England's Antiphon

CHARITY AND HUMILITY

  Far have I clambered in my mind,  But nought so great as love I find:  Deep-searching wit, mount-moving might,  Are nought compared to that good sprite.  Life of delight and soul of bliss!  Sure source of lasting happiness!  Higher than heaven! lower than hell!  What is thy tent? Where may'st thou dwell?  "My mansion hight Humility, is named.  Heaven's vastest capability.  The further it doth downward tend,  The higher up it doth ascend;  If it go down to utmost nought,  It shall return with that it sought."  Lord, stretch thy tent in my strait breast;  Enlarge it downward, that sure rest  May there be pight for that pure fire pitched.  Wherewith thou wontest to inspire  All self-dead souls: my life is gone;  Sad solitude's my irksome won; dwelling.  Cut off from men and all this world,  In Lethe's lonesome ditch I'm hurled;  Nor might nor sight doth ought me move,  Nor do I care to be above.  O feeble rays of mental light,  That best be seen in this dark night,  What are you? What is any strength  If it be not laid in one length  With pride or love? I nought desire  But a new life, or quite to expire.  Could I demolish with mine eye  Strong towers, stop the fleet stars in sky,  Bring down to earth the pale-faced moon,  Or turn black midnight to bright noon;  Though all things were put in my hand—  As parched, as dry as the Libyan sand  Would be my life, if charity  Were wanting. But humility  Is more than my poor soul durst crave  That lies entombed in lowly grave;  But if 'twere lawful up to send  My voice to heaven, this should it rend:  "Lord, thrust me deeper into dust,  That thou may'st raise me with the just."

There are strange things and worth pondering in all these. An occasional classical allusion seems to us quite out of place, but such things we must pass. The poems are quite different from any we have had before. There has been only a few of such writers in our nation, but I suspect those have had a good deal more influence upon the religious life of it than many thinkers suppose. They are in closest sympathy with the deeper forms of truth employed by St. Paul and St. John. This last poem, concerning humility as the house in which charity dwells, is very truth. A repentant sinner feels that he is making himself little when he prays to be made humble: the Christian philosopher sees such a glory and spiritual wealth in humility that it appears to him almost too much to pray for.

The very essence of these mystical writers seems to me to be poetry. They use the largest figures for the largest spiritual ideas—light for good, darkness for evil. Such symbols are the true bodies of the true ideas. For this service mainly what we term nature was called into being, namely, to furnish forms for truths, for without form truth cannot be uttered. Having found their symbols, these writers next proceed to use them logically; and here begins the peculiar danger. When the logic leaves the poetry behind, it grows first presumptuous, then hard, then narrow and untrue to the original breadth of the symbol; the glory of the symbol vanishes; and the final result is a worship of the symbol, which has withered into an apple of Sodom. Witness some of the writings of the European master of the order—Swedenborg: the highest of them are rich in truth; the lowest are poverty-stricken indeed.

In 1615 was born Richard Baxter, one of the purest and wisest and devoutest of men—and no mean poet either. If ever a man sought between contending parties to do his duty, siding with each as each appeared right, opposing each as each appeared wrong, surely that man was Baxter. Hence he fared as all men too wise to be partisans must fare—he pleased neither Royalists nor Puritans. Dull of heart and sadly unlike a mother was the Church when, by the Act of Uniformity of Charles II., she drove from her bosom such a son, with his two thousand brethren of the clergy!

He has left us a good deal of verse—too much, perhaps, if we consider the length of the poems and the value of condensation. There is in many of them a delightful fervour of the simplest love to God, uttered with a plain half poetic, half logical strength, from which sometimes the poetry breaks out clear and fine. Much that he writes is of death, from the dread of which he evidently suffered—a good thing when it drives a man to renew his confidence in his Saviour's presence. It has with him a very different origin from the vulgar fancy that to talk about death is religious. It was refuge from the fear of death he sought, and that is the part of every man who would not be a slave. The door of death of which he so often speaks is to him a door out of the fear of death.

The poem from which the following excerpt is made was evidently written in view of some imminent suffering for conscience-sake, probably when the Act of Uniformity was passed: twenty years after, he was imprisoned at the age of sixty-seven, and lay nearly a year and a half.—I omit many verses.

