upon grass-we turn to the New Testament, | holds. Almost as soon as the heart is moved and read of the "Holy Innocents." "They by filial affection, that affection grows reverent were redeemed from among men, being the even to earthly parents-and, erelong, becomes first-fruits unto God and to the Lamb." We piety towards the name of God and Saviour. look down into the depths of that text-and we Yet philosophers have said that the child must then turn again to Keble's lines, which from not be too soon spoken to about religion. Will those depths have flowed over upon the unin- they fix the time? No-let religion—a myriadspired page! Yet not uninspired-if that name meaning word-be whispered and breathed may be given to strains which, like the airs round about them, as soon as intelligence that had touched the flowers of Paradise, smiles in their eyes and quickens their cars, "whisper whence they stole those balmy while enjoying the sights and sounds of their sweets." Revelation has shown us that "we own small yet multitudinous world. are greater than we know;" and who may neglect the Infancy of that Being for whom Godhead died! They who read the lines on "the Holy Innocents" in a mood of mind worthy of them, will go on, with an equal delight, through those on "The Epiphany." They are separated in the volume by some kindred and congenial strains; but when brought close together, they occupy the still region of thought as two large clear stars do of themselves seem to occupy the entire sky. How far better than skilfully-how inspiredly does this Christian poet touch upon each successive holy theme-winging his way through the stainless ether like some dove gliding from tree to tree, and leaving one place of rest only for another equally happy, on the folding and unfolding of its peaceful flight! Of late many versifiers have attempted the theme; and some of them with shameful unsuccess. A bad poem on such a subject is a sin. He who is a Christian indeed, will, when the star of Bethlehem rises before his closed eyes, be mute beneath the image, or he will hail it in strains simple as were those of the shepherds watching their flocks by night when it appeared of old, high as were those of the sages who came from the East bearing incense to the Child in the Manger. Such are this Poet's strains, evolving themselves out of the few words-"Behold, the star, which they saw in the east, went before them, till it came and stood over where the young Child was: when they saw the star, they rejoiced with exceeding great joy." The transition from those affecting lines is natural and delightful to a strain further on in the volume, entitled "Catechism." How soon the infant spirit is touched with love-another name for religion-none may dare to say who have watched the eyes of little children. Feeling and thought would seem to come upon them like very inspiration-so strong it often is, and sudden, and clear; yet, no doubt, all the work of natural processes going on within Immortality. The wisdom of age has often been seen in the simplicity of childhoodcreatures but five or six years old-soon perhaps about to disappear-astonishing, and saddening, and subliming the souls of their parents and their parents' friends, by a holy precocity of all pitiful and compassionate feelings, blended into a mysterious piety that has made them sing happy hymns on the brink of leath and the grave. Such affecting instances of almost infantine unfolding of the spirit beneath spiritual influence should not be rarenor are they rare-in truly Christian house Let us turn to another strain of the same mood, which will be read with tears by many a grateful heart-on the "Churching of Women." What would become of us without the ceremonies of religion? How they strengthen the piety out of which they spring! How, by concentrating all that is holy and divine around their outward forms, do they purify and sanctify the affections! What a change on his infant's face is wrought before a father's eyes by Baptism! How the heart of the husband and the father yearns, as he sees the wife and mother kneeling in thanksgiving after childbirth! "Consider the lilies of the field how they grow: they toil not, neither do they spin; and yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these." What is all the poetry that genius ever breathed over all the flowers of this earth, to that one divine sentence! It has inspired our Chris tian poet-and here is his heart-felt homily. FIFTEENTH SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY. Bathed in soft airs, and fed with dew, "Relics ye are of Eden's bowers, As pure, as fragrant, and as