Sheffield has been poetically fortunate. It has had the honor, not to
give birth to two eminent poets--a mere accident--but to produce them.
Neither Montgomery nor Elliott was born in Sheffield; but they were
drawn to it as the trading capital of the district in which they
_were_ born; and there their minds, tastes, and reputations grew.
In both poets are strongly recognizable the intellectual features of a
manufacturing town. They are both of a popular and liberal tendency of
mind. They, or rather their spirits and characters, grew amid the
physical sufferings and the political struggles of a busy and
high-spirited population, and by these circumstances all the elements
of freedom and patriotism were strengthened to full growth in their
bosoms. Montgomery came upon the public stage, both as a poet and a
political writer, long before Elliott, though the difference of their
ages is not so vast as might be supposed from this fact, being as near
as possible ten years only.
It is not my object in this article to compare or to contrast the
intellectual characters of these two genuine poets. They are widely
different. In both the spirit of freedom, of progress, of sympathy
with the multitude, and of steady antagonism to oppression, manifest
themselves, but with much difference of manner. Both possess great
vigor and fervor of feeling; but in James Montgomery the decorums of
style are more strictly preserved. We feel that he received his
education in a very different school to that of Ebenezer Elliott. In
the still halls and gardens of the Moravian brethren, Montgomery
imbibed the softness of bearing, and that peculiarly religious tone
which distinguish him. Amid the roughest and often most hostile crowd
of struggling life, Elliott acquired a more fiery and battling aspect,
and he learned involuntarily to thunder against evils, where
Montgomery would reason and lament. Yet it would be difficult to say
in which all that characterizes real patriotism, and real religion,
most truly resides. In very different walks they have both done
gloriously and well, and we will leave to others to decide which is
the greater poet of the two. Elliott, by both circumstance and
temperament, has been led to make his poetry bear more directly and at
once upon the actual condition of the working-classes; Montgomery has
displayed more uniform grace, and in lyrical beauty has far surpassed
his townsman, though not in the exquisite harmony of many portions of
his versification. But, they are not now to be compared, but to be
admired; and nothing is more beautiful than to hear in what tone and
manner they speak of each other. Montgomery gives Ebenezer Elliot the
highest praise for his genius, and says, that for years in the Iris he
was the only one who could or would see the merit of the great but
unacknowledged bard; while Elliott modestly dedicates his poem of
Spirits and Men to the author of The World before the Flood, "as an
evidence of his presumption and his despair."
Mr. Montgomery had a strictly religious education; he was the son of
religious parents, and belonged to a pre-eminently religious body, the
Moravian brethren; and the spirit of that parentage, education, and
association, is deeply diffused through all that he has written. He is
essentially a religious poet. It is what of all things upon earth we
can well believe he most would desire to be; and that he is in the
truest sense of the word. In all his poems the spirit of a piety,
profound, and beautifully benevolent, is instantly felt. Perhaps there
are no lyrics in the language which are so truly Christian; that is,
which breathe the same glowing love to God and man, without one tinge
of the bigotry that too commonly eats into zeal as rust into the
finest steel. We have no dogmas, but a pure and heavenly atmosphere of
holy faith, filial and fraternal affection, and reverence of the great
Architect of the universe, and of the destinies of man. There is often
a tone of melancholy, but it is never that of doubt. It is the sighing
of a feeling and sensitive heart over the evils of life; but ever and
anon this tone rises into the more animated one of conscious strength
and well placed confidence; and terminates in that pæan of happy
triumph which the Christian only can ascend to. There is no "dealing
damnation round the land" in the religious poetry of James Montgomery;
we feel that he has peculiarly caught the genuine spirit of Christ;
and a sense of beauty and goodness, and of the glorious blessedness of
an immortal nature, accompanies us through all his works. That is the
spirit which, more than all other, distinguishes his lyrical
compositions; and how many and how beautiful are they! as, The Grave,
The Joy of Grief, Verses on the Death of Joseph Browne, a prisoner for
conscience' sake in York Castle, commencing, "Spirit, leave thine
house of clay;" The Common Lot, The Harp of Sorrow, The Dial, The
Molehill, The Peak Mountains, A Mother's Love, those noble Stanzas to
the Memory of the Rev. Thomas Spencer, The Alps, Friends, Night, and
the many in the same volume with the Pelican Island, perhaps some of
them the most beautiful and spiritual things he ever wrote. The poetry
of Montgomery is too familiar to most readers, and especially
religiously intellectual readers, to need much quotation here; but a
few stanzas may be ventured upon, and will of themselves more forcibly
indicate the peculiar features of his poetical character, than much
prose description.
The opening stanzas on the death of Thomas Spencer embody his very
creed and doctrine as a poet.
"I will not sing a mortal's praise,
To thee I consecrate my lays,
To whom my powers belong;
Those gifts upon thine altar thrown,
O GOD! accept;--accept thine own:
My gifts are Thine,--be Thine alone
The glory of my song.
"In earth and ocean, sky and air,
All that is excellent and fair,
Seen, felt, or understood,
From one eternal cause descends,
To one eternal center tends,
With GOD begins, continues, ends,
The source and stream of good.
"I worship not the Sun at noon,
The wandering Stars, the changing Moon,
The Wind, the Flood, the Flame;
I will not bow the votive knee
To Wisdom, Virtue, Liberty;
'There _is_ no GOD but GOD,' for me:
Jehovah is his name.
"Him through all nature I explore,
Him in his creatures I adore,
Around, beneath, above;
But clearest in the human mind,
His bright resemblance when I find,
Grandeur with purity combined,
I must admire and love."
I can not resist transcribing one more specimen. It is one in which
the quaint but adoring spirit of Quarll, Withers, or Herrick, seems to
speak; nor shall I ever forget the thrilling tone in which I have
heard it repeated by a sainted friend, in whom the love of her Savior
was the very life-blood of her heart, and who resembled him in his
beneficent walk on earth as much, perhaps, as it is possible for
mortal to do.