us mortal
creatures feel the union that subsists between the Book of Nature and
the Book of Life!
Poetry has endeared childhood by a thousand pictures, in which fathers
and mothers behold with deeper love the faces of their own offspring.
Such poetry has almost always been the production of the strongest and
wisest minds. Common intellects derive no power from earliest memories;
the primal morn, to them never bright, has utterly faded in the smoky
day; the present has swallowed up the past, as the future will swallow
up the present; each season of life seems to stand by itself as a
separate existence; and when old age comes, how helpless, melancholy,
and forlorn! But he who lives in the spirit of another creed, sees far
into the heart of Christianity. He hears a divine voice saying--"Suffer
little children to come unto me, and forbid them not, for of such is the
kingdom of heaven!" Thus it is that Poetry throws back upon the New
Testament the light she has borrowed from it, and that man's mortal
brother speaks in accordance with the Saviour of Man. On a dead
insensible flower--a lily--a rose--a violet--a daisy, poetry may pour
out all its divinest power--just as the sun itself sometimes seems to
look with all its light on some one especial blossom, all at once made
transparently lustrous. And what if the flower be alive in all its
leaves--and have in it an immortal spirit? Or what if its leaves be
dead, and the immortal spirit gone away to heaven? Genius shall change
death into sleep--till the grave, in itself so dark and dismal, shall
seem a bed of bright and celestial repose. From poetry, in words or
marble--both alike still and serene as water upon grass--we turn to the
New Testament, and read of the "Holy Innocents." "They were redeemed
from among men, being the first-fruits unto God and to the Lamb." We
look down into the depths of that text--and we then turn again to
Keble's lines, which from those depths have flowed over upon the
uninspired page! Yet not uninspired--if that name may be given to
strains which, like the airs that had touched the flowers of Paradise,
"whisper whence they stole those balmy sweets." Revelation has shown us
that "we are greater than we know;" and who may neglect the Infancy of
that Being for whom Godhead died!
They who read the lines on the "Holy Innocents" in a mood of mind worthy
of them, will go on, with an equal delight, through those on "The
Epiphany." They are separated in the volume by some kindred and
congenial strains; but when brought close together, they occupy the
still region of thought as two large clear stars do of themselves seem
to occupy the entire sky.
How far better than skilfully--how inspiredly does this Christian poet
touch upon each successive holy theme--winging his way through the
stainless ether like some dove gliding from tree to tree, and leaving
one place of rest only for another equally happy, on the folding and
unfolding of its peaceful flight! Of late many versifiers have attempted
the theme; and some of them with shameful unsuccess. A bad poem on such
a subject is a sin. He who is a Christian indeed, will, when the star of
Bethlehem rises before his closed eyes, be mute beneath the image, or he
will hail it in strains simple as were those of the shepherds watching
their flocks by night when it appeared of old, high as were those of the
sages who came from the East bearing incense to the Child in the Manger.
Such are this Poet's strains, evolving themselves out of the few
words--"Behold, the star, which they saw in the east, went before them,
till it came and stood over where the young Child was. When they saw the
star, they rejoiced with exceeding great joy."
The transition from those affecting lines is natural and delightful to a
strain further on in the volume, entitled "Catechism." How soon the
infant spirit is touched with love--another name for religion--none may
dare to say who have watched the eyes of little children. Feeling and
thought would seem to come upon them like very inspiration--so strong it
often is, and sudden, and clear; yet, no doubt, all the work of natural
processes going on within Immortality. The wisdom of age has often been
seen in the simplicity of childhood--creatures but five or six years
old--soon perhaps about to disappear--astonishing, and saddening, and
subliming the souls of their parents and their parents' friends, by a
holy precocity of all pitiful and compassionate feelings, blended into a
mysterious piety that has made them sing happy hymns on the brink of
death and the grave. Such affecting instances of almost infantine
unfolding of the spirit beneath spiritual influences should not be
rare--nor are they rare--in truly Christian households. Almost as soon
as the heart is moved by filial affection, that affection grows reverent
even to earthly parents--and, ere long, becomes piety towards the name
of God and Saviour. Yet philosophers have said that the child must not
be too soon spoken to about religion. Will they fix the time? No--let
religion--a myriad-meaning word--be whispered and breathed round about
them, as soon as intelligence smiles in their eyes and quickens their
ears, while enjoying the sights and sounds of their own small yet
multitudinous world.
