Book: Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2

J >> John Wilson >> Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2




"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."

Let us fly from Rydal to Sheffield. James Montgomery is truly a
religious poet. His popularity, which is great, has, by some scribes
sitting 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 self-same spirit was she built, and by that
self-same 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.

It is base therefore, and false, to attribute, in an invidious sense,
any of Montgomery's fame to any such cause. No doubt many persons read
his poetry on account of its religion, who, but for that, would not have
read it; and no doubt, too, many of them neither feel nor understand it.
But so, too, do many persons read Wordsworth's poetry on account of its
religion--the religion of the woods--who, but for that, would not have
read it; and so, too, many of them neither feel nor understand it. So is
it with the common-manners-painting poetry of Crabbe--the
dark-passion-painting poetry of Byron--the high-romance-painting poetry
of Scott--and so on with Moore, Coleridge, Southey, and the rest. But it
is to the _mens divinior_, however displayed, that they owe all their
fame. Had Montgomery not been a true poet, all the Religious Magazines
in the world could not have saved his name from forgetfulness and
oblivion. He might have flaunted his day like the melancholy
Poppy--melancholy in all its ill-scented gaudiness; but as it is, he is
like the Rose of Sharon, whose balm and beauty shall not wither, planted
on the banks 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 tenets are most irreconcilable and
hostile to those of the sect. Feelings, by being unduly concentrated,
are not thereby necessarily enfeebled--on the contrary, often
strengthened; and there is a grand austerity which the imagination more
than admires--which the conscience scarcely condemns. The feeling, 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.

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.

All his shorter poems are stamped with the character of the man. Most of
them are breathings of his own devout spirit, either delighted or awed
by a sense of the Divine goodness and mercy towards itself, or
tremblingly alive--not in mere sensibility to human virtues and joys,
crimes and sorrows, for that often belongs to the diseased and
depraved--but in solemn, moral, and religious thought, to all of good or
evil befalling his brethren of mankind. "A sparrow cannot fall to the
ground"--a flower of the field cannot wither immediately before his
eyes--without awakening in his heart such thoughts as we may believe God
intended should be awakened even by such sights as these; for the fall
of a sparrow is a Scriptural illustration of His providence, and His
hand framed the lily, whose array is more royal than was that of Solomon
in all his glory. Herein he resembles Wordsworth--less profound
certainly--less lofty; for in its highest moods the genius of Wordsworth
walks by itself--unapproachable--on the earth it beautifies. But
Montgomery's poetical piety is far more prevalent over his whole
character; it belongs more essentially and permanently to the man.
Perhaps, although we shall not say so, it may be more simple, natural,
and true. More accordant it certainly is, with the sympathies of
ordinary minds. The piety of his poetry is far more Christian than that
of Wordsworth. It is in all his feelings, all his thoughts, all his
imagery; and at the close of most of his beautiful compositions, which
are so often avowals, confessions, prayers, thanksgivings, we feel, not
the moral, but the religion of his song. He "improves" all the
"occasions" of this life, because he has an "eye that broods on its own
heart;" and that heart is impressed by all lights and shadows, like a
river or lake whose waters are pure--pure in their sources and in their
course. He is, manifestly, a man of the kindliest home-affections; and
these, though it is to be hoped the commonest of all, preserved to him
in unabated glow and freshness by innocence and piety, often give vent
to themselves in little hymns and ode-like strains, of which the rich
and even novel imagery shows how close is the connection between a pure
heart and a fine fancy, and that the flowers of poetry may be brought
from afar, nor yet be felt to be exotics--to intertwine with the very
simplest domestic feelings and thoughts--so simple, so perfectly human,
that there is a touch of surprise on seeing them capable of such
adornment, and more than a touch of pleasure on feeling how much that
adornment becomes them--brightening without changing, and adding
admiration to delight--wonder to love.

Montgomery, too, is almost as much of an egotist as Wordsworth; and
thence, frequently, his power. The poet who keeps all the appearances of
external nature, and even all the passions of humanity, at arm's length,
that he may gaze on, inspect, study, and draw their portraits, either in
the garb they ordinarily wear, or in a fancy dress, is likely to produce
a strong likeness indeed; yet shall his pictures be wanting in ease and
freedom--they shall be cold and stiff--and both passion and imagination
shall desiderate something characteristic in nature, of the mountain or
the man. But the poet who hugs to his bosom everything he loves or
admires--themselves, or the thoughts that are their shadows--who is
himself still the centre of the enchanted circle--who, in the delusion
of a strong creative genius, absolutely believes that were he to die,
all that he now sees and hears delighted would die with him--who not
only sees

