THE ROOTS OF THE HILLS.
In the poems of James Thomson, we find two hymns to the God of
Creation--one in blank verse, the other in stanzas. They are of the kind
which from him we should look for. The one in blank verse, which is as an
epilogue to his great poem, _The Seasons_, I prefer.
We owe much to Thomson. Born (in Scotland) in the year 1700, he is the
leading priest in a solemn procession to find God--not in the laws by
which he has ordered his creation, but in the beauty which is the outcome
of those laws. I do not say there is much of the relation of man to
nature in his writing; but thitherward it tends. He is true about the
outsides of God; and in Thomson we begin to feel that the revelation of
God as _meaning_ and therefore _being_ the loveliness of nature, is about
to be recognized. I do not say--to change my simile--that he is the first
visible root in our literature whence we can follow the outburst of the
flowers and foliage of our delight in nature: I could show a hundred
fibres leading from the depths of our old literature up to the great
root. Nor is it surprising that, with his age about him, he too should be
found tending to magnify, not God's Word, but his works, above all his
name: we have beauty for loveliness; beneficence for tenderness. I have
wondered whether one great part of Napoleon's mission was not to wake
people from this idolatry of the power of God to the adoration of his
love.
The _Hymn_ holds a kind of middle place between the _Morning Hymn_ in the
5th Book of the _Paradise Lost_ and the _Hymn in the Vale of Chamouni_.
It would be interesting and instructive to compare the three; but we have
not time. Thomson has been influenced by Milton, and Coleridge by both.
We have delight in Milton; art in Thomson; heart, including both, in
Coleridge.
HYMN.
These, as they change, Almighty Father, these
Are but the varied God. The rolling year
Is full of thee. Forth in the pleasing Spring
Thy beauty walks, thy tenderness and love.
Wide flush the fields; the softening air is balm;
Echo the mountains round; the forest smiles;
And every sense and every heart is joy.
Then comes thy glory in the Summer months,
With light and heat refulgent. Then thy sun
Shoots full perfection through the swelling year
And oft thy voice in dreadful thunder speaks,
And oft at dawn, deep noon, or falling eve,
By brooks and groves, in hollow-whispering gales.[159]
A yellow-floating pomp, thy bounty shines
In Autumn unconfined. Thrown from thy lap,
Profuse o'er nature, falls the lucid shower
Of beamy fruits; and, in a radiant stream,
Into the stores of sterile Winter pours.
In winter awful thou! with clouds and storms
Around thee thrown--tempest o'er tempest rolled.
Majestic darkness! on the whirlwind's wing
Riding sublime, thou bidst the world adore,[160]
And humblest nature with thy northern blast.
Mysterious round! what skill, what force divine
Deep felt, in these appear! a simple train,
Yet so delightful mixed, with such kind art,
Such beauty and beneficence combined!
Shade unperceived so softening into shade!
And all so forming an harmonious whole,
That, as they still succeed, they ravish still.
* * * * *
Nature attend! Join, every living soul,
Beneath the spacious temple of the sky--
In adoration join; and, ardent, raise
One general song! To him, ye vocal gales,
Breathe soft, whose spirit in your freshness breathes;
Oh! talk of him in solitary glooms,
Where, o'er the rock, the scarcely waving pine
Fills the brown shade with a religious awe;
And ye, whose bolder note is heard afar,
Who shake the astonished world, lift high to heaven
The impetuous song, and say from whom you rage.
His praise, ye brooks, attune,--ye trembling rills,
And let me catch it as I muse along.
Ye headlong torrents, rapid and profound;
Ye softer floods, that lead the humid maze
Along the vale; and thou, majestic main,
A secret world of wonders in thyself,
Sound his stupendous praise, whose greater voice
Or bids you roar, or bids your roarings fall.
Soft roll your incense, herbs, and fruits, and flowers,
In mingled clouds to him whose sun exalts,
Whose breath perfumes you, and whose pencil paints.
Ye forests, bend, ye harvests, wave to him;
Breathe your still song into the reaper's heart,
As home he goes beneath the joyous moon.
* * * * *
Bleat out afresh, ye hills! ye mossy rocks,
Retain the sound; the broad responsive low,
Ye valleys raise; for the great Shepherd reigns,
And his unsuffering kingdom yet will come.
* * * * *
Ye chief, for whom the whole creation smiles,
At once the head, the heart, and tongue of all,
Crown the great hymn! in swarming cities vast,
Assembled men, to the deep organ join
The long-resounding voice, oft breaking clear,
At solemn pauses, through the swelling base;
And, as each mingling flame increases each,
In one united ardour rise to heaven.
* * * * *
Should fate command me to the farthest verge
Of the green earth, to distant barbarous climes,
Rivers unknown to song, where first the sun
Gilds Indian mountains, or his setting beam
Flames on the Atlantic isles, 'tis nought to me,
Since God is ever present, ever felt,
In the void waste as in the city full;
And where he vital breathes there must be joy.
* * * * *
The worship of intellectual power in laws and inventions is the main
delight of the song; not the living presence of creative love, which
never sings its own praises, but spends itself in giving. Still, although
there has passed away a glory from the world of song, although the
fervour of childlike worship has vanished for a season, there are signs
in these verses of a new dawn of devotion. Even the exclusive and
therefore blind worship of science will, when it has turned the coil of
the ascending spiral, result in a new song to "him that made heaven and
earth and the sea and the fountains of waters." But first, for a long
time, the worship of power will go on. There is one sonnet by Kirke
White, eighty-five years younger than Thomson, which is quite pagan in
its mode of glorifying the power of the Deity.
