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 burst from their bonds, what
their bonds may be, why they should battle with the time, what the
time may be, and {208}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,