Thou too, hoar Mount! with thy sky-pointing peaks,
Oft from whose[168] 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To her was past, extinct, and out of date;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.
CHAPTER XXIII.
THE QUESTIONING FERVOUR.
And now I turn to the other class—that which, while the former has fled to tradition for refuge from doubt, sets its face towards the spiritual east, and in prayer and sorrow and hope looks for a dawn—the noble band of reverent doubters—as unlike those of the last century who scoffed, as those of the present who pass on the other side. They too would know; but they know enough already to know further, that it is from the hills and not from the mines their aid must come. They know that a perfect intellectual proof would leave them doubting all the same; that their high questions cannot be answered to the intellect alone, for their whole nature is the questioner; that the answers can only come as questioners and their questions grow towards them. Hence, growing hope, blossoming ever and anon into the white flower of confidence, is their answer as yet; their hope—the Beatific Vision—the happy-making sight, as Milton renders the word of the mystics.
It is strange how gentle a certain large class of the priesthood will be with those who, believing there is a God, find it hard to trust him, and how fierce with those who, unable, from the lack of harmony around and in them, to say they are sure there is a God, would yet, could they find him, trust him indeed. "Ah, but," answer such of the clergy and their followers, "you want a God of your own making." "Certainly," the doubters reply, "we do not want a God of your making: that would be to turn the universe into a hell, and you into its torturing demons. We want a God like that man whose name is so often on your lips, but whose spirit you understand so little—so like him that he shall be the bread of life to all our hunger—not that hunger only already satisfied in you, who take the limit of your present consciousness for that of the race, and say, 'This is all the world needs:' we know the bitterness of our own hearts, and your incapacity for intermeddling with its joy. We
have another mountain-range, from whence
Bursteth a sun unutterably bright;
nor for us only, but for you also, who will not have the truth except it come to you in a system authorized of man."
I have attributed a general utterance to these men, widely different from each other as I know they are.
Here is a voice from one of them, Arthur Hugh Clough, who died in 1861, well beloved. It follows upon two fine poems, called The Questioning Spirit, and Bethesda, in which is represented the condition of many of the finest minds of the present century. Let us receive it as spoken by one in the foremost ranks of these doubters, men reviled by their brethren who dare not doubt for fear of offending the God to whom they attribute their own jealousy. But God is assuredly pleased with those who will neither lie for him, quench their dim vision of himself, nor count that his mind which they would despise in a man of his making.
Across the sea, along the shore,
In numbers more and ever more,
From lonely hut and busy town,
The valley through, the mountain down,
What was it ye went out to see,
Ye silly folk of Galilee?
The reed that in the wind doth shake?
The weed that washes in the lake?
The reeds that waver, the weeds that float?—
young man preaching in a boat.
What was it ye went out to hear
By sea and land, from far and near?
A teacher? Rather seek the feet
Of those who sit in Moses' seat.
Go humbly seek, and bow to them,
Far off in great Jerusalem.
From them that in her courts ye saw,
Her perfect doctors of the law,
What is it came ye here to note?—
A young man preaching in a boat
A prophet! Boys and women weak!
Declare, or cease to rave:
Whence is it he hath learned to speak?
Say, who his doctrine gave?
A prophet? Prophet wherefore he
Of all in Israel tribes?—
He teacheth with authority,
And not as do the Scribes.
Here is another from one who will not be offended if I class him with this school—the finest of critics as one of the most finished of poets—Matthew Arnold. Only my reader must remember that of none of my poets am I free to choose that which is most characteristic: I have the scope of my volume to restrain me.
THE GOOD SHEPHERD WITH THE KID.
He saves the sheep; the goats he doth not save!
So rang Tertullian's sentence, on the side
Of that unpitying Phrygian sect which cried:
"Him can no fount of fresh forgiveness lave,
Who sins, once washed by the baptismal wave!"
So spake the fierce Tertullian. But she sighed,
The infant Church: of love she felt the tide
Stream on her from her Lord's yet recent grave.
And then she smiled, and in the Catacombs,
With eye suffused but heart inspired true,
On those walls subterranean, where she hid
Her head in ignominy, death, and tombs,
She her Good Shepherd's hasty image drew;
And on his shoulders, not a lamb, a kid.