"Poetic visions swarm on every bough,"

but the history of all his own most secret emotions written on the very
rocks--who gathers up the many beautiful things that in the prodigality
of nature lie scattered over the earth, neglected or unheeded, and the
more dearly, the more passionately loves them, because they are now
appropriated to the uses of his own imagination, who will by her alchymy
so further brighten them that the thousands of eyes that formerly passed
them by unseen or scorned, will be dazzled by their rare and
transcendent beauty--he is the "prevailing Poet!" Montgomery neither
seeks nor shuns those dark thoughts that will come and go, night and
day, unbidden, forbidden, across the minds of all men--fortified
although the main entrances may be; but when they do invade his secret,
solitary hours, he turns even such visitants to a happy account, and
questions them, ghost-like as they are, concerning both the future and
the past. Melancholy as often his views are, we should not suppose him a
man of other than a cheerful mind; for whenever the theme allows or
demands it, he is not averse to a sober glee, a composed gaiety that,
although we cannot say it ever so far sparkles out as to deserve to be
called absolutely brilliant, yet lends a charm to his lighter-toned
compositions, which it is peculiarly pleasant now and then to feel in
the writings of a man whose genius is naturally, and from the course of
life, not gloomy indeed, but pensive, and less disposed to indulge
itself in smiles than in tears.




SACRED POETRY.

CHAPTER III.


People nowadays will write, because they see so many writing; the
impulse comes upon them from without, not from within; loud voices from
streets and squares of cities call on them to join the throng, but the
still small voice that speaketh in the penetralia of the spirit is mute;
and what else can be the result, but, in place of the song of lark, or
linnet, or nightingale, at the best a concert of mocking-birds, at the
worst an oratorio of ganders and bubbleys?

At this particular juncture or crisis, the disease would fain assume the
symptoms of religious inspiration. The poetasters are all pious--all
smitten with sanctity--Christian all over--and crossing and jostling on
the Course of Time--as they think, on the high road to Heaven and
Immortality. Never was seen before such a shameless set of hypocrites.
Down on their knees they fall in booksellers' shops, and, crowned with
foolscap, repeat to Blue-Stockings prayers addressed in doggrel to the
Deity! They bandy about the Bible as if it were an Album. They forget
that the poorest sinner has a soul to be saved, as well as a set of
verses to be damned; they look forward to the First of the Month with
more fear and trembling than to the Last Day; and beseech a critic to be
merciful upon them with far more earnestness than they ever beseeched
their Maker. They pray through the press--vainly striving to give some
publicity to what must be private for evermore; and are seen wiping
away, at tea-parties, the tears of contrition and repentance for capital
crimes perpetrated but on paper, and perpetrated thereon so paltrily,
that so far from being worthy of hell-fire, such delinquents, it is
felt, would be more suitably punished by being singed like plucked fowls
with their own unsaleable sheets. They are frequently so singed; yet
singeing has not the effect upon them for which singeing is designed;
and like chickens in a shower that have got the pip, they keep still
gasping and shooting out their tongues, and walking on tip-toe with
their tails down, till finally they go to roost in some obscure corner,
and are no more seen among bipeds.

Among those, however, who have been unfortunately beguiled by the spirit
of imitation and sympathy into religious poetry, one or two--who for the
present must be nameless--have shown feeling; and would they but obey
their feeling, and prefer walking on the ground with their own free
feet, to attempting to fly in the air with borrowed and bound wings,
they might produce something really poetical, and acquire a creditable
reputation. But they are too aspiring; and have taken into their hands
the sacred lyre without due preparation. He who is so familiar with his
Bible, that each chapter, open it where he will, teems with household
words, may draw thence the theme of many a pleasant and pathetic song.
For is not all human nature and all human life shadowed forth in those
pages? But the heart, to sing well from the Bible, must be imbued with
religious feelings, as a flower is alternately with dew and sunshine.
The study of THE BOOK must have been begun in the simplicity of
childhood, when it was felt to be indeed divine--and carried on through
all those silent intervals in which the soul of manhood is restored,
during the din of life, to the purity and peace of its early being. The
Bible must be to such a poet even as the sky--with its sun, moon, and
stars--its boundless blue with all its cloud-mysteries--its peace deeper
than the grave, because of realms beyond the grave--its tumult louder
than that of life, because heard altogether in all the elements. He who
begins the study of the Bible late in life, must, indeed, devote himself
to it--night and day--and with a humble and a contrite heart as well as
an awakened and soaring spirit, ere he can hope to feel what he
understands, or to understand what he feels--thoughts and feelings
breathing in upon him, as if from a region hanging, in its mystery,
between heaven and earth. Nor do we think that he will lightly venture
on the composition of poetry drawn from such a source. The very thought
of doing so, were it to occur to his mind, would seem irreverent; it
would convince him that he was still the slave of vanity, and pride, and
the world.

