II
 
 Ex Ltbn's 
 C. K. OGDEN
 
 POETS IN THE PULPIT 
 
 BY THE 
 
 REV. H. R. HAWEIS, M.A. 
 
 (INCUMBENT OF ST. JAMES, MARYLEBONE) 
 
 AUTHOR OF "MUSIC AND MORALS," "THOUGHTS FOR THE TIMES," ".SPEECH IN 
 SEASON," "CURRENT COIN," "ARROWS IN THE AIR" 
 
 Ah'D CHEAPER EDITION 
 
 LONDON 
 SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON, SEARLE, & RIVINGTON 
 
 Limited 
 
 $\. gtanetan's *jousc 
 FETTER LANE, FLEET STREET, E.G. 
 
 1889 
 [All rights rtscrvf/f]
 
 LONDON : 
 
 PRINTED BY GILBXBT AND RIVINGTOW, LD., 
 ST. JOHN'S HOUSE, CLEBKENWELL ROAD, B.C.
 
 TO 
 
 THE RIGHT REV. JAMES ERASER, D.D., 
 
 LORD BISHOP OF MANCHESTER, 
 
 THESE DISCOURSES ARE INSCRIBED 
 
 WITH FEELINGS OF ADMIRATION AND RESPECT 
 
 BY 
 
 HUGH REGINALD HAWEIS, M.A., 
 
 INCUMBENT OF ST. JAMES, MARYLEBONE. 
 
 20153G9
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 HESE addresses were delivered on a 
 succession of Sundays in the Church 
 of St. James, Marylebone. 
 
 They took the place of sermons in a series 
 of services entitled " Sunday Evenings for the 
 People." 
 
 They were reported in shorthand, revised by 
 the author, and are now issued in accordance 
 with a very general request. 
 
 May the sphere of the Church of England 
 Pulpit be annually enlarged, and may her 
 Preachers learn to press all that is good into 
 the service of God. 
 
 H. R. HAWEIS, M.A.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 PAOB 
 
 I. LONGFELLOW. SELECTED POEMS i 
 
 II. TENNYSON. ST. SIMEON STYLITES, AND ST. AGNES 33 
 
 III. TENNYSON. THE VISION OF SIN, AND THE PALACE 
 
 OF ART 65 
 
 IV. TENNYSON. IN MEMORIAM 87 
 
 V. ROBERT BROWNING. NEW YEAR'S EVE . . .117 
 
 VI. KEBLE. THE " HIGH CHURCH " AND THE CHRISTIAN 
 
 YEAR 145 
 
 VII. GEORGE HERBERT. SELECTED POEMS . . .195 
 
 VIII. WORDSWORTH. DIVERSE POEMS .... 241 
 
 IX. THE GOLDEN TREASURY. GLEANINGS 261
 
 I. 
 JUngfeitoto. 
 
 SELECTED POEMS. 
 
 B
 
 I. 
 
 SELECTED POEMS. 
 
 |T is sometimes thought that an address 
 from the pulpit cannot be good unless 
 it starts with a text. But a right grasp 
 of the Bible should teach us how to find "sermons 
 in stones, and good in everything." 
 
 Nothing should be uttered in the pulpit incon- 
 sistent with the spirit of Religion, but the Bible 
 need not be incessantly quoted. Let us take a 
 hint from Christ and His Apostles ; how did they 
 preach ? No doubt they used the Old Testament 
 (the New not being in existence) as something 
 familiar, through which to teach their hearers 
 what was not familiar ; it was the schoolmaster 
 leading men to Christ. But the real use of the Old 
 Testament with Christ was, to make men think 
 and feel for themselves ; and this indeed is the only 
 kind of teaching worth much in any age. Such 
 teaching is often indirect, but none the less im- 
 
 B 2
 
 4 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 pressive. If you take the Bible only as a text- 
 book, you will be in danger of missing its higher 
 power as a spiritual fountain. 
 