Of these writers, Tennyson is the foremost: he has written the poem of the hoping doubters, the poem of our age, the grand minor organ-fugue of In Memoriam. It is the cry of the bereaved Psyche into the dark infinite after the vanished Love. His friend is nowhere in his sight, and God is silent. Death, God's final compulsion to prayer, in its dread, its gloom, its utter stillness, its apparent nothingness, urges the cry. Meanings over the dead are mingled with profoundest questionings of philosophy, the signs of nature, and the story of Jesus, while now and then the star of the morning, bright Phosphor, flashes a few rays through the shifting cloudy dark. And if the sun has not arisen on the close of the book, yet the Aurora of the coming dawn gives light enough to make the onward journey possible and hopeful: who dares say that he walks in the full light? that the counsels of God are to him not a matter of faith, but of vision?
Bewildered in the perplexities of nature's enigmas, and driven by an awful pain of need, Tennyson betakes himself to the God of nature, thus:
LIV.
The wish, that of the living whole
No life may fail beyond the grave;
Derives it not from what we have
The likest God within the soul?
Are God and Nature then at strife,
That Nature lends such evil dreams,
So careful of the type she seems,
So careless of the single life;
That I, considering everywhere
Her secret meaning in her deeds,
And finding that of fifty seeds
She often brings but one to bear;
I falter where I firmly trod,
And falling with my weight of cares
Upon the great world's altar-stairs
That slope thro' darkness up to God;
I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope,
And gather dust and chaff, and call
To what I feel is Lord of all,
And faintly trust the larger hope.
[Illustration:
"… he was dead, and there he sits, And he that brought him back is there."]
Once more, this is how he uses the gospel-tale: Mary has returned home from the sepulchre, with Lazarus so late its prey, and her sister and Jesus:—
XXXII.
Her eyes are homes of silent prayer,
Nor other thought her mind admits
But, he was dead, and there he sits,
And he that brought him back is there.
Then one deep love doth supersede
All other, when her ardent gaze
Roves from the living brother's face,
And rests upon the Life indeed.
All subtle thought, all curious fears,
Borne down by gladness so complete,
She bows, she bathes the Saviour's feet
With costly spikenard and with tears.
Thrice blest whose lives are faithful prayers,
Whose loves in higher love endure;
What souls possess themselves so pure,
Or is there blessedness like theirs?
* * * * *
I have thus traced—how slightly!—the course of the religious poetry of England, from simple song, lovingly regardful of sacred story and legend, through the chant of philosophy, to the full-toned lyric of adoration. I have shown how the stream sinks in the sands of an evil taste generated by the worship of power and knowledge, and that a new growth of the love of nature—beauty counteracting not contradicting science—has led it by a fair channel back to the simplicities of faith in some, and to a holy questioning in others; the one class having for its faith, the other for its hope, that the heart of the Father is a heart like ours, a heart that will receive into its noon the song that ascends from the twilighted hearts of his children.
Gladly would I have prayed for the voices of many more of the singers of our country's psalms. Especially do I regret the arrival of the hour, because of the voices of living men and women. But the time is over and gone. The twilight has already embrowned the gray glooms of the cathedral arches, and is driving us forth to part at the door.
But the singers will yet sing on to him that hath ears to hear. When he returns to seek them, the shadowy door will open to his touch, the long-drawn aisles receding will guide his eye to the carven choir, and there they still stand, the sweet singers, content to repeat ancient psalm and new song to the prayer of the humblest whose heart would join in England's Antiphon.
THE END.
[1] The rhymes of the first and second and of the fourth and fifth lines throughout the stanzas, are all, I think, what the French call feminine rhymes, as in the words "sleeping," "weeping." This I think it better not to attempt retaining, because the final unaccented syllable is generally one of those e's which, having first become mute, have since been dropped from our spelling altogether.
[2] For the grammatical interpretation of this line, I am indebted to Mr. Richard Morris. Shall is here used, as it often is, in the sense of must, and rede is a noun; the paraphrase of the whole being, "Son, what must be to me for counsel?" "What counsel must I follow?"
[3] "Do not blame me, it is my nature."
[4] Mon is used for man or woman: human being. It is so used in Lancashire still: they say mon to a woman.
[5] "They weep quietly and becomingly." I think there must be in this word something of the sense of gently,-uncomplainingly.
[6] "And are shrunken (clung with fear) like the clay." So here is the same as as. For this interpretation I am indebted to Mr. Morris.
[7] "It is no wonder though it pleases me very ill."
