England's Antiphon

HYMN

Before sunrise, in the Vale of Chamouni.

  Hast thou a charm to stay the morning star  In his steep course—so long he seems to pause  On thy bald awful head, O sovran Blanc?  The Arve and Arveiron at thy base  Rave ceaselessly; but thou, most awful Form!  Risest from forth thy silent sea of pines,  How silently! Around thee and above  Deep is the air and dark, substantial, black,  An ebon mass: methinks thou piercest it  As with a wedge! But when I look again,  It is thine own calm home, thy crystal shrine,  Thy habitation from eternity!  O dread and silent Mount! I gazed upon thee  Till thou, still present to the bodily sense,  Didst vanish from my thought: entranced in prayer  I worshipped the Invisible alone.  Yet, like some sweet beguiling melody,  So sweet, we know not we are listening to it,  Thou, the meanwhile, wast blending with my thought,  Yea, with my life and life's own secret joy;  Till the dilating soul, enwrapt, transfused,  Into the mighty vision passing—there  As in her natural form, swelled vast to Heaven!  Awake, my soul! Not only passive praise  Thou owest! Not alone these swelling tears,  Mute thanks and secret ecstasy! Awake,  Voice of sweet song! Awake, my heart, awake!  Green vales and icy cliffs, all join my hymn.  Thou first and chief, sole sovran163 of the Vale!  O struggling with the darkness all the night,  And visited all night by troops of stars,164  Or when they climb the sky or when they sink!  Companion of the morning-star at dawn,  Thyself earth's rosy star, and of the dawn165  Co-herald! wake, O wake, and utter praise!  Who sank thy sunless pillars deep in earth?  Who filled thy countenance with rosy light?  Who made thee parent of perpetual streams?  And you, ye five wild torrents fiercely glad!  Who called you forth from night and utter death,  From dark and icy caverns called you forth,166  Down those precipitous, black, jagged rocks,  For ever shattered, and the same for ever?  Who gave you your invulnerable life,  Your strength, your speed, your fury, and your joy,  Unceasing thunder, and eternal foam?  And who commanded—and the silence came—  Here let the billows stiffen, and have rest?167  Ye ice-falls! ye that from the mountain's brow  Adown enormous ravines slope amain—  Torrents, methinks, that heard a mighty voice,  And stopped at once amid their maddest plunge!—  Motionless torrents! silent cataracts!  Who made you glorious as the gates of heaven  Beneath the keen full moon? Who bade the sun  Clothe you with rainbows? Who, with living flowers  Of loveliest blue, spread garlands at your feet?—  God! let the torrents, like a shout of nations,  Answer! and let the ice-plains echo, God!  God! sing, ye meadow-streams, with gladsome voice!  Ye pine-groves, with your soft and soul-like sounds!  And they too have a voice, yon piles of snow,  And in their perilous fall shall thunder, God!  Ye living flowers that skirt the eternal frost!  Ye wild goats sporting round the eagle's nest!  Ye eagles, playmates of the mountain-storm!  Ye lightnings, the dread arrows of the clouds!  Ye signs and wonders of the element!  Utter forth God, and fill the hills with praise.  Thou too, hoar Mount! with thy sky-pointing peaks,  Oft from whose* feet the avalanche, unheard,  Shoots downward, glittering through the pure serene  Into the depth of clouds that veil thy breast—  Thou too again, stupendous Mountain! thou  That, as I raise my head, awhile bowed low  In adoration—upward from thy base  Slow-travelling with dim eyes suffused with tears—  Solemnly seemest, like a vapoury cloud,  To rise before me! rise, O ever rise;  Rise like a cloud of incense from the earth!  Thou kingly spirit throned among the hills!  Thou dread ambassador from earth to heaven!  Great hierarch! tell thou the silent sky,  And tell the stars, and tell yon rising sun,  Earth, with her thousand voices, praises God.

Here is one little poem I think most valuable, both from its fulness of meaning, and the form, as clear as condensed, in which that is embodied.

ON AN INFANT

Which died before baptism.

  "Be rather than be called a child of God,"  Death whispered. With assenting nod,  Its head upon its mother's breast    The baby bowed without demur—  Of the kingdom of the blest    Possessor, not inheritor.

