Book: Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2

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




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 childhood--creatures 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
death and the grave. Such affecting instances of almost infantine
unfolding of the spirit beneath spiritual influences should not be
rare--nor are they rare--in truly Christian households. Almost as soon
as the heart is moved by filial affection, that affection grows reverent
even to earthly parents--and, ere long, becomes piety towards the name
of God and Saviour. Yet philosophers have said that the child must not
be too soon spoken to about religion. Will they fix the time? No--let
religion--a myriad-meaning word--be whispered and breathed round about
them, as soon as intelligence smiles in their eyes and quickens their
ears, while enjoying the sights and sounds of their own small yet
multitudinous world.

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 Christian poet--and here is his heartfelt
homily.


FIFTEENTH SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY.

"Sweet nurslings of the vernal skies,
Bathed in soft airs, and fed with dew,
What more than magic in you lies
To fill the heart's fond view?
In childhood's sports companions gay,
In sorrow, on Life's downward way,
How soothing! in our last decay
Memorials prompt and true.

Relics ye are of Eden's bowers,
As pure, as fragrant, and as fair,
As when ye crown'd the sunshine hours
Of happy wanderers there.
Fall'n all beside--the world of life,
How is it stain'd with fear and strife!
In Reason's world what storms are rife,
What passions rage and glare!

But cheerful and unchanged the while
Your first and perfect form ye show,
The same that won Eve's matron smile
In the world's opening glow
The stars of Heaven a course are taught
Too high above our human thought;--
Ye may be found if ye are sought,
And as we gaze we know.

Ye dwell beside our paths and homes,
Our paths of sin, our homes of sorrow,
And guilty man, where'er he roams,
Your innocent mirth may borrow.
The birds of air before us fleet,
They cannot brook our shame to meet--
But we may taste your solace sweet,
And come again to-morrow.

Ye fearless in your nests abide--
Nor may we scorn, too proudly wise,
Your silent lessons undescried
By all but lowly eyes;
For ye could draw th' admiring gaze
Of Him who worlds and hearts surveys:
Your order wild, your fragrant maze,
He taught us how to prize.

Ye felt your Maker's smile that hour,
As when he paused and own'd you good;
His blessing on earth's primal bower,
Yet felt it all renew'd.
What care ye now, if winter's storm
Sweep ruthless o'er each silken form?
Christ's blessing at your heart is warm,
Ye fear no vexing mood.

Alas! of thousand bosoms kind,
That daily court you and caress,
How few the happy secret find
Of your calm loveliness!
'Live for to-day! to-morrow's light
To-morrow's cares shall bring to sight.
Go, sleep like closing flowers at night,
And Heaven thy morn will bless.'"

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 visitor, or a domesticated inmate, in 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 ghost-like 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 inspire--so 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 worshipped 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, instead
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, with the
darker and stronger passions? Nothing whatever in thy sweet, still,
serene, and seemingly almost sinless world. Be the brighter and the
weaker passions thine--brighter 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 Evanescence--a 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 somewhat higher than probably can be yet
felt, understood, and appreciated by the people, will 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."

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 classical
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 Keble--are all
her own--her inspired sons. Their strains are not steeped in "port and
prejudice;" but in the--Isis. Heaven bless Iffley and Godstow--and many
another sweet old ruined place--secluded, but not far apart from her own
inspiring Sanctities! And those who love her not, never may the Muses
love!




SACRED POETRY.

CHAPTER IV.


In his Poem, entitled, "The Omnipresence of the Deity," Mr Robert
Montgomery writes thus,--

"Lo! there, in yonder fancy-haunted room,
What mutter'd curses trembled through the gloom,
When pale, and shiv'ring, and bedew'd with fear,
The dying sceptic felt his hour drew near!
From his parch'd tongue no sainted murmurs fell,
No bright hopes kindled at his faint farewell;
As the last throes of death convulsed his cheek,
He gnash'd, and scowl'd, and raised a hideous shriek,
Rounded his eyes into a ghastly glare,
Lock'd his white lips--and all was mute despair!
Go, child of darkness, see a Christian die;
No horror pales his lip, or rolls his eye;
No dreadful doubts, or dreamy terrors, start
The hope Religion pillows on his heart,
When with a dying hand he waves adieu
To all who love so well, and weep so true:
Meek as an infant to the mother's breast
Turns fondly longing for its wonted rest,
He pants for where congenial spirits stray,
Turns to his God, and sighs his soul away."