fair, "But cheerful and unchanged the while "Ye dwell beside our paths and homes, Our paths of sin, our homes of sorrow, "Ye fearless in your nests abide— Nor may we scorn, too proudly wise, "Ye felt your Maker's smile that hour, What care ye now, if winter's storm "Alas! of thousand bosoms kind, And Heaven thy morn will bless.' stead of leaving him in utter darkness, seemed to be accompanied with a burst of light. Much of our most fashionable Modern Poetry is at once ludicrously and lamentably unsuitable and unseasonable to the innocent and youthful creatures who shed tears "such as angels weep" over the shameful sins of shameless sinners, crimes which, when perpetrated out of Poetry, and by persons with vulgar surnames, elevate their respective heroes to that vulgar altitude-the gallows. The darker-the stronger passions, forsooth! And what hast thou to do my dove-eyed Margaret Nothing whatever in thy sweet, still, serene. and seemingly almost sinless world. Be the brighter and the weaker passions thinebrighter indeed-yet say not weaker, for they are strong as death;-Love and Pity, Awe and Reverence, Joy, Grief, and Sorrow, sunny smiles and showery tears-be these all thy own-and sometimes, too, on melancholy nights, let the heaven of thy imagination be spanned in its starriness by the most celestial Evanescencea Lunar Rainbow. There is such perfect sincerity in the "Christian Year," such perfect sincerity, and consequently such simplicity, that though the production of a fine and finished scholar, we cannot doubt that it will some day or other find its way into many of the dwellings of humble life. Such descent, if descent it be, must be of all receptions the most delightful to the heart of a Christian poet. As intelligence spreads more widely over the land, why fear that it will deaden religion? Let us believe that it will rather vivify and quicken it; and that in time true poetry, such as this, of a character some what higher than probably can be yet felt, un derstood, and appreciated by the people, wil. come to be easy and familiar, and blended with all the other benign influences breathed over their common existence by books. Meanwhile the "Christian Year" will be finding its way into many houses where the inmates read from the love of reading-not for mere amusement only, but for instruction and a deeper delight; and we shall be happy if our recommendation causes its pages to be illumined by the gleams of a few more peaceful hearths, and to be rehearsed by a few more happy voices in the "parlour twilight." Such poetry as this must have a fine influence on all the best human affections. Sacred are such songs to sorrow-and sorrow is either a frequent visiter, or a domesticated inmate, in-with the darker and stronger passions? every household. Religion may thus be made to steal unawares, even during ordinary hours, into the commonest ongoings of life. Call not the mother unhappy who closes the eyes of her dead child, whether it has smiled lonely in the house, the sole delight of her eyes, or bloomed among other flowers, now all drooping for its sake-nor yet call the father unhappy who lays his sweet son below the earth, and returns to the home where his voice is to be heard never more. That affliction brings forth feelings unknown before in his heart; calming all turbulent thoughts by the settled peace of the grave. Then every page of the Bible is beautiful-and beautiful every verse of poetry that thence draws its inspiration. Thus in the pale and almost ghostlike countenance of decay, our hearts are not touched by the remembrance alone of beauty which is departed, and by the near extinction of loveliness which we behold fading before our eyes-but a beauty, fairer and deeper far, lies around the hollow eye and the sunken cheek, breathed from the calm air of the untroubled spirit that has heard resigned the voice that calls it away from the dim shades of mortality. Well may that beauty be said to be religious; for in it speaks the soul, conscious, in the undreaded dissolution of its earthly frame, of a being destined to everlasting bliss. With every deep emotion arising from our contemplation of such beauty as this -religious beauty beaming in the human countenance, whether in joy or sadness, health or decay-there is profoundly interfused a sense of the soul's spirituality, which silently sheds over the emotion something celestial and divine, rendering it not only different in degree, but altogether distinct in kind, from all the feelings that things merely perishable can inspireso that the spirit is fully satisfied, and the feeling of beauty is but a vivid recognition