 Our Lord's use of texts was peculiar ; He usually 
 took them to illustrate the differences between His 
 own teaching and that of the Old Testament, as in 
 the Sermon on the Mount. It was thus He taught : 
 Moses said one thing, I say another. The 
 new was in one sense opposed to the old, yet 
 not destructive of it ; it fulfilled and absorbed it. 
 When St. Paul alluded to the Old Testament, it 
 was usually to draw Jews through their favourite 
 oracles to something better; but when he turned 
 from the little Jewish sects to the great outside 
 world, we cease to hear from his lips the Bible 
 texts, instead we have verses from the popular 
 poets and philosophers; as when, on Mars Hill at 
 Athens, he finds an altar to the unknown God, 
 and quotes the poet Aratus (B.C. 270), a native 
 of his own city of Tarsus, in the opening lines 
 of the Phenomena 
 
 Tov yap /cat yevos eayxeV, 
 
 " We are also of his offspring ;" showing that 
 even the Greek poets had taught that the human
 
 Longfellow. 5 
 
 race was in some mysterious way bound to the Ail 
 Father. In the Epistle to Titus, St. Paul alludes 
 to the glaring faults of the Cretan character, lash- 
 ing the vices of those dissipated islanders with the 
 words of an older poet, 
 
 Kp^res del ^reuorat, KO.KO. dqpia, yaorepcs dpyai, 
 
 which being translated is, " The Cretans were ever 
 liars, evil beasts, lazy gorbels." And if St. Paul 
 did not scruple to point his discourses from popular 
 poets, why should we ? 
 
 The poets are the men after all more than 
 statesmen, more than philosophers who have the 
 deepest hold over, and insight into, the thoughts and 
 feelings of their age. A great student of men once 
 said, " Let who will make the people's laws, let me 
 make the people's songs." 
 
 The poet and the prophet in old days meant 
 almost the same thing ; the poet was often the 
 true political ruler, as he even now is seldom 
 without direct or indirect political influence. 
 Isaiah was a statesman and popular leader; 
 David, sweet psalmist, was poet and prophet, 
 as well as king. Think of the vast political
 
 6 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 and social, as well as moral and spiritual influ- 
 ence wielded by Chaucer, Shakespeare, and 
 Milton, down to the present time. And when 
 you study the utterances of contemporary poets, 
 you are really mastering the springs of con- 
 temporary life, and, in so far as the poet himself 
 is religious, the central religious thoughts and 
 aspirations of the age. Byron, Wordsworth, 
 Shelley, Tennyson, Longfellow, Browning, Swin- 
 bourne, Keble these are the men who condense 
 the life of your age into words that breathe, and 
 thoughts that burn. They leave among them 
 not a stop untouched, not a chord that is dear 
 and sympathetic unsounded ; they cut and polish 
 for us, as one of them has so sweetly sung, those 
 " jewels five words long which on the stretched 
 forefinger of Time sparkle for ever." 
 
 Of all living poets (Tennyson not excepted), 
 Longfellow the American has made for himself the 
 widest social popularity. As Dr. Whewell, the 
 famous Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, 
 once said in my hearing, " The sweet and homely 
 melodies of Longfellow have touched a thousand 
 hearts that have been unmoved by the deeper and
 
 Longfellow. 7 
 
 sometimes abstruse harmonies of Tennyson." 
 But it is Longfellow's fresh, genuine, and tender 
 insight into the religious thoughts and feelings of 
 ordinary human beings, which has made him the 
 minister of hope and the stay of faith in this ar- 
 tificial and doubt-tossed age. 
 
 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is still living. 
 He is seventy-three years (1880) old, being born 
 in 1807, at Portland, Maine, U.S. He was edu- 
 cated at Bowdoin College, where he graduated 
 with honours in 1825. He became Professor of 
 Modern Languages there, and afterwards filled the 
 same post at Harvard College in 1835, and at 
 Cambridge, U.S. in 1836. He has been an exten- 
 sive traveller throughout Europe, and has trans- 
 lated poems from many different languages, and 
 touched with a master-hand the springs of national 
 life and religion in many lands. 
 
