Such musings receive the Pedlar's approba- | misery, is religion the dominant principle of

tion, and he says

"My friend! enough to sorrow you have given. The purposes of wisdom ask no more. Be wise and cheerful, and no longer read The forms of things with an unworthy eye. She sleeps in the calm earth, and peace is here." As the Poet, then, was entirely satisfied with the tale, so ought to be all readers. No hint is dropped that there was any thing to blame in the poor woman's nine years' passion-no regret breathed that she had sought not, by means offered to all, for that peace of mind which passeth all understanding-no question asked, how it was that she had not communed with her own afflicted heart, over the pages of that Book where it is written, "Come unto me all ye that are weary and heavy laden, and I will give ye rest!" The narrator had indeed said, that on revisiting her during her afflic

tion

"Her humble lot of books,

Which in her cottage window, heretofore,
Had been piled up against the corner panes
In seemly order, now, with straggling leaves,
Lay scatter'd here and there, open or shut,
As they had chanced to fall."

But he does not mention the Bible.

thought and feeling in the character of any one human being with whom we are made acquainted, living or dead. Of not a single one, man or woman, are we made to feel the beauty of holiness-the power and the glory of the Christian Faith. Beings are brought before us whom we pity, respect, admire, love. The great poet is high-souled and tenderhearted-his song is pure as the morning, bright as day, solemn as night. But his inspiration is not drawn from the Book of God, but from the Book of Nature. Therefore it fails to sustain his genius when venturing into the depths of tribulation and anguish. Therefore imperfect are his most truthful delineations of sins and sorrows; and not in his philosophy, lofty though it be, can be found alleviation or cure of the maladies that kill the soul. Therefore never will the Excursion become a bosom-book, endeared to all ranks and conditions of a Christian People, like "The Task" or the "Night Thoughts." Their religion is that of revelation-it acknowledges no other source but the word of God. To that word, in all difficulty, distress, and dismay, these poets appeal; and though they may

What follows has always seemed to us of a sometimes, or often, misinterpret its judg questionable character

"I well remember that those very plumes,

ment, that is an evil incident to finite intelligence; and the very consciousness that it is

Those weeds, and the high spear-grass on that wall, so, inspires a perpetual humility that is itself

By mist and silent rain-drops silver'd o'er,
As once I pass'd, into my heart convey'd

So still an image of tranquillity,

So calm and still, and look'd so beautiful

Amid the uneasy thoughts which fill'd my mind, That what we feel of sorrow and despair From ruin and from change, and all the griefs The passing shows of Being leave behind, Appear'd an idle dream, that could not live Where meditation was. I turn'd away, And walk'd along my road in happiness." These are fine lines; nor shall we dare, in face of them, to deny the power of the beauty and serenity of nature to assuage the sorrow of us mortal beings, who live for awhile on her breast. Assuredly, there is sorrow that may be so assuaged: and the sorrow here spoken of for poor Margaret, many years dead-was of that kind. But does not the heart of a man beat painfully, as if violence were offered to its most sacred memories, to hear from the lips of wisdom, that "sorrow and despair from ruin and from change, and all the griefs" that we can suffer here below, appear an idle dream among plumes, and weeds, and speargrass, and mists, and raindrops! "Where meditation is!" What meditation? Turn thou, O child of a day! to the New Testament, and therein thou mayest find comfort. It matters not whether a springbank be thy seat by Rydal Mere, "while heaven and earth do make one imagery," or thou sittest in the shadow of death, beside a tomb.

a virtue found to accompany only a Christian's Faith.

