England's Antiphon

CHAPTER XIX

THE PLAIN.

But Addison's tameness is wonderfully lovely beside the fervours of a man of honoured name,—Dr. Isaac Watts, born in 1674. The result must be dreadful where fervour will poetize without the aidful restraints of art and modesty. If any man would look upon absurdity in the garb of sobriety, let him search Dryden's

Annus Mirabilis

: Dr. Watts's

Lyrics

 are as bad; they are fantastic to utter folly. An admiration of "the incomparable Mr. Cowley" did the sense of them more injury than the imitation of his rough-cantering ode could do their rhythm. The sentimentalities of Roman Catholic writers towards our Lord and his mother, are not half so offensive as the courtier-like flatteries Dr. Watts offers to the Most High. To say nothing of the irreverence, the vulgarity is offensive. He affords another instance amongst thousands how little the form in which feeling is expressed has to do with the feeling itself. In him the thought is true, the form of its utterance false; the feeling lovely, the word, often to a degree, repulsive. The ugly web is crossed now and then by a fine line, and even damasked with an occasional good poem: I have found two, and only two, in the whole of his seventy-five

Lyrics sacred to Devotion

. His objectivity and boldness of thought, and his freedom of utterance, cause us ever and anon to lament that he had not the humility and faith of an artist as well as of a Christian.

Almost all his symbols indicate a worship of power and of outward show.

I give the best of the two good poems I have mentioned, and very good it is.

HAPPY FRAILTY

  "How meanly dwells the immortal mind!

    How vile these bodies are!

  Why was a clod of earth designed

    To enclose a heavenly star?

  "Weak cottage where our souls reside!

    This flesh a tottering wall!

  With frightful breaches gaping wide,

    The building bends to fall.

  "All round it storms of trouble blow,

    And waves of sorrow roll;

  Cold waves and winter storms beat through,

    And pain the tenant-soul.

  "Alas, how frail our state!" said I,

    And thus went mourning on;

  Till sudden from the cleaving sky

    A gleam of glory shone.

  My soul all felt the glory come,

    And breathed her native air;

  Then she remembered heaven her home,

    And she a prisoner here.

  Straight she began to change her key;

    And, joyful in her pains,

  She sang the frailty of her clay

    In pleasurable strains.

  "How weak the prison is where I dwell!

    Flesh but a tottering wall!

  The breaches cheerfully foretell

    The house must shortly fall.

  "No more, my friends, shall I complain,

    Though all my heart-strings ache;

  Welcome disease, and every pain

    That makes the cottage shake!

  "Now let the tempest blow all round,

    Now swell the surges high,

  And beat this house of bondage down

    To let the stranger fly!

  "I have a mansion built above

    By the eternal hand;

  And should the earth's old basis move,

    My heavenly house must stand.

  "Yes, for 'tis there my Saviour reigns—

    I long to see the God—

  And his immortal strength sustains

    The courts that cost him blood.

  "Hark! from on high my Saviour calls:

    I come, my Lord, my Love!

  Devotion breaks the prison-walls,

    And speeds my last remove."

His psalms and hymns are immeasurably better than his lyrics. Dreadful some of them are; and I doubt if there is one from which we would not wish stanzas, lines, and words absent. But some are very fine. The man who could write such verses as these ought not to have written as he has written:—

  Had I a glance of thee, my God,

    Kingdoms and men would vanish soon;

  Vanish as though I saw them not,

    As a dim candle dies at noon.

  Then they might fight and rage and rave:

    I should perceive the noise no more

  Than we can hear a shaking leaf

    While rattling thunders round us roar.

Some of his hymns will be sung, I fancy, so long as men praise God together; for most heartily do I grant that of all hymns I know he has produced the best for public use; but these bear a very small proportion indeed to the mass of his labour. We cannot help wishing that he had written about the twentieth part. We could not have too much of his best, such as this:

  Be earth with all her scenes withdrawn;

  Let noise and vanity begone:

  In secret silence of the mind

  My heaven, and there my God, I find;

but there is no occasion for the best to be so plentiful: a little of it will go a great way. And as our best moments are so few, how could any man write six hundred religious poems, and produce quality in proportion to quantity save in an inverse ratio?

Dr. Thomas Parnell, the well-known poet, a clergyman, born in Dublin in 1679, has written a few religious verses. The following have a certain touch of imagination and consequent grace, which distinguishes them above the swampy level of the time.

HYMN FOR EVENING

  The beam-repelling mists arise,

  And evening spreads obscurer skies;

  The twilight will the night forerun,

  And night itself be soon begun.

  Upon thy knees devoutly bow,

  And pray the Lord of glory now

  To fill thy breast, or deadly sin

  May cause a blinder night within.