 In 1854 he resigned his professorship. In 1868 
 and 1869 he was with us in England. He went to 
 Oxford, and there they conferred on him the Hori. 
 D.C.L. degree. In 1874 he was nominated for 
 the Lord Rectorship of Glasgow University, and 
 was defeated on a contest, although not by a large 
 majority, by Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beacons-
 
 8 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 field ; and after that he returned to America, and is 
 now living there in his old age, having gone through 
 much suffering, endured many losses, and had a 
 very wide experience of life, and love, and sorrow. 
 Truly he has learned his lesson deeply and well ; 
 he has received the good seed into an honest heart, 
 from whence has sprung up for these latter days 
 a good and bountiful harvest. And this thought, 
 that he sowed not for himself alone, but for us 
 that his work was incomplete without our respon- 
 sive love and sympathy, seems to have been ever 
 present with him ; it has endeared Longfellow to a 
 multitude on either side of the Atlantic ; his sym- 
 pathy reaches across the wide ocean, his voice is 
 heard by those who love it, his teaching felt by 
 those who need it. This power of ministration, 
 this gentle presence of a wise, and genial, and 
 gifted friend simple, unassuming, yet irresistibly 
 winning has been beautifully illustrated by him in 
 the lovely Dedication to the " Sea-side and Fire- 
 side Poems." 
 
 As one who, walking in the twilight gloom, 
 Hears round about him voices as it darkens ; 
 
 And seeing not the forms from which they come, 
 Pauses from time to time, and turns and hearkens ;
 
 Longfellow. 
 
 So, walking here in twilight, oh, my friends, 
 I hear your voices, softened by the distance, 
 
 And pause, and turn to listen, as each sends 
 
 His words of friendship, comfort, and assistance. 
 
 If any thought of mine, or sung or told, 
 
 Has ever given delight or consolation, 
 Ye have repaid me back a thousand-fold, 
 
 By every friendly sign or salutation. 
 
 Thanks for the sympathies that ye have shown ! 
 
 Thanks for each kindly word, each silent token, 
 That teaches me, when seeming most alone, 
 
 Friends are around us, though no word be spoken ; 
 
 Kind messages, that pass from land to land ; 
 
 Kind letters, that betray the heart's deep history, 
 In which we feel the pressure of a hand, 
 
 One touch of fire, and all the rest is mystery ! 
 
 The pleasant books, that silently among 
 
 Our household treasures take familiar places, 
 
 And .ire to us as if a living tongue 
 
 Spake from the printed leaves or pictured faces. 
 
 Perhaps on earth I never shall behold, 
 
 With eye of sense, your outward form and semblance ; 
 Therefore to me ye never will grow old, 
 
 But live for ever young in my remembrance. 
 
 Never grow old, nor change, nor pass away ! 
 
 Your gentle voices will flow on for ever, 
 When life grows bare, and tarnished with decay k 
 
 As through a lifeless landscape flows a river.
 
 io Poets in the Pzilpit, 
 
 Not chance of birth or place has made us friends, 
 Being oftentimes of different tongues and nations ; 
 
 But the endeavour for the self-same ends, 
 With the same hopes, and fears, and aspirations. 
 
 Therefore I hope to join your sea-side walk, 
 Saddened, and mostly silent, with emotion ; 
 
 Not interrupting with intrusive talk 
 
 The grand, majestic symphonies of ocean. 
 
 Therefore I hope, as no unwelcome guest, 
 
 At your warm fireside, when the lamps are lighted, 
 
 To have my place reserved among the rest, 
 Nor stand as one unsought and uninvited ! 
 