But about the same time when Thomson's _Seasons_ was published, which was
in 1730, the third year of George II., that life which had burned on in
the hidden corners of the church in spite of the worldliness and
sensuality of its rulers, began to show a flame destined to enlarge and
spread until it should have lighted up the mass with an outburst of
Christian faith and hope. I refer to the movement called Methodism, in
the midst of which, at an early stage of its history, arose the directing
energies of John Wesley, a man sent of God to deepen at once and purify
its motive influences. What he and his friends taught, would, I presume,
in its essence, amount mainly to this: that acquiescence in the doctrines
of the church is no fulfilment of duty--or anything, indeed, short of an
obedient recognition of personal relation to God, who has sent every man
the message of present salvation in his Son. A new life began to bud and
blossom from the dry stem of the church. The spirit moved upon the waters
of feeling, and the new undulation broke on the shores of thought in an
outburst of new song. For while John Wesley roused the hearts of the
people to sing, his brother Charles put songs in their mouths.
I do not say that many of these songs possess much literary merit, but
many of them are real lyrics: they have that essential element, song, in
them. The following, however, is a very fine poem. That certain
expressions in it may not seem offensive, it is necessary to keep the
allegory of Jacob and the Angel in full view--even better in view,
perhaps, than the writer does himself.
WRESTLING JACOB.
Come, O thou traveller unknown,
Whom still I hold, but cannot see!
My company before is gone,
And I am left alone with thee!
With thee all night I mean to stay,
And wrestle till the break of day!
I need not tell thee who I am,
My misery or sin declare;
Thyself hast called me by my name:
Look on my hands, and read it there!
But who, I ask thee, who art thou?
Tell me thy name, and tell me now.
In vain thou struggles! to get free:
I never will unloose my hold.
Art thou the man that died for me?
The secret of thy love unfold.
Wrestling, I will not let thee go
Till I thy name, thy nature know.
* * * * *
What though my sinking flesh complain,
And murmur to contend so long!
I rise superior to my pain:
When I am weak, then I am strong;
And when my all of strength shall fail,
I shall with the God-man prevail.
My strength is gone; my nature dies;
I sink beneath thy weighty hand:
Faint to revive, and fall to rise;
I fall, and yet by faith I stand--
I stand, and will not let thee go
Till I thy name, thy nature know.
Yield to me now, for I am weak,
But confident in self-despair;
Speak to my heart, in blessings speak;
Be conquered by my instant[161] prayer.
Speak, or thou never hence shalt move,
And tell me if thy name is Love.
'Tis Love! 'tis Love! Thou diedst for me!
I hear thy whisper in my heart!
The morning breaks; the shadows flee:
Pure universal Love thou art!
To me, to all, thy bowels move:
Thy nature and thy name is Love!
My prayer hath power with God; the grace
Unspeakable I now receive;
Through faith I see thee face to face--
I see thee face to face, and live:
In vain I have not wept and strove;
Thy nature and thy name is Love.
I know thee, Saviour--who thou art--
Jesus, the feeble sinner's friend!
Nor wilt thou with the night depart,
But stay and love me to the end!
Thy mercies never shall remove:
Thy nature and thy name is Love!
* * * * *
Contented now, upon my thigh
I halt till life's short journey end;
All helplessness, all weakness, I
On thee alone for strength depend;
Nor have I power from thee to move:
Thy nature and thy name is Love.
Lame as I am, I take the prey;
Hell, earth, and sin, with ease o'ercome;
I leap for joy, pursue my way,
And as a bounding hart fly home;
Through all eternity to prove
Thy nature and thy name is Love.
It seems to me that the art with which his very difficult end in the
management of the allegory is reached, is admirable. I have omitted three
stanzas.
I cannot give much from William Cowper. His poems--graceful always, and
often devout even when playful--have few amongst them that are expressly
religious, while the best of his hymns are known to every reader of such.
Born in 1731, he was greatly influenced by the narrow theology that
prevailed in his circle; and most of his hymns are marred by the
exclusiveness which belonged to the system and not to the man. There is
little of it in the following:--
Far from the world, O Lord, I flee,
From strife and tumult far;
From scenes where Satan wages still
His most successful war.
The calm retreat, the silent shade,
With prayer and praise agree,
And seem by thy sweet bounty made
For those who follow thee.
There if thy spirit touch the soul,
And grace her mean abode,
Oh with what peace, and joy, and love,
She communes with her God!
There, like the nightingale, she pours
Her solitary lays,
Nor asks a witness of her song,
Nor thirsts for human praise.
Author and guardian of my life,
Sweet source of light divine,
And--all harmonious names in one--
My Saviour, thou art mine!
What thanks I owe thee, and what love--
A boundless, endless store--
Shall echo through the realms above
When time shall be no more.
Sad as was Cowper's history, with the vapours of a low insanity, if not
always filling his garden, yet ever brooding on the hill-tops of his
horizon, he was, through his faith in God, however darkened by the
introversions of a neat, poverty-stricken theology, yet able to lead his
life to the end. It is delightful to discover that, when science, which
is the anatomy of nature, had poisoned the theology of the country, in
creating a demand for clean-cut theory in infinite affairs, the
loveliness and truth of the countenance of living nature could calm the
mind which this theology had irritated to the very borders of madness,
and give a peace and hope which the man was altogether right in
attributing to the Spirit of God. How many have been thus comforted, who
knew not, like Wordsworth, the immediate channel of their comfort; or
even, with Cowper, recognized its source! God gives while men sleep.