66

We have elsewhere vindicated the choice of a person of low degree as Chief of the 'Excursion," and exult to think that a great poet should have delivered his highest doc trines through the lips of a Scottish Pedlar. "Early had he learn'd To reverence the volume that displays The mystery of life that cannot die." Throughout the poem he shows that he doe: reverence it, and that his whole being has been purified and elevated by its spirit. But fond as he is of preaching, and excellent in the art or gift, a Christian Preacher he is notat best a philosophical divine. Familiar by his parentage and nurture with all most hallowed round the poor man's hearth, and guarded by his noble nature from all offence to the sanctities there enshrined; yet the truth must be told, he speaks not, he expounds not the Word as the servant of the Lord, as the follower of Him Crucified. There is very much in his announcements to his equals wide of the mark set up in the New Testament. We seem to hear rather of a divine power and harmony in the universe than of the Living God. The spirit of Christianity as connected with the Incarnation of the Deity, the HumanGod, the link between heaven and earth, beWe said, that for the present we should con- tween helplessness and omnipotence, ought to fine our remarks on this subject to the story be everywhere visible in the religious effuof Margaret; but they are, more or less, appli- sions of a Christian Poet-wonder and awe cable to almost all the stories in the Excur- for the greatness of God, gratitude and love sion. In many of the eloquent disquisitions for his goodness, humility and self-abasement and harangues of the Three Friends, they for his own unworthiness. Passages may percarry along with them the sympathies of all haps be found in the "Excursion" expressive mankind; and the wisest may be enlightened of that spirit, but they are few and faint, and by their wisdom. But what we complain of somewhat professional, falling not from the is, that neither in joy nor grief, happiness nor | Pedlar but from the Pastor. If the mind,

forming its conceptions of divine things, is prouder of its own power than humbled in the comparison of its personal inferiority; and in enunciating them in verse, more rejoices in the consciousness of the power of its own genius than in the contemplation of Him from whom cometh every good and perfect gift-it has not attained Piety, and its worship is not an acceptable service. For it is self-worship -worship of the creature's own conceptions, and an overweening complacency with its own greatness, in being able to form and so to express them as to win or command the praise and adoration of his fellow mortals. Those lofty speculations, alternately declaimed among the mountains, with an accompaniment of waterfalls, by men full of fancies and eloquent of speech, elude the hold of the earnest spirit longing for truth; disappointment and impatience grow on the humblest and most reverent mind, and escaping from the multitude of vain words, the neophyte finds in one chapter of a Book forgotten in that babblement, a light to his way and a support to his steps, which, following and trusting, he knows will lead him to everlasting life.

Throughout the poem there is much talk of the light of nature, little of the light of revelation, and they all speak of the theological doctrines of which our human reason gives us assurance. Such expressions as these may easily lead to important error, and do, indeed, seem often to have been misconceived and misemployed. What those truths are which human reason, unassisted, would discover to us on these subjects, it is impossible for us to know, for we have never seen it left absolutely to itself. Instruction, more or less, in wandering tradition, or in express, full, and recorded revelation, has always accompanied it; and we have never had other experience of the human mind than as exerting its powers under the light of imparted knowledge. In these circumstances, all that can be properly meant by those expressions which regard the power of the human mind to guide, to enlighten, or to satisfy itself in such great inquiries, is not that it can be the discoverer of truth, but that, with the doctrines of truth set before it, it is able to deduce arguments from its own independent sources which confirm it in their belief; or that, with truth and error proposed to its choice, it has means, to a certain extent, in its own power, of distinguishing one from the other. For ourselves, we may understand easily that it would be impossible for us so to shut out from our minds the knowledge which has been poured in upon them from our earliest | years, in order to ascertain what self-left reason could find out. Yet this much we are able to do in the speculations of our philosophy. We can inquire, in this light, what are the grounds of evidence which nature and reason themselves offer for belief in the same truths. A like remark must be extended to the morality which we seem now to inculcate from the authority of human reason. We no longer possess any such independent morality. The spirit of a higher, purer, moral law than man could discover, has been breathed over the world, and we have grown up in the air and

the light of a system so congenial to the highest feelings of our human nature, that the wisest spirits amongst us have sometimes been tempted to forget that its origin is divine.