 Now to-night, let me try and gather up, as in a 
 brief though illustrated summary, some of the 
 noblest qualities of this poet's teaching, as I 
 dwell upon (I.) Longfellow's Natural Religion, 
 (II.) Longfellow's View of Death, (III.) Long- 
 fellow's Endeavour after the Higher Life, (IV.) 
 Longfellow's Philanthropy and Charity, (V.) 
 Longfellow's Faith and Hope. 
 
 I. LONGFELLOW'S NATURAL RELIGION. 
 There are immense gains in culture and civi- 
 lization, but we lose some things ; we lose the 
 sharp keen primitive taste " the great glad, 
 aboriginal instincts," as Emerson calls them the
 
 Longfellow. 1 1 
 
 healthy loves and hates aye, and the healthy 
 response of the soul to God. We miss the natural 
 influences which the sweet things of nature are 
 designed to bring home to our hearts. 
 
 We go with blunted perceptions and bleared 
 eyes to God's beautiful world ; we fail to hear the 
 secrets of the harmonious seasons, we sit down 
 with jaded appetites to the banquet of the bloom- 
 ing earth, and the light of heaven is dim. 
 
 But what constitutes the religious heart is just 
 this to be able to lift up our eyes and see, as 
 Henry Melville puts it, the whole world " burning 
 with Deity ! " 
 
 And what constitutes the eye of the poet is this, 
 that he sees what others cannot see. What made 
 Turner a great painter was, that he could catch 
 those effects of light and shade, of evanescent 
 colour, and register them so as to make others 
 see them and love them too. " I never saw such 
 effects in nature," said a buyer to Turner. " No," 
 replied the master; "but don't you wish you 
 could?" 
 
 It requires a special cultivated faculty before 
 you can see what the poets and artists can see 
 in outward nature. And it requires the tender
 
 1 2 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 heart and fresh susceptibilities before you can read 
 the great lessons of natural religion in the outward 
 and visible universe, and look up through nature 
 to nature's God. 
 
 It is because this faculty is so fresh, this habit 
 so confirmed in Longfellow, that I commend him 
 specially to this busy, hurrying, striving age, over 
 which his sweet temper has gained such a happy 
 control. Longfellow, in the happy solitudes of 
 Nature, cannot choose but feel and see God ; he 
 listens to the voices of the Woodlands, and the 
 Ocean, and the Night, as well as to those of the 
 Temple and the Fire-side. 
 
 Hear him, or rather over-hear him, in the 
 summer woods, 
 
 Into the blithe and breathing air, 
 
 Into the solemn wood 
 Solemn and silent everywhere, 
 Nature with folded hands seemed there 
 
 Like one in prayer I stood. 
 
 And wherever he turns divine whispers reach 
 his unspoiled heart, and his words flow forth with 
 the gentle grace and simplicity of a child's prayer : 
 
 Wondrous truths, and manifold as wondrous, 
 God has written in those stars above j
 
 Longfellow. 1 3 
 
 But not less in the bright flow'rets under us, 
 Stands the revelation of His love. 
 
 Bright and glorious is that revelation, 
 Written all over this great world of ours, 
 
 Making evident our own creation 
 
 In these stars of earth, these golden flowers. 
 
 And the poet, faithful and far-seeing, 
 Sees, alike in stars and flowers, a part 
 
 Of the self-same universal being 
 
 Which is throbbing in his brain and heart. 
 
 Does it not almost seem to lead up to the climax 
 of that more concisely inspired utterance of the 
 Apostle Paul, when he too is bidding men look 
 through creation to the Creator: "Because that 
 which may be known of God is manifest in us, for 
 God hath showed it unto us. For the invisible 
 things of Him from the creation of the world are 
 clearly seen, being understood by the things that 
 are made, even His eternal power and Godhead.'* 
 Romans ii. 20. 
 
