England's Antiphon

  Stones towards the earth descend;    Rivers to the ocean roll;  Every motion has some end:    What is thine, beloved soul?  "Mine is, where my Saviour is;    There with him I hope to dwell:  Jesu is the central bliss;    Love the force that doth impel."  Truly thou hast answered right:    Now may heaven's attractive grace  Towards the source of thy delight    Speed along thy quickening pace!  "Thank thee for thy generous care:    Heaven, that did the wish inspire,  Through thy instrumental prayer,    Plumes the wings of my desire.  "Now, methinks, aloft I fly;    Now with angels bear a part:  Glory be to God on high!    Peace to every Christian heart!"

THE ANSWER TO THE DESPONDING SOUL

  Cheer up, desponding soul;    Thy longing pleased I see:  'Tis part of that great whole    Wherewith I longed for thee.  Wherewith I longed for thee,    And left my Father's throne,  From death to set thee free,    To claim thee for my own.  To claim thee for my own,    I suffered on the cross:  O! were my love but known,    No soul could fear its loss.  No soul could fear its loss,    But, filled with love divine,  Would die on its own cross,    And rise for ever mine.

Surely there is poetry as well as truth in this. But, certainly in general, his thought is far in excess of his poetry.

Here are a few verses which I shall once more entitle

DIVINE EPIGRAMS

  With peaceful mind thy race of duty run  God nothing does, or suffers to be done,  But what thou wouldst thyself, if thou couldst see  Through all events of things as well as he.* * * * *  Think, and be careful what thou art within,  For there is sin in the desire of sin:  Think and be thankful, in a different case,  For there is grace in the desire of grace.* * * * *  An heated fancy or imagination  May be mistaken for an inspiration;  True; but is this conclusion fair to make—  That inspiration must be all mistake?  A pebble-stone is not a diamond: true;  But must a diamond be a pebble too?  To own a God who does not speak to men,  Is first to own, and then disown again;  Of all idolatry the total sum  Is having gods that are both deaf and dumb.* * * * *  What is more tender than a mother's love    To the sweet infant fondling in her arms?  What arguments need her compassion move    To hear its cries, and help it in its harms?  Now, if the tenderest mother were possessed  Of all the love within her single breast  Of all the mothers since the world began,  'Tis nothing to the love of God to man.* * * * *  Faith, Hope, and Love were questioned what they thought  Of future glory which Religion taught:  Now Faith believed it firmly to be true,  And Hope expected so to find it too:  Love answered, smiling with a conscious glow,  "Believe? Expect? I know it to be so."

CHAPTER XX

THE ROOTS OF THE HILLS.

In the poems of James Thomson, we find two hymns to the God of Creation—one in blank verse, the other in stanzas. They are of the kind which from him we should look for. The one in blank verse, which is as an epilogue to his great poem, The Seasons, I prefer.

We owe much to Thomson. Born (in Scotland) in the year 1700, he is the leading priest in a solemn procession to find God—not in the laws by which he has ordered his creation, but in the beauty which is the outcome of those laws. I do not say there is much of the relation of man to nature in his writing; but thitherward it tends. He is true about the outsides of God; and in Thomson we begin to feel that the revelation of God as meaning and therefore being the loveliness of nature, is about to be recognized. I do not say—to change my simile—that he is the first visible root in our literature whence we can follow the outburst of the flowers and foliage of our delight in nature: I could show a hundred fibres leading from the depths of our old literature up to the great root. Nor is it surprising that, with his age about him, he too should be found tending to magnify, not God's Word, but his works, above all his name: we have beauty for loveliness; beneficence for tenderness. I have wondered whether one great part of Napoleon's mission was not to wake people from this idolatry of the power of God to the adoration of his love.

The Hymn holds a kind of middle place between the Morning Hymn in the 5th Book of the Paradise Lost and the Hymn in the Vale of Chamouni. It would be interesting and instructive to compare the three; but we have not time. Thomson has been influenced by Milton, and Coleridge by both. We have delight in Milton; art in Thomson; heart, including both, in Coleridge.