Next the father let me place the gifted son, Hartley Coleridge. He was born in 1796, and died in 1849. Strange, wayward, and in one respect faulty, as his life was, his poetry—strange, and exceedingly wayward too—is often very lovely. The following sonnet is all I can find room for:—

"SHE LOVED MUCH."

  She sat and wept beside his feet. The weight  Of sin oppressed her heart; for all the blame,  And the poor malice of the worldly shame,  To her was past, extinct, and out of date;  Only the sin remained—the leprous state.  She would be melted by the heat of love,  By fires far fiercer than are blown to prove  And purge the silver ore adulterate.  She sat and wept, and with her untressed hair  Still wiped the feet she was so blest to touch;  And he wiped off the soiling of despair  From her sweet soul, because she loved so much.  I am a sinner, full of doubts and fears:  Make me a humble thing of love and tears.

CHAPTER XXII

THE FERVOUR OF THE IMPLICIT. INSIGHT OF THE HEART.

The late Dean Milman, born in 1791, best known by his very valuable labours in history, may be taken as representing a class of writers in whom the poetic fire is ever on the point, and only on the point, of breaking into a flame. His composition is admirable—refined, scholarly, sometimes rich and even gorgeous in expression—yet lacking that radiance of the unutterable to which the loftiest words owe their grandest power. Perhaps the best representative of his style is the hymn on the Incarnation, in his dramatic poem, The Fall of Jerusulem. But as an extract it is tolerably known. I prefer giving one from his few Hymns for Church Service.

EIGHTEENTH SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY

  When God came down from heaven—the living God—    What signs and wonders marked his stately way?  Brake out the winds in music where he trod?    Shone o'er the heavens a brighter, softer day?  The dumb began to speak, the blind to see,    And the lame leaped, and pain and paleness fled;  The mourner's sunken eye grew bright with glee,    And from the tomb awoke the wondering dead.  When God went back to heaven—the living God—    Rode he the heavens upon a fiery car?  Waved seraph-wings along his glorious road?    Stood still to wonder each bright wandering star?  Upon the cross he hung, and bowed his head,    And prayed for them that smote, and them that curst;  And, drop by drop, his slow life-blood was shed,    And his last hour of suffering was his worst.

The Christian Year of the Rev. John Keble (born in 1800) is perhaps better known in England than any other work of similar church character. I must confess I have never been able to enter into the enthusiasm of its admirers. Excellent, both in regard of their literary and religious merits, true in feeling and thorough in finish, the poems always remind me of Berlin work in iron—hard and delicate. Here is a portion of one of the best of them.

ST. MATTHEW

  Ye hermits blest, ye holy maids,          The nearest heaven on earth,        Who talk with God in shadowy glades,          Free from rude care and mirth;        To whom some viewless teacher brings        The secret lore of rural things,    The moral of each fleeting cloud and gale,  The whispers from above, that haunt the twilight vale:        Say, when in pity ye have gazed          On the wreath'd smoke afar,        That o'er some town, like mist upraised,          Hung hiding sun and star;        Then as ye turned your weary eye        To the green earth and open sky,    Were ye not fain to doubt how Faith could dwell  Amid that dreary glare, in this world's citadel?        But Love's a flower that will not die          For lack of leafy screen,        And Christian Hope can cheer the eye          That ne'er saw vernal green:        Then be ye sure that Love can bless        Even in this crowded loneliness,    Where ever-moving myriads seem to say,  Go—thou art nought to us, nor we to thee—away!        There are in this loud stunning tide          Of human care and crime,        With whom the melodies abide          Of the everlasting chime;        Who carry music in their heart        Through dusky lane and wrangling mart,    Plying their daily task with busier feet,  Because their secret souls a holy strain repeat.

