England's Antiphon

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

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

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:—

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.

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

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

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.

II.

III.

IV.

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.