THE RESOLUTION

  It's no great matter what men deem,    Whether they count me good or bad:  In their applause and best esteem,    There's no contentment to be had.  Thy steps, Lord, in this dirt I see;    And lest my soul from God should stray,  I'll bear my cross and follow thee:    Let others choose the fairer way.  My face is meeter for the spit;    I am more suitable to shame,  And to the taunts of scornful wit:    It's no great matter for my name.  My Lord hath taught me how to want    A place wherein to put my head:  While he is mine, I'll be content    To beg or lack my daily bread.  Must I forsake the soil and air    Where first I drew my vital breath?  That way may be as near and fair:    Thence I may come to thee by death.  All countries are my Father's lands;    Thy sun, thy love, doth shine on all;  We may in all lift up pure hands,    And with acceptance on thee call.  What if in prison I must dwell?    May I not there converse with thee?  Save me from sin, thy wrath, and hell,    Call me thy child, and I am free.  No walls or bars can keep thee out;    None can confine a holy soul;  The streets of heaven it walks about;    None can its liberty control.  This flesh hath drawn my soul to sin:    If it must smart, thy will be done!  O fill me with thy joys within,    And then I'll let it grieve alone.  Frail, sinful flesh is loath to die;    Sense to the unseen world is strange;  The doubting soul dreads the Most High,    And trembleth at so great a change.  O let me not be strange at home,    Strange to the sun and life of souls,  Choosing this low and darkened room,    Familiar with worms and moles!  Am I the first that go this way?    How many saints are gone before!  How many enter every day    Into thy kingdom by this door!  Christ was once dead, and in a grave;    Yet conquered death, and rose again;  And by this method he will save    His servants that with him shall reign.  The strangeness will be quickly over,    When once the heaven-born soul is there:  One sight of God will it recover    From all this backwardness and fear.  To us, Christ's lowest parts, his feet,    Union and faith must yet suffice  To guide and comfort us: it's meet    We trust our head who hath our eyes.

We see here that faith in the Lord leads Richard Baxter to the same conclusions immediately to which his faithful philosophy led Henry More.

There is much in Baxter's poems that I would gladly quote, but must leave with regret. Here is a curious, skilful, and, in a homely way, poetic ballad, embodying a good parable. I give only a few of the stanzas.

THE RETURN

  Who was it that I left behind    When I went last from home,  That now I all disordered find    When to myself I come?  I left it light, but now all's dark,    And I am fain to grope:  Were it not for one little spark    I should be out of hope.  My Gospel-book I open left,    Where I the promise saw;  But now I doubt it's lost by theft:    I find none but the Law.  The stormy rain an entrance hath    Through the uncovered top:  How should I rest when showers of wrath    Upon my conscience drop?  I locked my jewel in my chest;    I'll search lest that be gone:—  If this one guest had quit my breast,    I had been quite undone.  My treacherous Flesh had played its part,    And opened Sin the door;  And they have spoiled and robbed my heart,    And left it sad and poor.  Yet have I one great trusty friend    That will procure my peace,  And all this loss and ruin mend,    And purchase my release.  The bellows I'll yet take in hand,    Till this small spark shall flame:  Love shall my heart and tongue command    To praise God's holy name.  I'll mend the roof; I'll watch the door,    And better keep the key;  I'll trust my treacherous flesh no more,    But force it to obey.  What have I said? That I'll do this    That am so false and weak,  And have so often done amiss,    And did my covenants break?  I mean, Lord—all this shall be done    If thou my heart wilt raise;  And as the work must be thine own,    So also shall the praise.

The allegory is so good that one is absolutely sorry when it breaks down, and the poem says in plain words that which is the subject of the figures, bringing truths unmasked into the midst of the maskers who represent truths—thus interrupting the pleasure of the artistic sense in the transparent illusion.

The command of metrical form in Baxter is somewhat remarkable. He has not much melody, but he keeps good time in a variety of measures.

CHAPTER XVII

CRASHAW AND MARVELL.

I come now to one of the loveliest of our angel-birds, Richard Crashaw. Indeed he was like a bird in more senses than one; for he belongs to that class of men who seem hardly ever to get foot-hold of this world, but are ever floating in the upper air of it.

What I said of a peculiar Æolian word-music in William Drummond applies with equal truth to Crashaw; while of our own poets, somehow or other, he reminds me of Shelley, in the silvery shine and bell-like melody both of his verse and his imagery; and in one of his poems, Music's Duel, the fineness of his phrase reminds me of Keats. But I must not forget that it is only with his sacred, his best poems too, that I am now concerned.