  And whether pleasing vapours rise,

  Which gently dim the closing eyes,

  Which make the weary members blest

  With sweet refreshment in their rest;

  Or whether spirits

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  The animal spirits of the old physiologists.

 in the brain

  Dispel their soft embrace again,

  And on my watchful bed I stay,

  Forsook by sleep, and waiting day;

  Be God for ever in my view,

  And never he forsake me too;

  But still as day concludes in night,

  To break again with new-born light,

  His wondrous bounty let me find

  With still a more enlightened mind.

* * * * *

  Thou that hast thy palace far

  Above the moon and every star;

  Thou that sittest on a throne

  To which the night was never known,

  Regard my voice, and make me blest

  By kindly granting its request.

  If thoughts on thee my soul employ,

  My darkness will afford me joy,

  Till thou shalt call and I shall soar,

  And part with darkness evermore.

Many long and elaborate religious poems I have not even mentioned, because I cannot favour extracts, especially in heroic couplets or blank verse. They would only make my book heavy, and destroy the song-idea. I must here pass by one of the best of such poems,

The Complaint, or Night Thoughts

 of Dr. Young; nor is there anything else of his I care to quote.

I must give just one poem of Pope, born in 1688, the year of the Revolution. The flamboyant style of his

Messiah

 is to me detestable: nothing can be more unlike the simplicity of Christianity. All such, equally with those by whatever hand that would be religious by being miserable, I reject at once, along with all that are merely commonplace religious exercises. But this at least is very unlike the rest of Pope's compositions: it is as simple in utterance as it is large in scope and practical in bearing. The name

Jove

 may be unpleasant to some ears: it is to mine—not because it is the name given to their deity by men who had had little outward revelation, but because of the associations which the wanton poets, not the good philosophers, have gathered about it. Here let it stand, as Pope meant it, for one of the names of the Unknown God.

THE UNIVERSAL PRAYER

  Father of all! in every age,

    In every clime adored,

  By saint, by savage, and by sage,

    Jehovah, Jove, or Lord!

  Thou great First Cause, least understood!

    Who all my sense confined

  To know but this, that thou art good,

    And that myself am blind

  Yet gave me, in this dark estate,

    To see the good from ill;

  And, binding Nature fast in Fate,

    Left free the human will:

  What Conscience dictates to be done,

    Or warns me not to do—

  This, teach me more than hell to shun,

    That, more than heaven pursue.

  What blessings thy free bounty gives,

    Let me not cast away;

  For God is paid when man receives:

    To enjoy is to obey.

  Yet not to earth's contracted span

    Thy goodness let me bound,

  Or think thee Lord alone of man,

    When thousand worlds are round.

  Let not this weak, unknowing hand

    Presume thy bolts to throw,

  And deal damnation round the land

    On each I judge thy foe.

  If I am right, thy grace impart

    Still in the right to stay;

  If I am wrong, O teach my heart

    To find that better way.

  Save me alike from foolish pride

    Or impious discontent,

  At aught thy wisdom has denied,

    Or aught thy goodness lent.

  Teach me to feel another's woe,

    To hide the fault I see:

  That mercy I to others show,

    That mercy show to me.

  Mean though I am—not wholly so,

    Since quickened by thy breath:—

  O lead me wheresoe'er I go,

    Through this day's life or death.

  This day, be bread and peace my lot:

    All else beneath the sun

  Thou know'st if best bestowed or not,

    And let thy will be done.

  To thee, whose temple is all space,

    Whose altar, earth, sea, skies,

  One chorus let all being raise!

    All Nature's incense rise!

And now we come upon a strange little well in the desert. Few flowers indeed shine upon its brink, and it flows with a somewhat unmusical ripple: it is a well of the water of life notwithstanding, for its song tells of the love and truth which are the grand power of God.

John Byrom, born in Manchester in the year 1691, a man whose strength of thought and perception of truth greatly surpassed his poetic gifts, yet delighted so entirely in the poetic form that he wrote much and chiefly in it. After leaving Cambridge, he gained his livelihood for some time by teaching a shorthand of his own invention, but was so distinguished as a man of learning generally that he was chosen an F.R.S. in 1723. Coming under the influence, probably through William Law, of the writings of Jacob Böhme, the marvellous shoemaker of Görlitz in Silesia, who lived in the time of our Shakspere, and heartily adopting many of his views, he has left us a number of religious poems, which are seldom so sweet in music as they are profound in the metaphysics of religion. Here we have yet again a mystical thread running radiant athwart both warp and woof of our poetic web: the mystical thinker will ever be found the reviver of religious poetry; and although some of the seed had come from afar both in time and space, Byrom's verse is of indigenous growth. Much of the thought of the present day will be found in his verses. Here is a specimen of his metrical argumentation. It is taken from a series of

Meditations for every Day in Passion Week

.