Had the Excursion been written in the poet's later life, it had not been so liable to such objections as these; for much of his poetry composed since that era is imbued with a religious spirit, answering the soul's desire of the devoutest Christian. His Ecclesiastical Sonnets are sacred poetry indeed. How comprehensive the sympathy of a truly pious heart! How religion reconciles different forms, and modes, and signs, and symbols of worship, provided only they are all imbued with the spirit of faith! This is the toleration Christianity sanctions-for it is inspired by its own universal love. No sectarian feeling here, that would exclude or debar from the holiest chamber in the poet's bosom one sincere worshipper of our Father which is in heaven. Christian brethren! By that mysterious bond our natures are brought into more endearing communion-now more than ever, brethren, because of the blood that was shed for us all from His blessed side! Even of that most awful mystery in some prayer-like strains the Poet tremblingly speaks, in many a strain, at once so affecting and so elevating-breathing so divinely of Christian charity to all whose trust is in the Cross! Who shall say what form of worship is most acceptable to the Almighty? All are holy in which the soul seeks to approach him-holy

"The chapel lurking among trees, Where a few villagers on bended knees Find solace which a busy world disdains;" we feel as the poet felt when he breathed to the image of some old abbey—

"Once ye were holy, ye are holy still!" And what heart partakes not the awe of his "Beneath that branching roof Self-poised, and scoop'd into ten thousand cells Lingering and wandering on as loth to die?” Where light and shade repose, where music dwells

Read the first of these sonnets with the lastand then once more the strains that come between-and you will be made to feel how various and how vast beneath the sky are the regions set apart by the soul for prayer and worship; and that all places become consecrated-the high and the humble—the mean and the magnificent-in which Faith and Piety have sought to hold communion with Heaven.

But they who duly worship God in temples made with hands, meet every hour of their lives “Devotional Excitements" as they walk among his works; and in the later poetry of Wordsworth these abound--age having solemnized the whole frame of his being, that was always alive to religious emotions-but more than ever now, as around his paths in the evening of life longer fall the mysterious shadows. More fervid lines have seldom flowed from his spirit in its devoutest mood, than some awakened by the sounds and sights of a happy day in May-to him-though no church-bell was heard-a Sabbath. His occasional poems are often felt by us to be linked together by the finest affinities, which perhaps

"Doom'd as we are our native dust

To wet with many a bitter shower,
It ill be fits us to disdain

The Altar, to deride the Fane,
Where patient sufferers bend, in trust
To win a happier hour.

"I love, where spreads the village lawn,
Upon some knee-worn Cell to gaze;
Hail to the firm unmoving Cross,
Aloft, where pine their branches toss!
And to the Chapel far withdrawn,
That lurks by lonely ways!

are but affinities between the feelings they in- | to come down for an hour from heaven. How spire. Thus we turn from those lines to some solemn the opening strain! and from the moon a subject seemingly very different, from a mentary vision of Science on her speculative feeling of such fine affinities-which haply are Tower, how gently glides Imagination down, to but those subsisting between all things and take her place by the Poet's side, in his bark thoughts that are pure and good. We hear in afloat beneath Italian skies-suddenly bethem how the Poet, as he gazes on a Family dimmed, lake, land, and all, with a something that holds not the Christian Faith, embraces between day and night. In a moment we are them in the folds of Christian Love-and how conscious of Eclipse. Our slight surprise is religion as well as nature sanctifies the ten- lost in the sense of a strange beauty-solemn derness that is yearning at his heart towards not sad-settling on the face of nature and the them-"a Jewish Family"-who, though out- abodes of men. In a single stanza filled with casts by Heaven's decree, are not by Heaven, beautiful names of the beautiful, we have a still merciful to man, left forlorn on earth. vision of the Lake, with all its noblest banks, How exquisite the stanzas composed in one and bays, and bowers, and mountains-when of the Catholic Chapels in Switzerlandin an instant we are wafted away from a scene that might well have satisfied our imagination and our heart-if high emotions were not uncontrollable and omnipotent-wafted away by Fancy with the speed of Fire-lakes, groves, cliffs, mountains, all forgotten-and alight amid an aërial host of figures, human and divine, on a spire that seeks the sky. How still those imaged sanctities and purities, all white as snows of Apennine, stand in the heavenly region, circle above circle, and crowned as with a zone of stars! They are imbued with life. In their animation the figures of angels and saints, insensate stones no more, seem to feel the Eclipse that shadows them, and look awful in the portentous light. In his inspiration he transcends the grandeur even of that moment's How sweetly are interspersed among them vision-and beholds in the visages of that some of humbler mood, most touching in their aerial host those of the sons of heaven darkensimple pathos-such as a Hymn for the boat-ing with celestial sorrow at the Fall of Manmen as they approach the Rapids-Lines on hearing the song of the harvest damsels floating homeward on the lake of Brientz-the Italian Itinerant and the Swiss Goatherd-and the Three Cottage Girls, representatives of Italian, of Helvetian, and of Scottish beauty, brought together, as if by magic, into one picture, each breathing in her natural grace the peculiar spirit and distinctive character of her country's charms! Such gentle visions disappear, and we sit by the side of the Poet as he gazes from his boat floating on the Lake of Lugano, on the Church of San Salvador, which was almost destroyed by lightning a few years ago, while the altar and the image of the patron saint were untouched, and devoutly listen while he exclaims