The date of his birth is not known with certainty, but it is judged about 1616, the year of Shakspere's death. He was the son of a Protestant clergyman zealous even to controversy. By a not unnatural reaction Crashaw, by that time, it is said, a popular preacher, when expelled from Oxford in 1644 by the Puritan Parliament because of his refusal to sign their Covenant, became a Roman Catholic. He died about the age of thirty-four, a canon of the Church of Loretto. There is much in his verses of that sentimentalism which, I have already said in speaking of Southwell, is rife in modern Catholic poetry. I will give from Crashaw a specimen of the kind of it. Avoiding a more sacred object, one stanza from a poem of thirty-one, most musical, and full of lovely speech concerning the tears of Mary Magdalen, will suit my purpose.

  Hail, sister springs,  Parents of silver-footed rills!      Ever-bubbling things!  Thawing crystal! Snowy hills,  Still spending, never spent!—I mean  Thy fair eyes, sweet Magdalene!

The poem is called The Weeper, and is radiant of delicate fancy. But surely such tones are not worthy of flitting moth-like about the holy sorrow of a repentant woman! Fantastically beautiful, they but play with her grief. Sorrow herself would put her shoes off her feet in approaching the weeping Magdalene. They make much of her indeed, but they show her little reverence. There is in them, notwithstanding their fervour of amorous words, a coldness like that which dwells in the ghostly beauty of icicles shining in the moon.

But I almost reproach myself for introducing Crashaw thus. I had to point out the fact, and now having done with it, I could heartily wish I had room to expatiate on his loveliness even in such poems as The Weeper.

His Divine Epigrams are not the most beautiful, but they are to me the most valuable of his verses, inasmuch as they make us feel afresh the truth which he sets forth anew. In them some of the facts of our Lord's life and teaching look out upon us as from clear windows of the past. As epigrams, too, they are excellent—pointed as a lance.

Upon the Sepulchre of our Lord.

  Here, where our Lord once laid his head,  Now the grave lies buriëd.

The Widow's Mites.

  Two mites, two drops, yet all her house and land,  Fall from a steady heart, though trembling hand;  The other's wanton wealth foams high and brave:  The other cast away—she only gave.

On the Prodigal.

  Tell me, bright boy! tell me, my golden lad!  Whither away so frolic? Why so glad?  What! all thy wealth in council? all thy state?  Are husks so dear? Troth, 'tis a mighty rate!

I value the following as a lovely parable. Mary is not contented: to see the place is little comfort. The church itself, with all its memories of the Lord, the gospel-story, and all theory about him, is but his tomb until we find himself.

Come, see the place-where the Lord lay.

  Show me himself, himself, bright sir! Oh show  Which way my poor tears to himself may go.  Were it enough to show the place, and say,  "Look, Mary; here see where thy Lord once lay;"  Then could I show these arms of mine, and say,  "Look, Mary; here see where thy Lord once lay."

From one of eight lines, on the Mother Mary looking on her child in her lap, I take the last two, complete in themselves, and I think best alone.

  This new guest to her eyes new laws hath given:

  'Twas once look up, 'tis now look down to heaven.And here is perhaps his best.

Two went up into the Temple to pray.

  Two went to pray? Oh rather say,  One went to brag, the other to pray.  One stands up close, and treads on high,  Where the other dares not lend his eye.  One nearer to God's altar trod;  The other to the altar's God.

This appears to me perfect. Here is the true relation between the forms and the end of religion. The priesthood, the altar and all its ceremonies, must vanish from between the sinner and his God. When the priest forgets his mediation of a servant, his duty of a door-keeper to the temple of truth, and takes upon him the office of an intercessor, he stands between man and God, and is a Satan, an adversary. Artistically considered, the poem could hardly be improved.

Here is another containing a similar lesson.

I am not worthy that thou shouldst come under my roof.

  Thy God was making haste into thy roof;  Thy humble faith and fear keeps him aloof.  He'll be thy guest: because he may not be,  He'll come—into thy house? No; into thee.

The following is a world-wide intercession for them that know not what they do. Of those that reject the truth, who can be said ever to have truly seen it? A man must be good to see truth. It is a thought suggested by our Lord's words, not an irreverent opposition to the truth of them.

But now they have seen and hated.

  Seen? and yet hated thee? They did not see—  They saw thee not, that saw and hated thee!  No, no; they saw thee not, O Life! O Love!  Who saw aught in thee that their hate could move.