[8] I think the poet, wisely anxious to keep his last line just what it is, was perplexed for a rhyme, and fell on the odd device of saying, for "both day and night," "both day and the other."
[9] "All as if it were not never, I wis."
[10] "So that many men say—True it is, all goeth but God's will."
[11] I conjecture "All that grain (me) groweth green."
[12] Not is a contraction for ne wat, know not. "For I know not whither I must go, nor how long here I dwell." I think y is omitted by mistake before duelle.
[13] This is very poor compared with the original.
[14] I owe almost all my information on the history of these plays to Mr. Collier's well-known work on English Dramatic Poetry.
[15] Able to suffer, deserving, subject to, obnoxious to, liable to death and vengeance.
[16] The word harry is still used in Scotland, but only in regard to a bird's nest.
[17] Do-well, Do-better, and Do-best.
[18] Complexion.
[19] Ruddiness—complexion.
[20] Twig.
[21] Life (?).—I think she should be he.
[22] Field.
[23] "Carry you beyond this region."
[24] For the knowledge of this poem I am indebted to the Early English Text Society, now printing so many valuable manuscripts.
[25] The for here is only an intensive.
[26] Pref is proof. Put in pref seems to stand for something more than being tested. Might it not mean proved to be a pearl of price?
[27] A word acknowledged to be obscure. Mr. Morris suggests on the left hand, as unbelieved.
[28] "Except that which his sole wit may judge."
[29] "Be equal to thy possessions:" "fit thy desires to thy means."
[30] "Ambition has uncertainty." We use the word ticklish still.
[31] "Is mingled everywhere."
[32] To relish, to like. "Desire no more than is fitting for thee."
[33] For.
[34] "Let thy spiritual and not thine animal nature guide thee."
[35] "And I dare not falsely judge the reverse."
[36] A poem so like this that it may have been written immediately after reading it, is attributed to Robert Henryson, the Scotch poet. It has the same refrain to every verse as Lydgate's.
[37] "Mourning for mishaps that I had caught made me almost mad."
[38] "Led me all one:" "brought me back to peace, unity, harmony." (?)
[39] "That I read on (it)."
[40] Of in the original, as in the title.
[41] Does this mean by contemplation on it?
[42] "I paid good attention to it."
[43] "Greeted thee"—in the very affliction.
[44] "For Christ's love let us do the same."
[45] "Whatever grief or woe enslaves thee." But thrall is a blunder, for the word ought to have rhymed with make.
[46] "The precious leader that shall judge us."
[47] "When thou art in sorry plight, think of this."
[48] "And death, beyond renewal, lay hold upon their life."
[49] Sending, message: "whatever varying decree God sends thee."
[50] "Receives his message;" "accepts his will."
[51] Recently published by the Early English Text Society. S.L. IV.
[52] "Child born of a bright lady." Bird, berd, brid, burd, means lady originally: thence comes our bride.
[53] In Chalmers' English Poets, from which I quote, it is selly-worme; but I think this must be a mistake. Silly would here mean weak.
[54] The first poem he wrote, a very fine one, The Shepheard's Calender, is so full of old and provincial words, that the educated people of his own time required a glossary to assist them in the reading of it.
[55] Eyas is a young hawk, whose wings are not fully fledged.
[56] "What less than that is fitting?"
[57] For, even in Collier's edition, but certainly a blunder.
[58] Was, in the editions; clearly wrong.
[59] "Of the same mould and hand as we."
[60] There was no contempt in the use of this word then.
[61] Simple-hearted, therefore blessed; like the German selig.
[62] A shell plentiful on the coast of Palestine, and worn by pilgrims to show that they had visited that country.
[63] Evil was pronounced almost as a monosyllable, and was at last contracted to ill.
[64] "Come to find a place." The transitive verb stow means to put in a place: here it is used intransitively.
[65] The list of servants then kept in large houses, the number of such being far greater than it is now.
[66] There has been some blundering in the transcription of the last two lines of this stanza. In the former of the two I have substituted doth for dost, evidently wrong. In the latter, the word cradle is doubtful. I suggest cradled, but am not satisfied with it. The meaning is, however, plain enough.
[67] "The very blessing the soul needed."
[68] An old English game, still in use in Scotland and America, but vanishing before cricket.