There are here some indications of that strong reaction of the present century towards ancient forms of church life. This reaction seems to me a further consequence of that admiration of power of which I have spoken. For, finding the progress of discovery in the laws of nature constantly bring an assurance most satisfactory to the intellect, men began to demand a similar assurance in other matters; and whatever department of human thought could not be subjected to experiment or did not admit of logical proof began to be regarded with suspicion. The highest realms of human thought—where indeed only grand conviction, and that the result not of research, but of obedience to the voice within, can be had—came to be by such regarded as regions where, no scientific assurance being procurable, it was only to his loss that a man should go wandering: the whole affair was unworthy of him. And if there be no guide of humanity but the intellect, and nothing worthy of its regard but what that intellect can isolate and describe in the forms peculiar to its operations,—that is, if a man has relations to nothing beyond his definition, is not a creature of the immeasurable,—then these men are right. But there have appeared along with them other thinkers who could not thus be satisfied—men who had in their souls a hunger which the neatest laws of nature could not content, who could not live on chemistry, or mathematics, or even on geology, without the primal law of their many dim-dawning wonders—that is, the Being, if such there might be, who thought their laws first and then embodied them in a world of aeonian growth. These indeed seek law likewise, but a perfect law—a law they can believe perfect beyond the comprehension of powers of whose imperfection they are too painfully conscious. They feel in their highest moments a helplessness that drives them to search after some Power with a heart deeper than his power, who cares for the troubled creatures he has made. But still under the influence of that faithless hunger for intellectual certainty, they look about and divide into two parties: both would gladly receive the reported revelation in Jesus, the one if they could have evidence enough from without, the other if they could only get rid of the difficulties it raises within. I am aware that I distinguish in the mass, and that both sides would be found more or less influenced by the same difficulties—but more and less, and therefore thus classified by the driving predominance. Those of the one party, then, finding no proof to be had but that in testimony, and anxious to have all they can—delighting too in a certain holy wilfulness of intellectual self-immolation, accept the testimony in the mass, and become Roman Catholics. Nor is it difficult to see how they then find rest. It is not the dogma, but the contact with Christ the truth, with Christ the man, which the dogma, in pacifying the troubles of the intellect—if only by a soporific, has aided them in reaching, that gives them peace: it is the truth itself that makes them free.

The worshippers of science will themselves allow, that when they cannot gain observations enough to satisfy them upon any point in which a law of nature is involved, they must, if possible, institute experiments. I say therefore to those whose observation has not satisfied them concerning the phenomenon Christianity,—"Where is your experiment? Why do you not thus try the utterance claiming to be the law of life? Call it a hypothesis, and experiment upon it. Carry into practice, well justified of your conscience, the words which the Man spoke, for therein he says himself lies the possibility of your acceptance of his mission; and if, after reasonable time thus spent, you are not yet convinced enough to give testimony—I will not annoy you by saying to facts, but—to conviction, I think neither will you be ready to abandon the continuous experiment." These Roman Catholics have thus met with Jesus, come into personal contact with him: by the doing of what he tells us, and by nothing else, are they blessed. What if their theories show to me like a burning of the temple and a looking for the god in the ashes? They know in whom they have believed. And if some of us think we have a more excellent way, we shall be blessed indeed if the result be no less excellent than in such men as Faber, Newman, and Aubrey de Vere. No man needs be afraid that to speak the truth concerning such will hasten the dominance of alien and oppressive powers; the truth is free, and to be just is to be strong. Should the time come again when Liberty is in danger, those who have defended the truth even in her adversaries, if such there be, will be found the readiest to draw the sword for her, and, hating not, yet smite for the liberty to do even them justice. To give the justice we claim for ourselves is, if there be a Christ, the law of Christ, to obey which is eternally better than truest theory.

I should like to give many of the hymns of Dr. Faber. Some of them are grand, others very lovely, and some, of course, to my mind considerably repulsive. He seems to me to go wrong nowhere in originating—he produces nothing unworthy except when he reproduces what he never could have entertained but for the pressure of acknowledged authority. Even such things, however, he has enclosed in pearls, as the oyster its incommoding sand-grains.

His hymn on The Greatness of God is profound; that on The Will of God is very wise; that to The God of my Childhood is full of quite womanly tenderness: all are most simple in speech, reminding us in this respect of John Mason. In him, no doubt, as in all of his class, we find traces of that sentimentalism in the use of epithets—small words, as distinguished from homely, applied to great things—of which I have spoken more than once; but criticism is not to be indulged in the reception of great gifts—of such a gift as this, for instance:—