HYMN

  These, as they change, Almighty Father, these  Are but the varied God. The rolling year  Is full of thee. Forth in the pleasing Spring  Thy beauty walks, thy tenderness and love.  Wide flush the fields; the softening air is balm;  Echo the mountains round; the forest smiles;  And every sense and every heart is joy.  Then comes thy glory in the Summer months,  With light and heat refulgent. Then thy sun  Shoots full perfection through the swelling year  And oft thy voice in dreadful thunder speaks,  And oft at dawn, deep noon, or falling eve,  By brooks and groves, in hollow-whispering gales.159  A yellow-floating pomp, thy bounty shines  In Autumn unconfined. Thrown from thy lap,  Profuse o'er nature, falls the lucid shower  Of beamy fruits; and, in a radiant stream,  Into the stores of sterile Winter pours.  In winter awful thou! with clouds and storms  Around thee thrown—tempest o'er tempest rolled.  Majestic darkness! on the whirlwind's wing  Riding sublime, thou bidst the world adore,160  And humblest nature with thy northern blast.  Mysterious round! what skill, what force divine  Deep felt, in these appear! a simple train,  Yet so delightful mixed, with such kind art,  Such beauty and beneficence combined!  Shade unperceived so softening into shade!  And all so forming an harmonious whole,  That, as they still succeed, they ravish still.* * * * *  Nature attend! Join, every living soul,  Beneath the spacious temple of the sky—  In adoration join; and, ardent, raise  One general song! To him, ye vocal gales,  Breathe soft, whose spirit in your freshness breathes;  Oh! talk of him in solitary glooms,  Where, o'er the rock, the scarcely waving pine  Fills the brown shade with a religious awe;  And ye, whose bolder note is heard afar,  Who shake the astonished world, lift high to heaven  The impetuous song, and say from whom you rage.  His praise, ye brooks, attune,—ye trembling rills,  And let me catch it as I muse along.  Ye headlong torrents, rapid and profound;  Ye softer floods, that lead the humid maze  Along the vale; and thou, majestic main,  A secret world of wonders in thyself,  Sound his stupendous praise, whose greater voice  Or bids you roar, or bids your roarings fall.  Soft roll your incense, herbs, and fruits, and flowers,  In mingled clouds to him whose sun exalts,  Whose breath perfumes you, and whose pencil paints.  Ye forests, bend, ye harvests, wave to him;  Breathe your still song into the reaper's heart,  As home he goes beneath the joyous moon.* * * * *  Bleat out afresh, ye hills! ye mossy rocks,  Retain the sound; the broad responsive low,  Ye valleys raise; for the great Shepherd reigns,  And his unsuffering kingdom yet will come.* * * * *  Ye chief, for whom the whole creation smiles,  At once the head, the heart, and tongue of all,  Crown the great hymn! in swarming cities vast,  Assembled men, to the deep organ join  The long-resounding voice, oft breaking clear,  At solemn pauses, through the swelling base;  And, as each mingling flame increases each,  In one united ardour rise to heaven.* * * * *  Should fate command me to the farthest verge  Of the green earth, to distant barbarous climes,  Rivers unknown to song, where first the sun  Gilds Indian mountains, or his setting beam  Flames on the Atlantic isles, 'tis nought to me,  Since God is ever present, ever felt,  In the void waste as in the city full;  And where he vital breathes there must be joy.* * * * *

The worship of intellectual power in laws and inventions is the main delight of the song; not the living presence of creative love, which never sings its own praises, but spends itself in giving. Still, although there has passed away a glory from the world of song, although the fervour of childlike worship has vanished for a season, there are signs in these verses of a new dawn of devotion. Even the exclusive and therefore blind worship of science will, when it has turned the coil of the ascending spiral, result in a new song to "him that made heaven and earth and the sea and the fountains of waters." But first, for a long time, the worship of power will go on. There is one sonnet by Kirke White, eighty-five years younger than Thomson, which is quite pagan in its mode of glorifying the power of the Deity.

But about the same time when Thomson's Seasons was published, which was in 1730, the third year of George II., that life which had burned on in the hidden corners of the church in spite of the worldliness and sensuality of its rulers, began to show a flame destined to enlarge and spread until it should have lighted up the mass with an outburst of Christian faith and hope. I refer to the movement called Methodism, in the midst of which, at an early stage of its history, arose the directing energies of John Wesley, a man sent of God to deepen at once and purify its motive influences. What he and his friends taught, would, I presume, in its essence, amount mainly to this: that acquiescence in the doctrines of the church is no fulfilment of duty—or anything, indeed, short of an obedient recognition of personal relation to God, who has sent every man the message of present salvation in his Son. A new life began to bud and blossom from the dry stem of the church. The spirit moved upon the waters of feeling, and the new undulation broke on the shores of thought in an outburst of new song. For while John Wesley roused the hearts of the people to sing, his brother Charles put songs in their mouths.