WEDNESDAY

Christ satisfieth the justice of God by fulfilling all righteousness.

  Justice demandeth satisfaction—yes;

  And ought to have it where injustice is:

  But there is none in God—it cannot mean

  Demand of justice where it has full reign:

  To dwell in man it rightfully demands,

  Such as he came from his Creator's hands.

    Man had departed from a righteous state,

  Which he at first must have, if God create:

  'Tis therefore called God's righteousness, and must

  Be satisfied by man's becoming just;

  Must exercise good vengeance upon men,

  Till it regain its rights in them again.

    This was the justice for which Christ became

  A man to satisfy its righteous claim;

  Became Redeemer of the human race,

  That sin in them to justice might give place:

  To satisfy a just and righteous will,

  Is neither more nor less than to fulfil.

* * * * *

Here are two stanzas of one of more mystical reflection:

A PENITENTIAL SOLILOQUY

  What though no objects strike upon the sight!

  Thy sacred presence is an inward light.

  What though no sounds shall penetrate the ear!

  To listening thought the voice of truth is clear.

  Sincere devotion needs no outward shrine;

  The centre of an humble soul is thine.

  There may I worship! and there mayst thou place

  Thy seat of mercy, and thy throne of grace!

  Yea, fix, if Christ my advocate appear,

  The dread tribunal of thy justice there!

  Let each vain thought, let each impure desire

  Meet in thy wrath with a consuming fire.

And here are two of more lyrical favour.

THE SOUL'S TENDENCY TOWARDS ITS TRUE CENTRE

  Stones towards the earth descend;

    Rivers to the ocean roll;

  Every motion has some end:

    What is thine, beloved soul?

  "Mine is, where my Saviour is;

    There with him I hope to dwell:

  Jesu is the central bliss;

    Love the force that doth impel."

  Truly thou hast answered right:

    Now may heaven's attractive grace

  Towards the source of thy delight

    Speed along thy quickening pace!

  "Thank thee for thy generous care:

    Heaven, that did the wish inspire,

  Through thy instrumental prayer,

    Plumes the wings of my desire.

  "Now, methinks, aloft I fly;

    Now with angels bear a part:

  Glory be to God on high!

    Peace to every Christian heart!"

THE ANSWER TO THE DESPONDING SOUL

  Cheer up, desponding soul;

    Thy longing pleased I see:

  'Tis part of that great whole

    Wherewith I longed for thee.

  Wherewith I longed for thee,

    And left my Father's throne,

  From death to set thee free,

    To claim thee for my own.

  To claim thee for my own,

    I suffered on the cross:

  O! were my love but known,

    No soul could fear its loss.

  No soul could fear its loss,

    But, filled with love divine,

  Would die on its own cross,

    And rise for ever mine.

Surely there is poetry as well as truth in this. But, certainly in general, his thought is far in excess of his poetry.

Here are a few verses which I shall once more entitle

DIVINE EPIGRAMS

  With peaceful mind thy race of duty run

  God nothing does, or suffers to be done,

  But what thou wouldst thyself, if thou couldst see

  Through all events of things as well as he.

* * * * *

  Think, and be careful what thou art within,

  For there is sin in the desire of sin:

  Think and be thankful, in a different case,

  For there is grace in the desire of grace.

* * * * *

  An heated fancy or imagination

  May be mistaken for an inspiration;

  True; but is this conclusion fair to make—

  That inspiration must be all mistake?

  A pebble-stone is not a diamond: true;

  But must a diamond be a pebble too?

  To own a God who does not speak to men,

  Is first to own, and then disown again;

  Of all idolatry the total sum

  Is having gods that are both deaf and dumb.

* * * * *

  What is more tender than a mother's love

    To the sweet infant fondling in her arms?

  What arguments need her compassion move

    To hear its cries, and help it in its harms?

  Now, if the tenderest mother were possessed

  Of all the love within her single breast

  Of all the mothers since the world began,

  'Tis nothing to the love of God to man.

* * * * *

  Faith, Hope, and Love were questioned what they thought

  Of future glory which Religion taught:

  Now Faith believed it firmly to be true,

  And Hope expected so to find it too:

  Love answered, smiling with a conscious glow,

  "Believe? Expect? I

know

 it to be so."

CHAPTER XX

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.

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159

  In the following five lines I have adopted the reading of the first edition, which, although a little florid, I prefer to the scanty two lines of the later.

  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,

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  False in feeling, nor like God at all, although a ready pagan representation of him. There is much of the pagan left in many Christians—poets too.

  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 bi