They alone, therefore, to whom God has given genius as well as faith,
zeal, and benevolence--will, of their own accord, fix their Pindus
either on Lebanon or Calvary--and of these but few. The genius must be
high--the faith sure--and human love must coalesce with divine, that the
strain may have power to reach the spirits of men, immersed as they are
in matter, and with all their apprehensions and conceptions blended with
material imagery, and the things of this moving earth and this restless
life.

So gifted and so endowed, a great or good poet, having chosen his
subject well within religion, is on the sure road to immortal fame. His
work, when done, must secure sympathy for ever; a sympathy not dependent
on creeds, but out of which creeds spring, all of them manifestly
moulded by imaginative affections of religion. Christian Poetry will
outlive every other; for the time will come when Christian Poetry will
be deeper and higher far than any that has ever yet been known among
men. Indeed, the sovereign songs hitherto have been either religious or
superstitious; and as "the day-spring from on High that has visited us"
spreads wider and wider over the earth, "the soul of the world, dreaming
of things to come," shall assuredly see more glorified visions than have
yet been submitted to her ken. That poetry has so seldom satisfied the
utmost longings and aspirations of human nature, can only have been
because Poetry has so seldom dealt in its power with the only mysteries
worth knowing--the greater mysteries of religion, into which the
Christian is initiated only through faith, an angel sent from heaven to
spirits struggling by supplications and sacrifices to escape from sin
and death.

These, and many other thoughts and feelings concerning the "Vision and
the Faculty divine," when employed on divine subjects, have arisen
within us, on reading--which we have often done with delight--"The
Christian Year," so full of Christian poetry of the purest character. Mr
Keble is a poet whom Cowper himself would have loved--for in him piety
inspires genius, and fancy and feeling are celestialised by religion. We
peruse his book in a tone and temper of spirit similar to that which is
breathed upon us by some calm day in spring, when all imagery is serene
and still--cheerful in the main--yet with a touch and a tinge of
melancholy, which makes all the blended bliss and beauty at once more
endearing and more profound. We should no more think of criticising such
poetry than of criticising the clear blue skies--the soft green
earth--the "liquid lapse" of an unpolluted stream, that

"Doth make sweet music with the enamell'd stones,
Giving a gentle kiss to every flower
It overtaketh on its pilgrimage."

All is purity and peace; as we look and listen, we partake of the
universal calm, and feel in nature the presence of Him from whom it
emanated. Indeed, we do not remember any poetry nearly so beautiful as
this, which reminds one so seldom of the poet's art. We read it without
ever thinking of the place which its author may hold among poets, just
as we behold a "lily of the field" without comparing it with other
flowers, but satisfied with its own pure and simple loveliness; or each
separate poem may be likened, in its
unostentatious--unambitious--unconscious beauty--to

"A violet by a mossy stone,
Half hidden to the eye."

Of all the flowers that sweeten this fair earth, the violet is indeed
the most delightful in itself--form, fragrance, and colour--nor less in
the humility of its birthplace, and its haunts in the "sunshiny shade."
Therefore, 'tis a meet emblem of those sacred songs that may be said to
blossom on Mount Sion.

The most imaginative poetry inspired by Nature, and dedicated to her
praise, is never perfectly and consummately beautiful till it ascends
into the religious; but then religion breathes from, and around, and
about it, only at last when the poet has been brought, by the leading of
his own aroused spirit, to the utmost pitch of his inspiration. He
begins, and continues long, unblamed in mere emotions of beauty; and he
often pauses unblamed, and brings his strain to a close, without having
forsaken this earth, and the thoughts and feelings which belong alone to
this earth. But poetry like that of the "Christian Year" springs at
once, visibly and audibly, from religion as its fount. If it, indeed,
issue from one of the many springs religion opens in the human heart, no
fear of its ever being dried up. Small indeed may seem the silver line,
when first the rill steals forth from its sacred source! But how soon it
begins to sing with a clear loud voice in the solitude! Bank and
brae--tree, shrub, and flower--grow greener at each successive
waterfall--the rains no more disturb that limpid element than the
dews--and never does it lose some reflection of the heavens.