"Where'er we roam-along the brink
Of Rhine-or by the sweeping Po,
Through Alpine vale, or champaign wide,
Whate'er we look on, at our side
Be Charity-to bid us think
And feel, if we would know.'

"Cliffs, fountains, rivers, seasons, times,
Let all remind the soul of heaven;
Our slack devotion needs them all;
And faith, so oft of sense the thrall,
While she, by aid of Nature, climbs,
May hope to be forgiven."

We do not hesitate to pronounce "Eclipse of the Sun, 1820," one of the finest lyrical effusions of combined thought, passion, sentiment, and imagery, within the whole compass of poetry. If the beautiful be indeed essentially different from the sublime, we here feel that they may be made to coalesce so as to be in their united agencies one divine power. We called it lyrical, chiefly because of its transitions. Though not an ode, it is ode-like in its invocations; and it might be set and sung to music if Handel were yet alive, and St. Cecilia

25

when

"Throngs of celestial visages, Darkening like water in the breeze, A holy sadness shared."

Never since the day on which the wondrous edifice, in its consummate glory, first saluted the sun, had it inspired in the soul of kneeling saint a thought so sad and so sublime-a thought beyond the reaches of the soul of him whose genius bade it bear up all its holy adornments so far from earth, that the silent company seem sometimes, as light and shadow move among them, to be in ascension to heaven. But the Sun begins again to look like the Sun, and the poet, relieved by the joyful light from that awful trance, delights to behold

"Town and Tower,

The Vineyard and the Olive Bower,
Their lustre re-assume;"

and "breathes there a man with soul so dead,"
that it burns not within him as he hears the
heart of the husband and the father breathe
forth its love and its fear, remembering on a
sudden the far distant whom it has never for-
gotten-a love and a fear that saddens, but dis-
turbs not, for the vision he saw had inspired
him with a trust in the tender mercies of God?
Commit to faithful memory, O Friend! who
may some time or other be a traveller over the
wide world, the sacred stanzas that brings the
Poem to a close-and it will not fail to comfort
thee when sitting all alone by the well in the
wilderness, or walking along the strange streets
of foreign cities, or lying in thy cot at midnight
afloat on far-off seas.

R

“O ye, who guard and grace my Home
While in far-distant Lands we roam,
Was such a vision given to you?
Or, while we look'd with favour'd eyes,
Did sullen mist hide lake and skies
And mountains from your view?
"I ask in vain-and know far less,
If sickness, sorrow, or distress
Have spared my dwelling to this hour;
Sad blindness! but ordained to prove
Our faith in Heaven's unfailing love,
And all-controlling power."

wither, planted on the bank of "that river whose streams make glad the city of the Lord."

Indeed, we see no reason why poetry, conceived in the spirit of a most exclusive sectarianism, may not be of a very high order, and powerfully impressive on minds whose religious tenents are most irreconcilable and hostile to those of the sect. Feelings, by being unduly concentrated, are not thereby necessa rily enfeebled on the contrary, often strengthened; and there is a grand austerity which the imagination more than admires-which the

the conviction from which that austerity grows, is in itself right; for it is a feeling-a conviction of the perfect righteousness of God-the utter worthlessness of self-left man—the awful sanctity of duty-and the dreadfulness of the judgment-doom, from which no soul is safe till the seals have been broken, and the Archangel has blown his trumpet. A religion planted in such convictions as these, may become dark and disordered in its future growth within the spirit; and the tree, though of good seed and in a strong soil, may come to be laden with bitter fruit, and the very droppings of its leaves may be pernicious to all who rest within its shade. Still, such shelter is better in the blast than the trunk of a dead faith; and such food, unwholesome though it be, is not so miserable as famine to a hungry soul.