Let us turn to another strain of the same mood, which will be read with
tears by many a grateful heart--on the "Churching of Women." What would
become of us without the ceremonies of religion? How they strengthen the
piety out of which they spring! How, by concentrating all that is holy
and divine around their outward forms, do they purify and sanctify the
affections! What a change on his infant's face is wrought before a
father's eyes by Baptism! How the heart of the husband and the father
yearns, as he sees the wife and mother kneeling in thanksgiving after
childbirth!
"Consider the lilies of the field how they grow: they toil not, neither
do they spin; and yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory
was not arrayed like one of these." What is all the poetry that genius
ever breathed over all the flowers of this earth to that one divine
sentence! It has inspired our Christian poet--and here is his heartfelt
homily.
FIFTEENTH SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY.
"Sweet nurslings of the vernal skies,
Bathed in soft airs, and fed with dew,
What more than magic in you lies
To fill the heart's fond view?
In childhood's sports companions gay,
In sorrow, on Life's downward way,
How soothing! in our last decay
Memorials prompt and true.
Relics ye are of Eden's bowers,
As pure, as fragrant, and as fair,
As when ye crown'd the sunshine hours
Of happy wanderers there.
Fall'n all beside--the world of life,
How is it stain'd with fear and strife!
In Reason's world what storms are rife,
What passions rage and glare!
But cheerful and unchanged the while
Your first and perfect form ye show,
The same that won Eve's matron smile
In the world's opening glow
The stars of Heaven a course are taught
Too high above our human thought;--
Ye may be found if ye are sought,
And as we gaze we know.
Ye dwell beside our paths and homes,
Our paths of sin, our homes of sorrow,
And guilty man, where'er he roams,
Your innocent mirth may borrow.
The birds of air before us fleet,
They cannot brook our shame to meet--
But we may taste your solace sweet,
And come again to-morrow.
Ye fearless in your nests abide--
Nor may we scorn, too proudly wise,
Your silent lessons undescried
By all but lowly eyes;
For ye could draw th' admiring gaze
Of Him who worlds and hearts surveys:
Your order wild, your fragrant maze,
He taught us how to prize.
Ye felt your Maker's smile that hour,
As when he paused and own'd you good;
His blessing on earth's primal bower,
Yet felt it all renew'd.
What care ye now, if winter's storm
Sweep ruthless o'er each silken form?
Christ's blessing at your heart is warm,
Ye fear no vexing mood.
Alas! of thousand bosoms kind,
That daily court you and caress,
How few the happy secret find
Of your calm loveliness!
'Live for to-day! to-morrow's light
To-morrow's cares shall bring to sight.
Go, sleep like closing flowers at night,
And Heaven thy morn will bless.'"
Such poetry as this must have a fine influence on all the best human
affections. Sacred are such songs to sorrow--and sorrow is either a
frequent visitor, or a domesticated inmate, in every household.