In a few modest words, Mr Keble states the aim and object of his volume.
He says truly, that it is the peculiar happiness of the Church of
England to possess in her authorised formularies an ample and secure
provision, both for a sound rule of faith and a sober standard of
feeling in matters of practical religion. The object of his publication
will be attained, if any person find assistance from it in bringing his
own thoughts and feelings into more entire unison with those recommended
and exemplified in the Prayer-Book. We add, that its object has been
attained. In England, "The Christian Year" is already placed in a
thousand homes among household books. People are neither blind nor deaf
yet to lovely sights and sounds--and a true poet is as certain of
recognition now as at any period of our literature. In Scotland we have
no prayer-book printed on paper--perhaps it would be better if we had;
but the prayer-book which has inspired Mr Keble, is compiled and
composed from another Book, which, we believe, is more read in Scotland
than in any other country. Here the Sabbath reigns in power, that is
felt to be a sovereign power over all the land. We have, it may be said,
no prescribed holydays; but all the events recorded in the Bible, and
which in England make certain days holy in outward as well as inward
observances, are familiar to our knowledge and our feeling _here_; and
therefore the poetry that seeks still more to hallow them to the heart,
will find every good heart recipient of its inspiration--for the
Christian creed is "wide and general as the casing air," and felt as
profoundly in the Highland heather-glen, where no sound of psalms is
heard but on the Sabbath, as in the cathedral towns and cities of
England, where so often

"Through the long-drawn aisle and fretted vault,
The pealing anthem swells the note of praise."

Poetry, in our age, has been made too much a thing to talk about--to
show off upon--as if the writing and the reading of it were to be
reckoned among what are commonly called accomplishments. Thus, poets
have too often sacrificed the austere sanctity of the divine art to most
unworthy purposes, of which, perhaps, the most unworthy--for it implies
much voluntary self-degradation--is mere popularity. Against all such
low aims he is preserved, who, with Christian meekness, approaches the
muse in the sanctuaries of religion. He seeks not to force his songs on
the public ear; his heart is free from the fever of fame; his poetry is
praise and prayer. It meets our ear like the sound of psalms from some
unseen dwelling among the woods or hills, at which the wayfarer or
wanderer stops on his journey, and feels at every pause a holier
solemnity in the silence of nature. Such poetry is indeed _got by
heart_; and memory is then tenacious to the death, for her hold on what
she loves is strengthened as much by grief as by joy; and, when even
hope itself is dead--if, indeed, hope ever dies--the trust is committed
to despair. Words are often as unforgetable as voiceless thoughts; they
become very thoughts themselves, and _are_ what they represent. How are
many of the simply, rudely, but fervently and beautifully rhymed Psalms
of David, very part and parcel of the most spiritual treasures of the
Scottish peasant's being!

"The Lord's my shepherd, I'll not want.
He makes me down to lie
In pastures green: he leadeth me
The quiet waters by."

These four lines sanctify to the thoughtful shepherd on the braes every
stream that glides through the solitary places--they have often given
colours to the greensward beyond the brightness of all herbage and of
all flowers. Thrice hallowed is that poetry which makes us mortal
creatures feel the union that subsists between the Book of Nature and
the Book of Life!

Poetry has endeared childhood by a thousand pictures, in which fathers
and mothers behold with deeper love the faces of their own offspring.
Such poetry has almost always been the production of the strongest and
wisest minds. Common intellects derive no power from earliest memories;
the primal morn, to them never bright, has utterly faded in the smoky
day; the present has swallowed up the past, as the future will swallow
up the present; each season of life seems to stand by itself as a
separate existence; and when old age comes, how helpless, melancholy,
and forlorn! But he who lives in the spirit of another creed, sees far
into the heart of Christianity. He hears a divine voice saying--"Suffer
little children to come unto me, and forbid them not, for of such is the
kingdom of heaven!" Thus it is that Poetry throws back upon the New
Testament the light she has borrowed from it, and that man's mortal
brother speaks in accordance with the Saviour of Man. On a dead
insensible flower--a lily--a rose--a violet--a daisy, poetry may pour
out all its divinest power--just as the sun itself sometimes seems to
look with all its light on some one especial blossom, all at once made
transparently lustrous. And what if the flower be alive in all its
leaves--and have in it an immortal spirit? Or what if its leaves be
dead, and the immortal spirit gone away to heaven? Genius shall change
death into sleep--till the grave, in itself so dark and dismal, shall
seem a bed of bright and celestial repose. From poetry, in words or
marble--both alike still and serene as water upon grass--we turn to the
New Testament, and read of the "Holy Innocents." "They were redeemed
from among men, being the first-fruits unto God and to the Lamb." We
look down into the depths of that text--and we then turn again to
Keble's lines, which from those depths have flowed over upon the
uninspired page! Yet not uninspired--if that name may be given to
strains which, like the airs that had touched the flowers of Paradise,
"whisper whence they stole those balmy sweets." Revelation has shown us
that "we are greater than we know;" and who may neglect the Infancy of
that Being for whom Godhead died!

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