 II. LONGFELLOW ON DEATH. If there is 
 one thing which paralyzes and depresses us in 
 the midst of contemplating beautiful things in the 
 outward world, it is the depressing effect of the 
 spectacle of Death, with its inseparable pain and
 
 1 4 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 suffering. Who shall lighten for us the burden of 
 death ? Who shall take from the grave its dark- 
 ness, and from death its bitterness ? Many a brave 
 and bright spirit has gone on its way rejoicing, 
 until it came upon the veiled figure and the 
 yawning abyss. It is especially on all these sad 
 and grim subjects that Longfellow is sweetly and 
 nobly inspired. The pain of separation the terror 
 of dissolution, vanishes beneath his ardent touch ; 
 and those who are naturally paralyzed and pros- 
 trated by the spectacle of humanity passing into 
 apparent darkness and oblivion, are suddenly lifted 
 up and comforted. Even that most dismal of all 
 symbols and reminders of mortality, a close city 
 churchyard, is suffused beneath his gaze with deli- 
 cate and poetic emotion. You may have noticed 
 some of our own city grave-yards. Many of them, 
 it is true, have now been turned into bright places 
 for springing flowers ; but others remain, do what 
 you will to them, dismal, and dreary, and lonely ; 
 and when we pass, the sight of these mouldering 
 stones behind the iron railings, and the green 
 rank grass, makes our hearts sink within us, as we 
 think of the decaying bodies which lie beneath. 
 Yet even these seem to acquire new pathos, and
 
 Longfellow. 15 
 
 derive a certain glory, from the brightness of the 
 poet's spirit, and his first thought is one of deep 
 rest : 
 
 All was ended now, and the hope, and the fear, and the 
 
 sorrow 
 All the aching of heart, the restless unsatisfied longing, 
 
 All the dull deep pain, and constant anguish of patience ! 
 ******* 
 
 In the heart of the city they lie, unknown and unnoticed. 
 Daily the tides of life go ebbing and flowing beside them ; 
 Thousands of throbbing hearts, where theirs are at rest for 
 
 ever; 
 
 Thousands of aching brains, where theirs no longer are busy ; 
 Thousands of toiling hands, where theirs have ceased from their 
 
 labours ; 
 Thousands of weary feet, where theirs have completed their 
 
 journey ! 
 
 And whether he touches on the passing away of 
 a little child in the first dawn of life, or a young 
 man or woman taken in the glowing bloom of youth, 
 or the more mature companion of our later years, 
 there is the same undefinable glow of hope and 
 aspiration, and the same recurrent feeling that they 
 are not dead, but gone before the very message 
 which every one who has lost a dear friend longs 
 to receive. Ah ! we often hear it from lips which 
 pronounce it apparently without feeling it, and are
 
 1 6 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 not able to convey to those who want to feel it, 
 the precious faith in the existence, perchance the 
 presence, of the dear, the forever-remembered dead! 
 Then are the words of the true and faithful poet 
 helpful. He never sounds the note of despair; 
 doubt never sweeps darkly across his soul. But 
 the spirit world itself becomes visible to him ; he is 
 looking out from the loneliness of his life with the 
 eyes of an inspired seer, and we sit and listen at 
 his feet whilst he pours forth, without constraint 
 or effort, such a flood of spiritual emotion that our 
 drooping souls are indeed lifted up with the hope 
 that is full of immortality. Hear him on the death 
 of little children : 
 
 There is a Reaper, whose name is Death, 
 
 And, with his sickle keen, 
 He reaps the bearded grain at a breath, 
 
 And the flowers that grow between. 
 
 " Shall I have nought that is fair ? " saith he ; 
 
 " Have nought but the bearded grain ? 
 " Though the breath of these flowers is sweet to me, 
 
 " I will^ive them all back again." 
 
 He gazed at the flowers with tearful eyes, 
 
 He kissed their drooping leaves. 
 It was for the Lord of Paradise 
 
 He bound them in his sheaves.
 
 Longfellow. 1 7 
 
 " My Lord has need of these flow'rets gay," 
 
 The Reaper said, and smiled ; 
 " Dear tokens of the earth are they, 
 
 Where He was once a child. 
 