Religion may thus be made to steal unawares, even during ordinary hours,
into the commonest ongoings of life. Call not the mother unhappy who
closes the eyes of her dead child, whether it has smiled lonely in the
house, the sole delight of her eyes, or bloomed among other flowers, now
all drooping for its sake--nor yet call the father unhappy who lays his
sweet son below the earth, and returns to the home where his voice is to
be heard never more. That affliction brings forth feelings unknown
before in his heart; calming all turbulent thoughts by the settled peace
of the grave. Then every page of the Bible is beautiful--and beautiful
every verse of poetry that thence draws its inspiration. Thus in the
pale and almost ghost-like countenance of decay, our hearts are not
touched by the remembrance alone of beauty which is departed, and by the
near extinction of loveliness which we behold fading before our
eyes--but a beauty, fairer and deeper far, lies around the hollow eye
and the sunken cheek, breathed from the calm air of the untroubled
spirit that has heard resigned the voice that calls it away from the dim
shades of mortality. Well may that beauty be said to be religious; for
in it speaks the soul, conscious, in the undreaded dissolution of its
earthly frame, of a being destined to everlasting bliss. With every deep
emotion arising from our contemplation of such beauty as this--religious
beauty beaming in the human countenance, whether in joy or sadness,
health or decay--there is profoundly interfused a sense of the soul's
spirituality, which silently sheds over the emotion something celestial
and divine, rendering it not only different in degree, but altogether
distinct in kind, from all the feelings that things merely perishable
can inspire--so that the spirit is fully satisfied, and the feeling of
beauty is but a vivid recognition of its own deathless being and
ethereal essence. This is a feeling of beauty which was but faintly
known to the human heart in those ages of the world when all other
feelings of beauty were most perfect; and accordingly we find, in the
most pathetic strains of their elegiac poetry, lamentations over the
beauty intensely worshipped in the dust, which was to lie for ever over
its now beamless head. But to the Christian who may have seen the living
lustre leave the eye of some beloved friend, there must have shone a
beauty in his latest smile, which spoke not alone of a brief scene
closed, but of an endless scene unfolding; while its cessation, instead
of leaving him in utter darkness, seemed to be accompanied with a burst
of light.
Much of our most fashionable Modern Poetry is at once ludicrously and
lamentably unsuitable and unseasonable to the innocent and youthful
creatures who shed tears "such as angels weep" over the shameful sins of
shameless sinners, crimes which, when perpetrated out of Poetry, and by
persons with vulgar surnames, elevate their respective heroes to that
vulgar altitude--the gallows. The darker--the stronger passions,
forsooth! And what hast thou to do--my dove-eyed Margaret, with the
darker and stronger passions? Nothing whatever in thy sweet, still,
serene, and seemingly almost sinless world. Be the brighter and the
weaker passions thine--brighter indeed--yet say not _weaker_, for they
are strong as death;--Love and Pity, Awe and Reverence, Joy, Grief, and
Sorrow, sunny smiles and showery tears--be these all thy own--and
sometimes, too, on melancholy nights, let the heaven of thy imagination
be spanned in its starriness by the most celestial Evanescence--a Lunar
Rainbow.
There is such perfect sincerity in the "Christian Year"--such perfect
sincerity, and consequently such simplicity--that though the production
of a fine and finished scholar, we cannot doubt that it will some day or
other find its way into many of the dwellings of humble life. Such
descent, if descent it be, must be of all receptions the most delightful
to the heart of a Christian poet. As intelligence spreads more widely
over the land, why fear that it will deaden religion? Let us believe
that it will rather vivify and quicken it; and that in time true poetry,
such as this, of a character somewhat higher than probably can be yet
felt, understood, and appreciated by the people, will come to be easy
and familiar, and blended with all the other benign influences breathed
over their common existence by books. Meanwhile the "Christian Year"
will be finding its way into many houses where the inmates read from the
love of reading--not for mere amusement only, but for instruction and a
deeper delight; and we shall be happy if our recommendation causes its
pages to be illumined by the gleams of a few more peaceful hearths, and
to be rehearsed by a few more happy voices in the "parlour twilight."
We cannot help expressing the pleasure it has given us to see so much,
true poetry coming from Oxford. It is delightful to see that classical
literature, which sometimes, we know not how, certainly has a chilling
effect on poetical feeling, there warming it as it ought to do, and
causing it to produce itself in song. Oxford has produced many true
poets; Collins, Warton, Bowles, Heber, Milman, and now Keble--are all
her own--her inspired sons. Their strains are not steeped in "port and
prejudice;" but in the--Isis. Heaven bless Iffley and Godstow--and many
another sweet old ruined place--secluded, but not far apart from her own
inspiring Sanctities! And those who love her not, never may the Muses
love!
SACRED POETRY.