I do not say that many of these songs possess much literary merit, but many of them are real lyrics: they have that essential element, song, in them. The following, however, is a very fine poem. That certain expressions in it may not seem offensive, it is necessary to keep the allegory of Jacob and the Angel in full view—even better in view, perhaps, than the writer does himself.

WRESTLING JACOB

  Come, O thou traveller unknown,    Whom still I hold, but cannot see!  My company before is gone,    And I am left alone with thee!  With thee all night I mean to stay,  And wrestle till the break of day!  I need not tell thee who I am,    My misery or sin declare;  Thyself hast called me by my name:    Look on my hands, and read it there!  But who, I ask thee, who art thou?  Tell me thy name, and tell me now.  In vain thou struggles! to get free:    I never will unloose my hold.  Art thou the man that died for me?    The secret of thy love unfold.  Wrestling, I will not let thee go  Till I thy name, thy nature know.* * * * *  What though my sinking flesh complain,    And murmur to contend so long!  I rise superior to my pain:    When I am weak, then I am strong;  And when my all of strength shall fail,  I shall with the God-man prevail.  My strength is gone; my nature dies;    I sink beneath thy weighty hand:  Faint to revive, and fall to rise;    I fall, and yet by faith I stand—  I stand, and will not let thee go  Till I thy name, thy nature know.  Yield to me now, for I am weak,    But confident in self-despair;  Speak to my heart, in blessings speak;    Be conquered by my instant161 prayer.  Speak, or thou never hence shalt move,  And tell me if thy name is Love.  'Tis Love! 'tis Love! Thou diedst for me!    I hear thy whisper in my heart!  The morning breaks; the shadows flee:    Pure universal Love thou art!  To me, to all, thy bowels move:  Thy nature and thy name is Love!  My prayer hath power with God; the grace    Unspeakable I now receive;  Through faith I see thee face to face—    I see thee face to face, and live:  In vain I have not wept and strove;  Thy nature and thy name is Love.  I know thee, Saviour—who thou art—    Jesus, the feeble sinner's friend!  Nor wilt thou with the night depart,    But stay and love me to the end!  Thy mercies never shall remove:  Thy nature and thy name is Love!* * * * *  Contented now, upon my thigh    I halt till life's short journey end;  All helplessness, all weakness, I    On thee alone for strength depend;  Nor have I power from thee to move:  Thy nature and thy name is Love.  Lame as I am, I take the prey;    Hell, earth, and sin, with ease o'ercome;  I leap for joy, pursue my way,    And as a bounding hart fly home;  Through all eternity to prove  Thy nature and thy name is Love.

It seems to me that the art with which his very difficult end in the management of the allegory is reached, is admirable. I have omitted three stanzas.

I cannot give much from William Cowper. His poems—graceful always, and often devout even when playful—have few amongst them that are expressly religious, while the best of his hymns are known to every reader of such. Born in 1731, he was greatly influenced by the narrow theology that prevailed in his circle; and most of his hymns are marred by the exclusiveness which belonged to the system and not to the man. There is little of it in the following:—

  Far from the world, O Lord, I flee,    From strife and tumult far;  From scenes where Satan wages still    His most successful war.  The calm retreat, the silent shade,    With prayer and praise agree,  And seem by thy sweet bounty made    For those who follow thee.  There if thy spirit touch the soul,    And grace her mean abode,  Oh with what peace, and joy, and love,    She communes with her God!  There, like the nightingale, she pours    Her solitary lays,  Nor asks a witness of her song,    Nor thirsts for human praise.  Author and guardian of my life,    Sweet source of light divine,  And—all harmonious names in one—    My Saviour, thou art mine!  What thanks I owe thee, and what love—    A boundless, endless store—  Shall echo through the realms above    When time shall be no more.