THE ETERNITY OF GOD

        O Lord! my heart is sick,      Sick of this everlasting change;        And life runs tediously quick      Through its unresting race and varied range:    Change finds no likeness to itself in Thee,  And wakes no echo in Thy mute eternity.        Dear Lord! my heart is sick      Of this perpetual lapsing time,        So slow in grief, in joy so quick,      Yet ever casting shadows so sublime:    Time of all creatures is least like to Thee,  And yet it is our share of Thine eternity.        Oh change and time are storms      For lives so thin and frail as ours;        For change the work of grace deforms      With love that soils, and help that overpowers;    And time is strong, and, like some chafing sea,  It seems to fret the shores of Thine eternity.        Weak, weak, for ever weak!      We cannot hold what we possess;        Youth cannot find, age will not seek,—      Oh weakness is the heart's worst weariness:    But weakest hearts can lift their thoughts to Thee;  It makes us strong to think of Thine eternity.        Thou hadst no youth, great God!      An Unbeginning End Thou art;        Thy glory in itself abode,      And still abides in its own tranquil heart:    No age can heap its outward years on Thee:  Dear God! Thou art Thyself Thine own eternity!        Without an end or bound      Thy life lies all outspread in light;        Our lives feel Thy life all around,      Making our weakness strong, our darkness bright;    Yet is it neither wilderness nor sea,  But the calm gladness of a full eternity.        Oh Thou art very great      To set Thyself so far above!        But we partake of Thine estate,      Established in Thy strength and in Thy love:    That love hath made eternal room for me  In the sweet vastness of its own eternity.        Oh Thou art very meek      To overshade Thy creatures thus!        Thy grandeur is the shade we seek;      To be eternal is Thy use to us:    Ah, Blessed God! what joy it is to me  To lose all thought of self in Thine eternity.        Self-wearied, Lord! I come;      For I have lived my life too fast:        Now that years bring me nearer home      Grace must be slowly used to make it last;    When my heart beats too quick I think of Thee,  And of the leisure of Thy long eternity.        Farewell, vain joys of earth!      Farewell, all love that it not His!        Dear God! be Thou my only mirth,      Thy majesty my single timid bliss!    Oh in the bosom of eternity  Thou dost not weary of Thyself, nor we of Thee!

How easily his words flow, even when he is saying the deepest things! The poem is full of the elements of the finest mystical metaphysics, and yet there is no effort in their expression. The tendency to find God beyond, rather than in our daily human conditions, is discernible; but only as a tendency.

What a pity that the sects are so slow to become acquainted with the grand best in each other!

I do not find in Dr. Newman either a depth or a precision equal to that of Dr. Faber. His earlier poems indicate a less healthy condition of mind. His Dream of Gerontius is, however, a finer, as more ambitious poem than any of Faber's. In my judgment there are weak passages in it, with others of real grandeur. But I am perfectly aware of the difficulty, almost impossibility, of doing justice to men from some of whose forms of thought I am greatly repelled, who creep from the sunshine into every ruined archway, attracted by the brilliance with which the light from its loophole glows in its caverned gloom, and the hope of discovering within it the first steps of a stair winding up into the blue heaven. I apologize for the unavoidable rudeness of a critic who would fain be honest if he might; and I humbly thank all such as Dr. Newman, whose verses, revealing their saintship, make us long to be holier men.

Of his, as of Faber's, I have room for no more than one. It was written off Sardinia.

DESOLATION

  O say not thou art left of God,    Because His tokens in the sky  Thou canst not read: this earth He trod    To teach thee He was ever nigh.  He sees, beneath the fig-tree green,    Nathaniel con His sacred lore;  Shouldst thou thy chamber seek, unseen    He enters through the unopened door.  And when thou liest, by slumber bound,    Outwearied in the Christian fight,  In glory, girt with saints around,    He stands above thee through the night.  When friends to Emmaus bend their course,    He joins, although He holds their eyes:  Or, shouldst thou feel some fever's force,    He takes thy hand, He bids thee rise.  Or on a voyage, when calms prevail,    And prison thee upon the sea,  He walks the waves, He wings the sail,    The shore is gained, and thou art free.

Sir Aubrey de Vere is a poet profound in feeling, and gracefully tender in utterance. I give one short poem and one sonnet.

REALITY

  Love thy God, and love Him only:  And thy breast will ne'er be lonely.  In that one great Spirit meet  All things mighty, grave, and sweet.  Vainly strives the soul to mingle  With a being of our kind:  Vainly hearts with hearts are twined:  For the deepest still is single.  An impalpable resistance  Holds like natures still at distance.  Mortal! love that Holy One!  Or dwell for aye alone.