[69] Silly means innocent, and therefore blessed; ignorant of evil, and in so far helpless. It is easy to see how affection came to apply it to idiots. It is applied to the ox and ass in the next stanza, and is often an epithet of shepherds.
[70] See Poems by Sir Henry Wotton and others. Edited by the Rev. John Hannah.
[71] "Know thyself."
[72] "And I have grown their map."
[73] The guilt of Adam's first sin, supposed by the theologians of Dr. Donne's time to be imputed to Adam's descendants.
[74] The past tense: ran.
[75] Their door to enter into sin—by his example.
[76] He was sent by James I. to assist an embassy to the Elector Palatine, who had married his daughter Elizabeth.
[77] He had lately lost his wife, for whom he had a rare love.
[78] "If they know us not by intuition, but by judging from circumstances and signs."
[79] "With most willingness."
[80] "Art proud."
[81] A strange use of the word; but it evidently means recovered, and has some analogy with the French repasser.
[82] To understood: to sweeten.
[83] He plays upon the astrological terms, houses and schemes. The astrologers divided the heavens into twelve houses; and the diagrams by which they represented the relative positions of the heavenly bodies, they called schemes.
[84] The tree of knowledge.
[85] Dyce, following Seward, substitutes curse.
[86] A glimmer of that Platonism of which, happily, we have so much more in the seventeenth century.
[87] Should this be "in fees;" that is, in acknowledgment of his feudal sovereignty?
[88] Warm is here elongated, almost treated as a dissyllable.
[89] "He ought not to be forsaken: whoever weighs the matter rightly, will come to this conclusion."
[90] The Eridan is the Po.—As regards classical allusions in connexion with sacred things, I would remind my reader of the great reverence our ancestors had for the classics, from the influence they had had in reviving the literature of the country.—I need hardly remind him of the commonly-received fancy that the swan does sing once—just as his death draws nigh. Does this come from the legend of Cycnus changed into a swan while lamenting the death of his friend Phaeton? or was that legend founded on the yet older fancy? The glorious bird looks as if he ought to sing.
[91] The poet refers to the singing of the hymn before our Lord went to the garden by the brook Cedron.
[92] The construction is obscure just from the insertion of the to before breathe, where it ought not to be after the verb hear. The poet does not mean that he delights to hear that voice more than to breathe gentle airs, but more than to hear gentle airs (to) breathe. To hear, understood, governs all the infinitives that follow; among the rest, the winds (to) chide.
[93] Rut is used for the sound of the tide in Cheshire. (See Halliwell's Dictionary.) Does rutty mean roaring? or does it describe the deep, rugged shores of the Jordan?
[94] A monosyllable, contracted afterwards into bloom.
[95] Willows.
[96] Groom originally means just a man. It was a word much used when pastoral poetry was the fashion. Spenser has herd-grooms in his Shepherd's Calendar. This last is what it means here: shepherds.
[97] Obtain, save.
[98] Equivalent to "What are those hands of yours for?"
[99] He was but thirty-nine when he died.
[100] To rhyme with pray in the second line.
[101] Bunch of flowers. He was thinking of Aaron's rod, perhaps.
[102] To correspond to that of Christ.
[103] Again a touch of holy humour: to match his Master's predestination, he will contrive something three years beforehand, with an if.
[104] The here in the preceding line means his book; hence the thy book is antithetical.
[105] Concent is a singing together, or harmoniously.
[106] Music depends all on proportions.
[107] The diapason is the octave. Therefore "all notes true." See note 2, p. 205.
[108] An intransitive verb: he was wont.
[109] The birds called halcyons were said to build their nests on the water, and, while they were brooding, to keep it calm.
[110] The morning star.
[111] The God of shepherds especially, but the God of all nature—the All in all, for Pan means the All.
[112] Milton here uses the old Ptolemaic theory of a succession of solid crystal concentric spheres, in which the heavenly bodies were fixed, and which revolving carried these with them. The lowest or innermost of these spheres was that of the moon. "The hollow round of Cynthia's seat" is, therefore, this sphere in which the moon sits.
[113] That cannot be expressed or described.
[114] By hinges he means the axis of the earth, on which it turns as on a hinge. The origin of hinge is hang. It is what anything hangs on.
[115] This is an apostrophe to the nine spheres (see former note), which were believed by the ancients to send forth in their revolutions a grand harmony, too loud for mortals to hear. But no music of the lower region can make up full harmony without the bass of heaven's organ. The music of the spheres was to Milton the embodiment of the theory of the universe. He uses the symbol often.