of its own deathless being and ethereal essence. This is a feeling of beauty which was but faintly known to the human heart in those ages of the world when all other feelings of beauty were most perfect; and accordingly we find, in the most pathetic strains of their elegiac poetry, lamentations over the beauty intensely worhipped in the dust, which was to lie for ever over its now beamless head. But to the Christian who may have seen the living lustre leave the eye of some beloved friend, there must have shone a beauty in his latest smile, which spoke not alone of a brief scene closed, but of an endless scene unfolding; while its cessation, in We cannot help expressing the pleasure it has given us to see so much true poetry coming from Oxford. It is delightful to see that clas sical literature, which sometimes, we know not how, certainly has a chilling effect on poetical feeling, there warming it as it ought to do, and causing it to produce itself in song. Oxford has produced many true poets; Collins, Warton, Bowles, Heber, Milman, and now Kebleare all her own-her inspired sons. Their strains are not steeped in "port and prejudice;" but in the-Isis. Heaven bless Iffley and God. stow-and many another sweet old ruined place-secluded, but not far apart from her own inspiring Sanctities. And those who lɔve her not, never may the Muses love! "Lo! there, in yonder fancy-haunted room, What mutter'd curses trembled through the gloom, gether, and such as ought to be expunged from all paper. But that is not all we have to say against it —it is radically and essentially bad, because it either proves nothing of what it is meant to prove or what no human being on earth ever disputed. Be fair-be just in all that concerns religion. Take the best, the most moral, if the word can be used, the most enlightened Skep. tic, and the true Christian, and compare their death-beds. That of the Skeptic will be disturbed or disconsolate-that of the Christian confiding or blessed. But to contrast the death-bed of an absolute maniac, muttering curses, gnashing and scowling, and "raising a hideous shriek," and "rounding his eyes with a ghastly glare," and convulsed, too, with severe bodily throes-with that of a convinced, confiding, and conscientious Christian, a calm, meek, undoubting believer, happy in the "hope religion pillows on his heart," and enduring no fleshly agonies, can serve no purpose under the sun. Men who have the misery of being unbelievers, are at all times to be pitied-most of all in their last hours; but though theirs be then dim melancholy, or dark despair, they ex press neither the one state nor the other by mutterings, curses, and hideous shrieks. Such a wretch there may sometimes be-like him "who died and made no sign;" but there is no more sense in seeking to brighten the character of the Christian by its contrast with that of such an Atheist, than by contrast with a fiend to brighten the beauty of an angel. meekly "From his parch'd tongue no sainted murmurs fell, No bright hopes kindled at his faint farewell." How could they?-The line but one before is, "What mutter'd curses trembled through the gloom." This, then, is purely ridiculous, and we cannot doubt that Mr. Montgomery will confess that it Finally, are the deathbeds of all good Chrisis so; but independently of that, he is describ-tians so calm as this-and do they all thus ing the death-bed of a person who, ex hypothesi, could have no bright hopes, could breathe no "Pant for where congenial spirits stray," sainted murmurs. He might as well, in a description of a negress, have told us that she a line, besides its other vice, most unscriptu had no long, smooth, shining, yellow locks-ral? Congenial spirit is not the language of no light-blue eyes--no ruddy and rosy cheeks -nor yet a bosom white as snow. The execution of the picture of the Christian is not much better-it is too much to use, in the sense here given to them, no fewer than three verbs-"pales"-"rolls"-"starts," in four lines. the New Testament. Alas! for poor weak human nature at the dying hour! Not even can the Christian always then retain unquaking trust in his Saviour! "This is the blood that was shed for thee," are words whose mystery quells not always nature's terror. The Sacrament of the Lord's Supper is renewed in vain--and he remembers, in doubt and dismay, words that, if misunderstood, would appal all the Christian world-" My God-my God-why hast thou forsaken me?" Perhaps, conveys an unnatural image. Dying men do before the Faith, that has waxed dim and died not act so. Not thus are taken eternal fare-in his brain distracted by pain, and