We must not be too ready to quarrel with every oddity: an oddity will sometimes just give the start to an outbreak of song. The strangeness of the following hymn rises almost into grandeur.

EASTER DAY

  Rise, heir of fresh eternity,      From thy virgin-tomb;  Rise, mighty man of wonders, and thy world with thee;    Thy tomb, the universal East—      Nature's new womb;  Thy tomb—fair Immortality's perfumed nest.    Of all the glories139 make noon gay      This is the morn;  This rock buds forth the fountain of the streams of day;    In joy's white annals lives this hour,      When life was born,  No cloud-scowl on his radiant lids, no tempest-lower.      Life, by this light's nativity,        All creatures have;  Death only by this day's just doom is forced to die.    Nor is death forced; for, may he lie      Throned in thy grave,  Death will on this condition be content to die.

When we come, in the writings of one who has revealed masterdom, upon any passage that seems commonplace, or any figure that suggests nothing true, the part of wisdom is to brood over that point; for the probability is that the barrenness lies in us, two factors being necessary for the result of sight—the thing to be seen and the eye to see it. No doubt the expression may be inadequate, but if we can compensate the deficiency by adding more vision, so much the better for us.

In the second stanza there is a strange combination of images: the rock buds; and buds a fountain; the fountain is light. But the images are so much one at the root, that they slide gracefully into each other, and there is no confusion or incongruity: the result is an inclined plane of development.

I now come to the most musical and most graceful, therefore most lyrical, of his poems. I have left out just three stanzas, because of the sentimentalism of which I have spoken: I would have left out more if I could have done so without spoiling the symmetry of the poem. My reader must be friendly enough to one who is so friendly to him, to let his peculiarities pass unquestioned—amongst the rest his conceits, as well as the trifling discord that the shepherds should be called, after the classical fashion—ill agreeing, from its associations, with Christian song—Tityrus and Thyrsis.

A HYMN OF THE NATIVITY SUNG BY THE SHEPHERDS

  Chorus. Come, we shepherds, whose blest sight  Hath met love's noon in nature's night;  Come, lift we up our loftier song,  And wake the sun that lies too long.  To all our world of well-stolen140 joy    He slept, and dreamed of no such thing,  While we found out heaven's fairer eye,    And kissed the cradle of our king:  Tell him he rises now too late  To show us aught worth looking at.  Tell him we now can show him more    Than he e'er showed to mortal sight—  Than he himself e'er saw before,    Which to be seen needs not his light:  Tell him, Tityrus, where thou hast been;  Tell him, Thyrsis, what thou hast seen.  Tityrus. Gloomy night embraced the place    Where the noble infant lay:  The babe looked up and showed his face:    In spite of darkness it was day.  It was thy day, sweet, and did rise  Not from the east, but from thy eyes.      Chorus. It was thy day, sweet, &c.  Thyrsis. Winter chid aloud, and sent    The angry north to wage his wars:  The north forgot his fierce intent,    And left perfumes instead of scars.  By those sweet eyes' persuasive powers,  Where he meant frosts, he scattered flowers.      Chorus. By those sweet eyes', &c.  Both. We saw thee in thy balmy nest,    Young dawn of our eternal day;  We saw thine eyes break from the east,    And chase the trembling shades away.  We saw thee, and we blessed the sight;  We saw thee by thine own sweet light.      Chorus. We saw thee, &c.  Tityrus. "Poor world," said I, "what wilt thou do    To entertain this starry stranger?  Is this the best thou canst bestow—    A cold and not too cleanly manger?  Contend, the powers of heaven and earth,  To fit a bed for this huge birth."      Chorus. Contend, the powers, &c.  Thyrsis. "Proud world," said I, "cease your contest,    And let the mighty babe alone:  The phoenix builds the phoenix' nest—    Love's architecture is his own.  The babe, whose birth embraves this morn,  Made his own bed ere he was born."      Chorus. The babe, whose birth, &c.  Tityrus. I saw the curl'd drops, soft and slow,    Come hovering o'er the place's head,  Offering their whitest sheets of snow    To furnish the fair infant's bed:  "Forbear," said I; "be not too bold:  Your fleece is white, but 'tis too cold."      Chorus. "Forbear," said I, &c.  Thyrsis. I saw the obsequious seraphim    Their rosy fleece of fire bestow;  For well they now can spare their wings,    Since heaven itself lies here below.  "Well done," said I; "but are you sure  Your down, so warm, will pass for pure?"      Chorus. "Well done," said I, &c.* * * * *  Full Chorus. Welcome all wonders in one sight!    Eternity shut in a span!  Summer in winter! day in night!    Heaven in earth, and God in man!  Great little one, whose all-embracing birth  Lifts earth to heaven, stoops heaven to earth!* * * * *  Welcome—though not to those gay flies    Gilded i' th' beams of earthly kings—  Slippery souls in smiling eyes—    But to poor shepherds, homespun things,  Whose wealth's their flocks, whose wit's to be  Well read in their simplicity.  Yet when young April's husband showers    Shall bless the fruitful Maia's bed,  We'll bring the firstborn of her flowers    To kiss thy feet, and crown thy head:  To thee, dear Lamb! whose love must keep  The shepherds while they feed their sheep.  To thee, meek Majesty, soft king    Of simple graces and sweet loves,  Each of us his lamb will bring,    Each his pair of silver doves.  At last, in fire of thy fair eyes,  Ourselves become our own best sacrifice.