First, as to the execution of this passage. "Fancy-haunted" may do, but
it is not a sufficiently strong expression for the occasion. In every
such picture as this, we demand appropriate vigour in every word
intended to be vigorous, and which is important to the effect of the
whole.

"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 is so; but independently of that, he is describing
the deathbed of a person who, _ex hypothesi_, could have no bright
hopes, could breathe no sainted murmurs. He might as well, in a
description of a negress, have told us that she had no long, smooth,
shining, yellow locks--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 hope Religion pillows on his heart,"

is not a good line, and it is a borrowed one.

"When with a dying hand he waves adieu,"

conveys an unnatural image. Dying men do not act so. Not thus are taken
eternal farewells. The motion in the sea-song was more natural--

"She waved adieu, and kiss'd her lily hand."

"_Weeps so true_," means nothing, nor is it English. The grammar is not
good of,

"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 the
line,

"Turns to his God, _and sighs his soul away_;"

a prettiness we very much dislike--alter one word, and it would be
voluptuous--nor do we hesitate to call the passage a puling one
altogether, 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 Sceptic, and the true Christian,
and compare their deathbeds. That of the Sceptic will be disturbed or
disconsolate--that of the Christian confiding or blessed. But to
contrast the deathbed 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
express 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.

Finally, are the deathbeds of all good Christians so calm as this--and
do they all thus meekly

"Pant for where congenial spirits stray,"

a line, besides its other vice, most unscriptural? Congenial spirit is
not the language of 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,
before the Faith, that has waxed dim and died in his brain distracted by
pain, and disease, and long sleeplessness, and a weight of woe--for he
is a father who strove in vain to burst those 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, before that Faith could, by the prayers of holy men, be restored
and revivified, and the Christian once more comforted by thinking on
Him, who for all human beings did take upon him the rueful burden and
agonies of the Cross--Death may have come for his prey, and left the
chamber, of late so hushed and silent, at full liberty to weep! Enough
to know, that though Christianity be divine, we are human,--that the
vessel is weak in which that glorious light may be enshrined--weak as
the potter's clay--and that though Christ died to save sinners, sinners
who believe in Him, and therefore shall not perish, may yet lose hold of
the belief when their understandings are darkened by the shadow of
death, and, like Peter losing faith and sinking in the sea, feel
themselves descending into some fearful void, and cease here to be, ere
they find voice to call on the name of the Lord--"Help, or I perish!"

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 far 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--fierce as demons and the sons
of perdition, if that be the temper of the congregating hour--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 spring day 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 his 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 eagle" when their ken is directed to heaven,
but which are turned away in aversion from the human countenance that
would dare to deny God. Appeal not to the intellect of such a man, but
to his heart; and let not even that appeal be conveyed in any fixed form
of words--but let it be an appeal of the smiles and tears of
affectionate and loving lips and eyes--of common joys and common griefs,
whose contagion is often felt, beyond prevention or cure, where two or
three are gathered together--among families thinly sprinkled over the
wilderness, where, on God's own day, they repair to God's own house, a
lowly building on the brae, which the Creator of suns and systems
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 crowded in silence, as beneath
the shadow of a thunder-cloud, to see some one single human being
die--or swaying and swinging backwards and forwards, and to and fro, to
hail a victorious armament returning from the war of Liberty, with him
who hath "taken the start of this majestic world" conspicuous from afar
in front, encircled with music, and with 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, falsely so called, starts in wonder and in delight, 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,
greyhaired 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.

If then Atheists do exist, and if their deathbeds may be described for
the awful or melancholy instruction of their fellow-men, let them be
such Atheists as those whom, let us not hesitate to say, 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 deathbeds 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--visible now in
the tears that fall, audible now in the sighs that breathe for his
sake--in the still small voice. That Being forgets not those by whom he
has been forgotten; least of all, the poor "Fool who has said in his
heart there is no God," and who knows at last that a God there is, not
always in terror and trembling, but as often perhaps in the assurance of
forgiveness, which, undeserved by the best of the good, may not be
withheld even from the worst of the bad, if the thought of a God and a
Saviour pass but for a moment through the darkness of the departing
spirit--like a dove shooting swiftly, with its fair plumage, through the
deep but calm darkness that follows the subsided storm.

So, too, with respect to Deists. Of unbelievers in Christianity there
are many kinds--the reckless, the ignorant, the callous, the confirmed,
the melancholy, the doubting, the despairing--the _good_. At their
deathbeds, too, may the Christian poet, in imagination, take his
stand--and there may he even hear

"The still sad music of humanity,
Not harsh nor grating, but of amplest power
To soften and subdue!"

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.

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