I respond most heartily to the last two lines; but I venture to add, with regard to the preceding six, "Love that holy One, and the impalpable resistance will vanish; for when thou seest him enter to sup with thy neighbour, thou wilt love that neighbour as thyself."

SONNET

  Ye praise the humble: of the meek ye say,  "Happy they live among their lowly bowers;  "The mountains, and the mountain-storms are ours."  Thus, self-deceivers, filled with pride alway,  Reluctant homage to the good ye pay,  Mingled with scorn like poison sucked from flowers—  Revere the humble; godlike are their powers:  No mendicants for praise of men are they.  The child who prays in faith "Thy will be done"  Is blended with that Will Supreme which moves  A wilderness of worlds by Thought untrod;  He shares the starry sceptre, and the throne:  The man who as himself his neighbour loves  Looks down on all things with the eyes of God!

Is it a fancy that, in the midst of all this devotion and lovely thought, I hear the mingled mournful tone of such as have cut off a right hand and plucked out a right eye, which had not caused them to offend? This is tenfold better than to have spared offending members; but the true Christian ambition is to fill the divine scheme of humanity—abridging nothing, ignoring nothing, denying nothing, calling nothing unclean, but burning everything a thank-offering in the flame of life upon the altar of absolute devotion to the Father and Saviour of men. We must not throw away half his gifts, that we may carry the other half in both hands to his altar.

But sacred fervour is confined to no sect. Here it is of the profoundest, and uttered with a homely tenderness equal to that of the earliest writers. Mrs. Browning, the princess of poets, was no partisan. If my work were mainly critical, I should feel bound to remark upon her false theory of English rhyme, and her use of strange words. That she is careless too in her general utterance I cannot deny; but in idea she is noble, and in phrase magnificent. Some of her sonnets are worthy of being ranged with the best in our language—those of Milton and Wordsworth.

BEREAVEMENT

  When some Beloveds, 'neath whose eyelids lay  The sweet lights of my childhood, one by one  Did leave me dark before the natural sun,  And I astonied fell, and could not pray,  A thought within me to myself did say,  "Is God less God that thou art left undone?  Rise, worship, bless Him! in this sackcloth spun,  As in that purple!"—But I answer, Nay!  What child his filial heart in words can loose,  If he behold his tender father raise  The hand that chastens sorely? Can he choose  But sob in silence with an upward gaze?  And my great Father, thinking fit to bruise,  Discerns in speechless tears both prayer and praise.

COMFORT

  Speak low to me, my Saviour, low and sweet,  From out the hallelujahs sweet and low,  Lest I should fear and fall, and miss thee so,  Who art not missed by any that entreat.  Speak to me as to Mary at thy feet—  And if no precious gums my hands bestow,  Let my tears drop like amber, while I go  In reach of thy divinest voice complete  In humanest affection—thus, in sooth  To lose the sense of losing! As a child,  Whose song-bird seeks the wood for evermore,  Is sung to in its stead by mother's mouth;  Till sinking on her breast, love-reconciled,  He sleeps the faster that he wept before.

Gladly would I next give myself to the exposition of several of the poems of her husband, Robert Browning, especially the Christmas Eve and Easter Day; in the first of which he sets forth in marvellous rhymes the necessity both for widest sympathy with the varied forms of Christianity, and for individual choice in regard to communion; in the latter, what it is to choose the world and lose the life. But this would take many pages, and would be inconsistent with the plan of my book.

When I have given two precious stanzas, most wise as well as most lyrical and lovely, from the poems of our honoured Charles Kingsley, I shall turn to the other of the classes into which the devout thinkers of the day have divided.

A FAREWELL

  My fairest child, I have no song to give you;    No lark could pipe to skies so dull and grey;  Yet, ere we part, one lesson I can leave you        For every day.  Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever;    Do noble things, not dream them, all day long;  And so make life, death, and that vast for-ever        One grand, sweet song.

Surely these last, who have not accepted tradition in the mass, who believe that we must, as our Lord demanded of the Jews, of our own selves judge what is right, because therein his spirit works with our spirit,—worship the Truth not less devotedly than they who rejoice in holy tyranny over their intellects.