Sad as was Cowper's history, with the vapours of a low insanity, if not always filling his garden, yet ever brooding on the hill-tops of his horizon, he was, through his faith in God, however darkened by the introversions of a neat, poverty-stricken theology, yet able to lead his life to the end. It is delightful to discover that, when science, which is the anatomy of nature, had poisoned the theology of the country, in creating a demand for clean-cut theory in infinite affairs, the loveliness and truth of the countenance of living nature could calm the mind which this theology had irritated to the very borders of madness, and give a peace and hope which the man was altogether right in attributing to the Spirit of God. How many have been thus comforted, who knew not, like Wordsworth, the immediate channel of their comfort; or even, with Cowper, recognized its source! God gives while men sleep.

CHAPTER XXI

THE NEW VISION.

William Blake, the painter of many strange and fantastic but often powerful—sometimes very beautiful pictures—wrote poems of an equally remarkable kind. Some of them are as lovely as they are careless, while many present a curious contrast in the apparent incoherence of the simplest language. He was born in 1757, towards the close of the reign of George II. Possibly if he had been sent to an age more capable of understanding him, his genius would not have been tempted to utter itself with such a wildness as appears to indicate hopeless indifference to being understood. We cannot tell sometimes whether to attribute the bewilderment the poems cause in us to a mysticism run wild, or to regard it as the reflex of madness in the writer. Here is a lyrical gem, however, although not cut with mathematical precision.

DAYBREAK

  To find the western path,  Right through the gates of wrath      I urge my way;  Sweet morning leads me on:  With soft repentant moan,      I see the break of day  The war of swords and spears,  Melted by dewy tears,      Exhales on high;  The sun is freed from fears,  And with soft grateful tears,      Ascends the sky.

The following is full of truth most quaintly expressed, with a homeliness of phrase quite delicious. It is one of the Songs of Innocence, published, as we learn from Gilchrist's Life of Blake, in the year 1789. They were engraved on copper with illustrations by Blake, and printed and bound by his wife. When we consider them in respect of the time when they were produced, we find them marvellous for their originality and simplicity.

ON ANOTHER'S SORROW

  Can I see another's woe,  And not be in sorrow too?  Can I see another's grief,  And not seek for kind relief?  Can I see a falling tear,  And not feel my sorrow's share?  Can a father see his child  Weep, nor be with sorrow filled?  Can a mother sit and hear  An infant groan, an infant fear?  No, no; never can it be!  Never, never can it be!  And can he, who smiles on all,  Hear the wren, with sorrows small—  Hear the small bird's grief and care,  Hear the woes that infants bear,  And not sit beside the nest,  Pouring pity in their breast?  And not sit the cradle near,  Weeping tear on infant's tear?  And not sit both night and day,  Wiping all our tears away?  Oh, no! never can it be!  Never, never can it be!  He doth give his joy to all;  He becomes an infant small;  He becomes a man of woe;  He doth feel the sorrow too.  Think not thou canst sigh a sigh,  And thy Maker is not by;  Think not thou canst weep a tear,  And thy Maker is not near.  Oh! he gives to us his joy,  That our grief he may destroy:  Till our grief is fled and gone,  He doth sit by us and moan.

There is our mystic yet again leading the way.

A supreme regard for science, and the worship of power, go hand in hand: that knowledge is power has been esteemed the grandest incitement to study. Yet the antidote to the disproportionate cultivation of science, is simply power in its crude form—breaking out, that is, as brute force. When science, isolated and glorified, has produced a contempt, not only for vulgar errors, but for the truths which are incapable of scientific proof, then, as we see in the French Revolution, the wild beast in man breaks from its den, and chaos returns. But all the noblest minds in Europe looked for grand things in the aurora of this uprising of the people. To the terrible disappointment that followed, we are indebted for the training of Wordsworth to the priesthood of nature's temple. So was he possessed with the hope of a coming deliverance for the nations, that he spent many months in France during the Revolution. At length he was forced to seek safety at home. Dejected even to hopelessness for a time, he believed in nothing. How could there be a God that ruled in the earth when such a rising sun of promise was permitted to set in such a sea! But for man to worship himself is a far more terrible thing than that blood should flow like water: the righteous plague of God allowed things to go as they would for a time. But the power of God came upon Wordsworth—I cannot say as it had never come before, but with an added insight which made him recognize in the fresh gift all that he had known and felt of such in the past. To him, as to Cowper, the benignities of nature restored peace and calmness and hope—sufficient to enable him to look back and gather wisdom. He was first troubled, then quieted, and then taught. Such presence of the Father has been an infinitely more active power in the redemption of men than men have yet become capable of perceiving. The divine expressions of Nature, that is, the face of the Father therein visible, began to heal the plague which the worship of knowledge had bred. And the power of her teaching grew from comfort to prayer, as will be seen in the poem I shall give. Higher than all that Nature can do in the way of direct lessoning, is the production of such holy moods as result in hope, conscience of duty, and supplication. Those who have never felt it have to be told there is in her such a power—yielding to which, the meek inherit the earth.

