```“But lo! around the marsh’lling clouds unite,
```Like thick battalions halting for the fight;
```The sun sinks back, the tempest spirits sweep
```Fierce through the air and flutter on the deep.
```Till from their caverns rush the maniac blasts,
```Tear the loose sails, and split the creaking masts,
```And the lash’d billows, rolling in a train,
```Rear their white heads, and race along the main”=
What, we should like to know, is the difference between the two
operations which Mr. Robert Montgomery so accurately distinguishes from
each other, the fierce sweeping of the tempest-spirits through the air,
and the rushing of the maniac blasts from their caverns? And why does
the former operation end exactly when the latter commences?
We cannot stop over each of Mr. Robert Montgomery’s descriptions. We
have a shipwrecked sailor, who “visions a viewless temple in the air”;
a murderer who stands on a heath, “with ashy lips, in cold convulsion
spread”; a pious man, to whom, as he lies in bed at night,=
```“The panorama of past life appears,
```Warms his pure mind, and melts it into tears”:=
a traveller, who loses his way, owing to the thickness of the
“cloud-battalion,” and the want of “heaven-lamps, to beam their holy
light.” We have a description of a convicted felon, stolen from that
incomparable passage in Crabbe’s Borough, which has made many a rough
and cynical reader cry like a child. We can, however, conscientiously
declare that persons of the most excitable sensibility may safely
venture upon Mr. Robert Montgomery’s version. Then we have the “poor,
mindless, pale-faced maniac boy,” who=
`````“Rolls his vacant eye
```To greet the glowing fancies of the sky.”=
What are the glowing fancies of the sky? And what is the meaning of the
two lines which almost immediately follow?=
```“A soulless thing, a spirit of the woods,
```He loves to commune with the fields and floods.”=
How can a soulless thing be a spirit? Then comes a panegyric on the
Sunday. A baptism follows; after that a marriage: and we then proceed,
in due course, to the visitation of the sick, and the burial of the
dead.
Often as Death has been personified, Mr. Montgomery has found something
new to say about him:=
```“O Death! thou dreadless vanquisher of earth,
```The Elements shrank blasted at thy birth!
```Careering round the world like tempest wind,
```Martyrs before, and victims strew’d behind
```Ages on ages cannot grapple thee,
```Dragging the world into eternity!”=
If there be any one line in this passage about which we are more in the
dark than about the rest, it is the fourth. What the difference may
be between the victims and the martyrs, and why the martyrs are to lie
before Death, and the victims behind him, are to us great mysteries.
We now come to the third part, of which we may say with honest Cassio,
“Why, this is a more excellent song than the other.” Mr. Robert
Montgomery is very severe on the infidels, and undertakes to prove,
that, as he elegantly expresses it,=
```“One great Enchanter helm’d the harmonious whole.”=
What an enchanter has to do with helming, or what a helm has to do with
harmony, he does not explain. He proceeds with his argument thus:=
```“And dare men dream that dismal Chance has framed
```All that the eye perceives, or tongue has named
```The spacious world, and all its wonders, born
```Designless, self-created, and forlorn;
```Like to the flashing bubbles on a stream,
```Fire from the cloud, or phantom in a dream?”=
We should be sorry to stake our faith in a higher Power on Mr. Robert
Montgomery’s logic. He informs us that lightning is designless and
self-created. If he can believe this, we cannot conceive why he may not
believe that the whole universe is designless and self-created. A few
lines before, he tells us that it is the Deity who bids “thunder rattle
from the skiey deep.” His theory is therefore this, that God made the
thunder, but that the lightning made itself.
But Mr. Robert Montgomery’s metaphysics are not at present our game. He
proceeds to set forth the fearful effects of Atheism=
```“Then, blood-stain’d Murder, bare thy hideous arm
```And thou, Rebellion, welter in thy storm:
```Awake, ye spirits of avenging crime;
```Burst from your bonds, and battle with the time!”=
Mr. Robert Montgomery is fond of personification, and belongs, we need
not say, to that school of poets who hold that nothing more is necessary
to a personification in poetry than to begin a word with a capital
letter. Murder may, without impropriety, bare her arm, as she did long
ago, in Mr. Campbell’s Pleasures of Hope. But what possible motive
Rebellion can have for weltering in her storm, what avenging crime may
be, who its spirits may be, why they should be burst from their bonds,
what their bonds may be, why they should battle with the time, what
the time may be, and what a battle between the time and the spirits of
avenging crime would resemble, we must confess ourselves quite unable to
understand.=
```“And here let Memory turn her tearful glance
```On the dark horrors of tumultuous France,
```When blood and blasphemy defiled her land,
```And fierce Rebellion shook her savage hand.”=
Whether Rebellion shakes her own hand, shakes the hand of Memory, or
shakes the hand of France, or what any one of these three metaphors
would mean, we, know no more than we know what is the sense of the
following passage=
```“Let the foul orgies of infuriate crime
```Picture the raging havoc of that time,
```When leagued Rebellion march’d to kindle man,
```Fright in her rear, and Murder in her van.
```And thou, sweet flower of Austria, slaughter’d Queen,
```Who dropp’d no tear upon the dreadful scene,
```When gush’d the life-blood from thine angel form,
```And martyr’d beauty perish’d in the storm,
```Once worshipp’d paragon of all who saw,
```Thy look obedience, and thy smile a law.”=
What is the distinction between the foul orgies and the raging havoc
which the foul orgies are to picture? Why does Fright go behind
Rebellion, and Murder before? Why should not Murder fall behind Fright?
Or why should not all the three walk abreast? We have read of a hero who
had=
```“Amazement in his van, with flight combined,
```And Sorrow’s faded form, and Solitude behind.”
Gray, we suspect, could have given a reason for disposing the
allegorical attendants of Edward thus. But to proceed, “Flower of
Austria” is stolen from Byron. “Dropp’d” is false English. “Perish’d in
the storm” means nothing at all; and “thy look obedience” means the very
reverse of what Mr. Robert Montgomery intends to say.