disease, wells. The motion in the sea-song was more "The hope Religion pillows on the heart," is not a good line, and it is a borrowed one. "When with a dying hand he waves adieu," natural "She waved adieu, and kiss'd her lily hand." "Werps so true," means nothing, nor is it English. The grammar is not good of, for he is a father who strove in vain to burst and long sleeplessness, and a weight of wothose silken ties, that winding all round and about his very soul and his very body, bound him to those dear little ones, who are of the same spirit and the same flesh,--we say, be fore that Faith could, by the prayers of holy men, be restored and revivified, and the Chris tian, once more comforted by thinking on Him, who for all human beings did take upon him Death may have come for his prey, and left the rueful burden and agonies of the Crossthe chamber, of late so hushed and silent, at "Turns to his God, and sighs his soul away;" full liberty to weep! Enough to know, that 2 prettiness we very much dislike-alter one though Christianity be divine, we are human, word, and it would be voluptuous--nor do we that the vessel is weak in which that glori hesitate to call the passage a puling one alto-ous light may be enshrined-weak as the pot "He pants for where congenial spirits"Neither is the word pants by any means the right one; and in such an awful crisis, admire who may the simile of the infant longing for its mother's breast, we never can in its present shape; while there is in the line, ter's clay-and that though Christ died to save | crowded in silence, as beneath the shadow of sinners, sinners who believe in Him, and there- a thunder-cloud, to see some one single human fore shall not perish, may yet lose hold of the being die-or swaying and swinging back belief when their understandings are darkened wards and forwards, and to and fro, to hail a by the shadow of death, and, like Peter losing victorious armament returning from the war faith and sinking in the sea, feel themselves of Liberty, with him who hath "taken the descending into some fearful void, and cease start of this majestic world" conspicuous from here to be, ere they find voice to call on the afar in front, encircled with music, and with name of the Lord-"Help, or I perish!" the standard of his unconquered country afloat above his head. Thus, and by many thousand other potent influences for ever at work, and from which the human heart can never make its safe escape-let it flee to the uttermost parts of the earth, to the loneliest of the multitude of the isles of the sea-are men, who vainly dream that they are Atheists, forced to feel God. Nor happens this but rarely-nor are such "angel-visits few and far between." As the most cruel have often, very often, thoughts tender as dew, so have the most dark often, very often, thoughts bright as day. The sun's golden finger writes the name of God on the clouds, rising or setting, and the Atheist, false which his soul, because it is immortal, cannot resist, to behold that Bible suddenly opened before his eyes on the sky. Or some old, decrepit, grayhaired crone, holds out her shrivelled hand, with dim eyes patiently fixed on his, silently asking charity-silently, but in the holy name of God; and the Atheist, taken unawares, at the very core of his heart bids "God bless her," as he relieves her uncomplaining miseries. What may be the nature of the thoughts and feelings of an Atheist, either when in great joy or great sorrow, full of life and the spirit of life, or in mortal malady and environed with the toils of death, it passes the power of our imagination even dimly to conceive; nor are we convinced that there ever was an utter Atheist. The thought of a God will enter in, barred though the doors be, both of the understanding and the heart, and all the windows supposed to be blocked up against the light. The soul, blind and deaf as it may often be, cannot always resist the intimations all life long, day and night, forced upon it from the outer world; its very necessities, nobler farly so called, starts in wonder and in delight, than those of the body, even when most degraded, importunate when denied their manna, are to it oftentimes a silent or a loud revelation. Then, not to feel and think as other beings do with "discourse of reason," is most hard and difficult indeed, even for a short time, and on occasions of very inferior moment. Being men, we are carried away, willing or unwilling, and often unconsciously, by the great common instinct; we keep sailing with the tide of humanity, whether in flow or ebb- If then Atheists do exist, and if their deathfierce as demons and