NINTH EVENING VOLUNTARY

Composed upon an evening of extraordinary splendour and beauty.

I.

  Had this effulgence disappeared  With flying haste, I might have sent  Among the speechless clouds a look  Of blank astonishment;  But 'tis endued with power to stay,  And sanctify one closing day,  That frail Mortality may see—  What is?—ah no, but what can be!  Time was when field and watery cove  With modulated echoes rang,  While choirs of fervent angels sang  Their vespers in the grove;  Or, crowning, star-like, each some sovereign height,  Warbled, for heaven above and earth below,  Strains suitable to both.—Such holy rite,  Methinks, if audibly repeated now  From hill or valley could not move  Sublimer transport, purer love,  Than doth this silent spectacle—the gleam—  The shadow—and the peace supreme!

II.

  No sound is uttered,—but a deep  And solemn harmony pervades  The hollow vale from steep to steep,  And penetrates the glades.  Far distant images draw nigh,  Called forth by wondrous potency  Of beamy radiance, that imbues  Whate'er it strikes with gem-like hues.  In vision exquisitely clear,  Herds range along the mountain side,  And glistening antlers are descried,  And gilded flocks appear.  Thine is the tranquil hour, purpureal Eve!  But long as godlike wish or hope divine  Informs my spirit, ne'er can I believe  That this magnificence is wholly thine!  From worlds nor quickened by the sun  A portion of the gift is won;  An intermingling of heaven's pomp is spread  On ground which British shepherds tread!

III.

  And if there be whom broken ties  Afflict, or injuries assail,  Yon hazy ridges to their eyes  Present a glorious scale162  Climbing suffused with sunny air,  To stop—no record hath told where;  And tempting Fancy to ascend,  And with immortal spirits blend!  —Wings at my shoulders seem to play!  But, rooted here, I stand and gaze  On those bright steps that heavenward raise  Their practicable way.  Come forth, ye drooping old men, look abroad,  And see to what fair countries ye are bound!  And if some traveller, weary of his road,  Hath slept since noontide on the grassy ground,  Ye genii, to his covert speed,  And wake him with such gentle heed  As may attune his soul to meet the dower  Bestowed on this transcendent hour.

IV.

  Such hues from their celestial urn  Were wont to stream before mine eye  Where'er it wandered in the morn  Of blissful infancy.  This glimpse of glory, why renewed?  Nay, rather speak with gratitude;  For, if a vestige of those gleams  Survived, 'twas only in my dreams.  Dread Power! whom peace and calmness serve  No less than nature's threatening voice,  If aught unworthy be my choice,  From THEE if I would swerve;  Oh, let thy grace remind me of the light  Full early lost, and fruitlessly deplored;  Which, at this moment, on my waking sight  Appears to shine, by miracle restored:  My soul, though yet confined to earth,  Rejoices in a second birth!  —'Tis past; the visionary splendour fades;  And night approaches with her shades.

Although I have mentioned Wordsworth before Coleridge because he was two years older, yet Coleridge had much to do with the opening of Wordsworth's eyes to such visions; as, indeed, more than any man in our times, he has opened the eyes of the English people to see wonderful things. There is little of a directly religious kind in his poetry; yet we find in him what we miss in Wordsworth, an inclined plane from the revelation in nature to the culminating revelation in the Son of Man. Somehow, I say, perhaps because we find it in his prose, we feel more of this in Coleridge's verse.

Coleridge is a sage, and Wordsworth is a seer; yet when the sage sees, that is, when, like the son of Beor, he falls into a trance having his eyes open, or, when feeling and sight are one and philosophy is in abeyance, the ecstasy is even loftier in Coleridge than in Wordsworth. In their highest moods they seem almost to change places—Wordsworth to become sage, and Coleridge seer. Perhaps the grandest hymn of praise which man, the mouth-piece of Nature, utters for her, is the hymn of Mont Blanc.