A splendid line to end with! too good for the preceding one. All temples and altars, all priesthoods and prayers, must vanish in this one and only sacrifice. Exquisite, however, as the poem is, we cannot help wishing it looked less heathenish. Its decorations are certainly meretricious.

From a few religious poems of Sir Edward Sherburne, another Roman Catholic, and a firm adherent of Charles I., I choose the following—the only one I care for.

AND THEY LAID HIM IN A MANGER

  Happy crib, that wert, alone,  To my God, bed, cradle, throne!  Whilst thy glorious vileness I  View with divine fancy's eye,  Sordid filth seems all the cost,  State, and splendour, crowns do boast.  See heaven's sacred majesty  Humbled beneath poverty;  Swaddled up in homely rags,  On a bed of straw and flags!  He whose hands the heavens displayed,  And the world's foundations laid,  From the world's almost exiled,  Of all ornaments despoiled.  Perfumes bathe him not, new-born;  Persian mantles not adorn;  Nor do the rich roofs look bright  With the jasper's orient light.  Where, O royal infant, be  The ensigns of thy majesty;  Thy Sire's equalizing state;  And thy sceptre that rules fate?  Where's thy angel-guarded throne,  Whence thy laws thou didst make known—  Laws which heaven, earth, hell obeyed?  These, ah! these aside he laid;  Would the emblem be—of pride  By humility outvied.

I pass by Abraham Cowley, mighty reputation as he has had, without further remark than that he is too vulgar to be admired more than occasionally, and too artificial almost to be, as a poet, loved at all.

Andrew Marvell, member of Parliament for Hull both before and after the Restoration, was twelve years younger than his friend Milton. Any one of some half-dozen of his few poems is to my mind worth all the verse that Cowley ever made. It is a pity he wrote so little; but his was a life as diligent, I presume, as it was honourable.

ON A DROP OF DEW

  See how the orient dew,    Shed from the bosom of the morn      Into the blowing roses,  Yet careless of its mansion new    For the clear region where 'twas born,      Round in itself encloses, used intransitively.    And in its little globe's extent,  Frames as it can its native element.    How it the purple flower does slight,      Scarce touching where it lies,    But gazing back upon the skies,      Shines with a mournful light,        Like its own tear,  Because so long divided from the sphere:    Restless it rolls, and unsecure,      Trembling lest it grow impure,    Till the warm sun pity its pain,  And to the skies exhale it back again.      So the soul, that drop, that ray  Of the clear fountain of eternal day,  Could it within the human flower be seen,    Remembering still its former height,    Shuns the sweet leaves and blossoms green;    And, recollecting its own light,  Does, in its pure and circling thoughts, express  The greater heaven in an heaven less.      In how coy a figure wound,        Every way it turns away,      So the world excluding round,        Yet receiving in the day;      Dark beneath but bright above,        Here disdaining, there in love.    How loose and easy hence to go!      How girt and ready to ascend!    Moving but on a point below,      It all about does upwards bend.  Such did the manna's sacred dew distil—  White and entire,141 though congealed and chill—  Congealed on earth, but does, dissolving, run  Into the glories of the almighty sun.

Surely a lovely fancy of resemblance, exquisitely wrought out; an instance of the lighter play of the mystical mind, which yet shadows forth truth.