Let us fly from Rydal to Sheffield. James Montgomery is truly a religious poet. His popularity, which is great, has, by some scribes sit-conscience scarcely condemns. The feeling, ting in the armless chairs of the scorners, been attributed chiefly to the power of sectarianism. He is, we believe, a sectary; and, if all sects were animated by the spirit that breathes throughout his poetry, we should have no fears for the safety and stability of the Established Church; for in that selfsame spirit was she built, and by that selfsame spirit were her foundations dug in a rock. Many are the lights-solemn and awful all-in which the eyes of us mortal creatures may see the Christian dispensation. Friends, looking down from the top of a high mountain on a city-sprinkled plain, have each his own vision of imagination each his own sinking or swelling of heart. They urge no inquisition into the peculiar affections of each other's secret breasts-all assured, from what each knows of his brother, that every eye there may see God-that every tongue that has the gift of lofty utterance may sing his praises aloud that the lips that remain silent may be mute in adoration-and that all the distinctions of habits, customs, professions, modes of life, even natural constitution and form of character, if not lost, may be blended together in mild amalgamation under the common atmosphere of emotion, even as the towers, domes, and temples, are all softly or brightly interfused with the huts, cots, and homesteads the whole scene below harmonious, because inhabited by beings created by the same God— in his own image-and destined for the same immortality.

Grant, then, that there may be in Mr. Montgomery's poetry certain sentiments, which, in want of a better word, we call Sectarian. They are not necessarily false, although not perfectly reconcilable to our own creed, which, we shall suppose, is true. On the contrary, we may be made much the better and the wiser men by meditating upon them; for while they may, perhaps, (and we are merely making a supposition,) be too strongly felt by him, they may be too feebly felt by us-they may, perhaps, be rather blots on the beauty of his poetry than of his faith-and if, in some degree, offensive in the composition of a poem, far less so, or not at all, in that of a life.

It is base therefore, and false, to attribute, All his shorter poems are stamped with the in an invidious sense, any of Montgomery's character of the man. Most of them are breath. fame to any such cause. No doubt many per- ings of his own devout spirit, either delighted sons read his poetry on account of its religion, or awed by a sense of the Divine goodness who, but for that, would not have read it; and and mercy towards itself, or tremblingly alive no doubt, too, many of them neither feel nor-not in mere sensibility to human virtues and understand it. But so, too, do many persons joys, crimes and sorrows, for that often belongs read Wordsworth's poetry on account of its to the diseased and depraved—but in solemn, religion-the religion of the woods-who, but moral, and religious thought, to all of good or for that, would not have read it; and so, too, evil befalling his brethren of mankind. “A many of them neither feel nor understand it. sparrow cannot fall to the ground”—a flower So is it with the common manners-painting of the field cannot wither immediately before poetry of Crabbe-the dark passion-painting his eyes-without awakening in his heart poetry of Byron-the high-romance-painting such thoughts as we may believe God inpoetry of Scott-and so on with Moore, Cole-tended should be awakened even by such ridge, Southey, and the rest. But it is to the sights as these; for the fall of a sparrow is mens divinior, however displayed, that they a scriptural illustration of his providence, and owe all their fame. Had Montgomery not his hand framed the lily, whose array is more been a true poet, all the Religious Magazines royal than was that of Solomon in all his glory. in the world could not have saved his name Herein he resembles Wordsworth-less profrom forgetfulness and oblivion. He might found certainly-less lofty; for in its highest have flaunted his day like the melancholy moods the genius of Wordsworth walks by Poppy-melancholy in all its ill-scented gau- itself-unapproachable-on the earth it beau diness; but as it is, he is like the Rose of tifies. But Montgomery's poetical piety is far Sharon, whose baim and beauty shall not more prevalent over his whole character; it