[116] Consort is the right word scientifically. It means the fitting together of sounds according to their nature. Concert, however, is not wrong. It is even more poetic than consort, for it means a striving together, which is the idea of all peace: the strife is together, and not of one against the other. All harmony is an ordered, a divine strife. In the contest of music, every tone restrains its foot and bows its head to the rest in holy dance.
[117] Symphony is here used for chorus, and quite correctly; for symphony is a voicing together. To this symphony of the angels the spheres and the heavenly organ are the accompaniment.
[118] Die of the music.
[119] Not merely swings, but lashes about.
[120] Full of folds or coils.
[121] The legend concerning this cessation of the oracles associates it with the Crucifixion. Milton in The Nativity represents it as the consequence of the very presence of the infant Saviour. War and lying are banished together.
[122] The genius is the local god, the god of the place as a place.
[123] The Lars were the protecting spirits of the ancestors of the family; the Lemures were evil spirits, spectres, or bad ghosts. But the notions were somewhat indefinite.
[124] Flamen was the word used for priest when the Romans spoke of the priest of any particular divinity. Hence the peculiar power in the last line of the stanza.
[125] Jupiter Ammon, worshipped in Libya, in the north of Africa, under the form of a goat. "He draws in his horn."
[126] The Syrian Adonis.
[127] Frightful, horrible, as, a grisly bear.
[128] Isis, Orus, Anubis, and Osiris, all Egyptian divinities—the last worshipped in the form of a bull.
[129] No rain falls in Egypt.
[130] Last-born: the star in the east.
[131] Bright-armoured.
[132] Ready for what service may arise.
[133] The with we should now omit, for when we use it we mean the opposite of what is meant here.
[134] It is the light of the soul going out from the eyes, as certainly as the light of the world coming in at the eyes that makes things seen.
[135] The action by which a body attacked collects force by opposition.
[136] Cut roughly through.
[137] Intransitively used. They touch each other.
[138] Self-desire, which is death's pit, &c.
[139] Which understood.
[140] How unpleasant conceit can become. The joy of seeing the Saviour was stolen because they gained it in the absence of the sun!
[141] A trisyllable.
[142] His garland.
[143] The "sunny seed" in their hearts.
[144] From tine or tind, to set on fire. Hence tinder.
[145] The body of Jesus.
[146] Mark i. 35; Luke xxi. 37. The word time must be associated both with progress and prayer—his walking-time and prayer-time.
[147] This is an allusion to the sphere-music: the great heavens is a clock whose hours are those when Jesus retires to his Father; and to these hours the sphere-music gives the chime.
[148] He continues his poetic synonyms for the night.
[149] "Behold I stand at the door and knock."
[150] A monosyllable.
[151] Often used for chambers.
[152] "The creation looks for the light, thy shadow?" Or, "The light looks for thy shadow, the sun"?
[153] Perforce: of necessity.
[154] He does not mean his fellows, but his bodily nature.
[155] Savourest?
[156] The first I ever saw of its hymns was on a broad-sheet of Christmas Carols, with coloured pictures, printed in Seven Dials.
[157] They passed through twenty editions, not to mention one lately published (by Daniel Sedgwick, of 81, Sun-street, Bishopsgate, a man who, concerning hymns and their writers, knows more than any other man I have met), from which, carefully edited, I have gathered all my information, although I had known the book itself for many years.
[158] The animal spirits of the old physiologists.
[159] In the following five lines I have adopted the reading of the first edition, which, although a little florid, I prefer to the scanty two lines of the later.
[160] False in feeling, nor like God at all, although a ready pagan representation of him. There is much of the pagan left in many Christians—poets too.
[161] Insisting—persistent.
[162] Great cloudy ridges, one rising above the other, like a grand stair up to the heavens. See Wordsworth's note.
[163] The mountain.
[164] These two lines are just the symbol for the life of their author.
[165] From the rose-light on the snow of its peak.
[166] They all flow from under the glaciers, fed by their constant melting.
[167] Turning for contrast to the glaciers, which he apostrophizes in the next line.
[168] Antecedent, peaks.
[Transcriber's Note: In this electronic edition, the footnotes have been
numbered and relocated to the end of the work. In chapter 14, the word
"Iris", which appears in our print copy, seems to be a misprint for
"Isis" and was corrected as such.]