the sons of perdition, if beds may be described for the awful or melan. that be the temper of the congregating hour-choly instruction of their fellow-men, let them mild and meek as Pity, or the new-born babe, when the afflatus of some divine sympathy has breathed through the multitude, nor one creature escaped its influence, like a springday that steals through a murmuring forest, till not a single tree, even in the darkest nook, is without some touch of the season's sunshine. Think, then, of one who would fain be an Atheist, conversing with the "sound, healthy children of the God of heaven!" To this reason, which is his solitary pride, arguments might in vain be addressed, for he exults in being "an Intellectual All in All," and is a bold-browed sophist to daunt even the eyes of Truth-eyes which can indeed "outstare the-visible now in the tears that fall, audible now eagle" when their ken is directed to heaven, in the sighs that breathe for his sake-in the but which are turned away in aversion from still small voice. That Being forgets not those the human countenance that would dare to by whom he has been forgotten; least of all, deny God. Appeal not to the intellect of such the poor "Fool who has said in his heart there a man, but to his heart; and let not even that is no God," and who knows at last that a God appeal be conveyed in any fixed form of words there is, not always in terror and trembling, -but let it be an appeal of the smiles and tears but as often perhaps in the assurance of forof affectionate and loving lips and eyes-of giveness, which undeserved by the best of the common joys and common griefs, whose con- good, may not be withheld even from the worst tagion is often felt, beyond prevention or cure, of the bad, if the thought of a God and a Sa where two or three are gathered together-viour pass but for a moment through the dark. among families thinly sprinkled over the wil-ness of the departing spirit-like a dove shoot. derness, where, on God's own day, they repairing swiftly, with its fair plumage, through the o God's own house, a lowly building on the deep but calm darkness that follows the sub brae, which the Creator of suns and systems sided storm. despiseth not, nor yet the beatings of the few contrite hearts therein assembled to worship him in the cathedral's "long-drawn aisles and fretted vaults".-in mighty multitudes all be such Atheists as those whom, let us not hesitate to say it, we may blamelessly love with a troubled affection; for our Faith may not have preserved us from sins from which they are free-and we may give even to many of the qualities of their most imperfect and unhappy characters almost the name of virtues. No curses on their death-beds will they be heard to utter. No black scowlings-no horrid gnashing of teeth-no hideous shriekings will there appal the loving ones who watch and weep by the side of him who is dying disconsolate. He will hope, and he will fear, now that there is a God indeed everywhere present So, too, with respect to Deists. Of unbe lievers in Christianity there are many kinds-. the reckless, the ignorant, the callous, the con firmed, the melancholy, the doubting, the de spairing the good. At their death-beds, too, | down or straw-stretched, a.ready a skeleton may the Christian poet, in imagination, take nis stand-and there may he even hear "The still sad music of humanity, Not harsh nor grating, but of amplest power Oftener all the sounds and sights there will be full of most rueful anguish; and that anguish will groan in the poet's lays when his human heart, relieved from its load of painful sympathies, shall long afterwards be inspired with the pity of poetry, and sing in elegies, sublime in their pathos, the sore sufferings and the dim distress that clouded and tore the dying spirit, longing, but all unable-profound though its longings be-as life's daylight is about to close upon that awful gloaming, and the night of death to descend in oblivion-to believe in the Redeemer. Why then turn but to such death-bed, if indeed religion, and not superstition, described that scene-as that of Voltaire? Or even Rousseau, whose dying eyes sought, in the last passion, the sight of the green earth, and the blue skies, and the sun shining so brightly, when all within the brain of his worshipper was fast growing dimmer and more dim-when all the unsatisfied spirit, that scarcely hoped a future life, knew not how it could ever take farewell of the present with tenderness enough, and enough of yearning and craving after its disappearing beauty, and when as if the whole earth were at that moment beloved even as his small peculiar birthplace "Et dulces moriens reminiscitur Argos." and gnashing-may it be in senselessness, for otherwise what pangs are these!-gnashing his teeth, within lips once so eloquent, now white with foam and slaver; and the whole mouth, of yore so musical, grinning ghastly, like the fleshless face of fear-painted death! Is that Voltaire? He who, with wit, thought to shear the Son of God of all his beams-with wit, to loosen the dreadful fastenings of the Cross?with wit, to scoff at Him who hung thereon, while the blood and water came from the wound in his blessed side?-with wit to drive away those Shadows of Angels, that were said to have rolled off the stone from the mouth of the sepulchre of the resurrection ?-with wit, to deride the ineffable glory of transfigured Godhead on the Mount, and the sweet and solemn semblance of the Man Jesus in the garden ?— with wit, to darken all the decrees of Providence?—and with wit, "To shut the gates of Mercy on mankind ?" Nor yet will the Christian poet long dwell in his religious strains, though awhile he may linger there, "and from his eyelids wipe the tears that sacred pity hath engendered," beside the dying couch of Jean Jaques Rousseau—a couch of turf beneath trees-for he was ever a lover of Nature, though he loved all things living or dead as madmen love. His soul, while most spiritual, was sensual still, and with tendrils of flesh and blood embracedeven as it did embrace the balm-breathing form of voluptuous woman-the very phantoms of his most etherealized imagination. Vice stained all his virtues-as roses are seen, in some The Christian poet, in his humane wisdom, certain soils, and beneath some certain skies, will, for instruction's sake of his fellow-men, always to be blighted, and their fairest petals and for the discovery and the revealment of to bear on them something like blots of blood. ever-sacred truth, keep aloof from such death- Over the surface of the mirror of his mind, beds as these, or take his awful stand beside which reflected so much of the imagery of man them to drop the perplexed and pensive tear. and nature, there was still, here and there, on For we know not what it is that we either hear the centre or round the edges, rust-spots, that or see; and holy Conscience, hearing through gave back no image, and marred the propora confused sound, and seeing through an ob- tions of the beauty and the grandeur that yet scure light, fears to condemn, when perhaps shone over the rest of the circle set in the rich she ought only to pity-to judge another, when carved gold. His disturbed, and distracted, and perhaps it is her duty but to use that inward defeated friendships, that all vanished in insane eye for her own delinquencies. He, then, who suspicions, and seemed to leave his soul as designs to benefit his kind by strains of high well satisfied in its fierce or gloomy void, as instruction, will turn from the death-bed of when it was filled with airy and glittering vithe famous Wit, whose brilliant fancy hath sions, are all gone for ever now. Those many waxed dim as that of the clown-whose ma- thoughts and feelings-so melancholy, yet still lignant heart is quaking beneath the Power fair, and lovely, and beautiful-which, like it had so long derided, with terrors over which bright birds encaged, with ruffled and drooping his hated Christian triumphs-and whose in-wings, once so apt to soar, and their music tellect, once so perspicacious that it could see but too well the motes that are in the sun, the specks and stains that are on the flowing robe of nature herself-prone, in miserable contradiction to its better being, to turn them as proofs against the power and goodness of the Holy One who inhabiteth eternity-is now palsy-stricken as that of an idiot, and knows not even the sound of the name of its once vain and proud possessor-when crowded theatres had risen up with one rustle to honour, and thea, with deafening acclamaticns, mute, that used to make the wide woods to ring, were confined within the wires of his jealous heart-have now all flown away, and are at rest! Who sits beside the wild and wondrous genius, whose ravings entranced the world? forehead, once filled with such a multitude of who wipes the death-sweat from that capacious disordered but aspiring fancies? Who, that his beloved air of heaven may kiss and cool it for the last time, lays open the covering that hides the marble sallowness of Rousseau's sin-and-sorrow-haunted breast? One of Nature's least gifted children-to whose eyes nor There he is-it matters not now whether on earth nor heaven ever beamed with beauty "Raised a mortal to the skies!"' |