 " They shall all bloom in fields of light, 
 
 Transplanted by my care ; 
 And saints upon their garments white 
 
 These sacred blossoms wear." 
 
 And the mother gave, in tears and pain, 
 
 The flowers she most did love ; 
 She knew she should find them all again 
 
 In the fields of light above. 
 
 Oh, not in cruelty, not in wrath, 
 
 The Reaper came that day ; 
 'Twas an angel visited the green earth, 
 
 And took the flowers away. 
 
 And equally sweet and searching is the note of 
 resignation sounded on the passing away of those 
 who are young and beautiful in the bloom of 
 years : 
 
 There is no flock, however watched and tended, 
 
 But one dead lamb is there ! 
 There is no fireside, howsoe'er defended, 
 
 But has one vacant chair ! 
 
 The air is full of farewells to the dying, 
 
 And mournings for the dead ; 
 The heart of Rachel, for her children crying, 
 not be comforted !
 
 i8 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 Let us be patient ! These severe afflictions 
 
 Not from the ground arise ; 
 But oftentimes celestial benedictions 
 
 Assume this dark disguise. 
 
 There is no death ! What seems so is transition ; 
 
 This life of mortal breath 
 Is but a suburb of the life elysian, 
 
 Whose portal we call Death. 
 
 She is not dead, the child of our affection, 
 
 But gone unto that school 
 Where she no longer needs our poor protection, 
 
 And Christ himself doth rule. 
 
 In that great cloister's stillness and seclusion, 
 
 By guardian angels led, 
 Safe from temptation, safe from sin's pollution, 
 
 She lives, whom we call dead. 
 
 Not as a child shall we again behold her ; 
 
 For when, with raptures wild, 
 In our embraces we again enfold her,. 
 
 She will not be a child ; 
 
 But a fair maiden, in her Father's mansion, 
 
 Clothed with celestial grace ; 
 And beautiful with all the soul's expansion, 
 
 Shall we behold her face. 
 
 And though at times, impetuous with emotion, 
 And anguish long suppressed,
 
 Longfellow. 19 
 
 The swelling heart heaves, moaning like the ocean 
 That cannot be at rest ; 
 
 We will be patient, and assuage the feeling 
 
 We may not wholly stay ; 
 By silence sanctifying, not concealing, 
 
 The grief that must have way. 
 
 Or again, when he deals with the more mature, 
 and far more irreparable losses : 
 
 They, the holy ones and weakly, 
 
 Who the cross of suffering bore, 
 Folded their pale hands so meekly, 
 
 Spake with us on earth no more '. 
 
 And with them the Being Beauteous, 
 
 Who unto my youth was given, 
 More than all things else to love me, 
 
 And is now a saint in heaven. 
 
 With a slow and noiseless footstep 
 
 Comes that messenger divine, 
 Takes the vacant chair beside me, 
 
 Lays her gentle hand in mine. 
 
 And she sits and gazes at me 
 
 With those deep and tender eyes, 
 Like the stars, so still and saint-like, 
 
 Looking downward from the skies. 
 
 Utter'd not, yet comprehended, 
 
 Is the spirit's noiseless prayer, 
 Soft rebukes, in blessings ended, 
 
 Breathing from her lips of air. 
 
 C 2
 
 2O Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 Oh, though oft depressed and lonely, 
 
 All my fears are laid aside, 
 If I but remember only 
 
 Such as these have lived and died. 
 
 Is not death changed ? is not the weight lifted ? 
 is not One felt to be very near us, bearing our sor- 
 row, and carrying our griefs ? 
 
 O holy trust ! O endless sense of rest ! 
 
 Like the beloved John, 
 To lay his head upon the Saviour's breast, 
 
 And thus to journey on ! 
 
 This grasp of things unseen this sense of the 
 ever present surroundings of the world of spirits 
 this abiding trust in the love which has passed 
 beyond the grave, and gate of death, does it not 
 seem to be yet another spiritual echo of the great 
 Apostle's words " death, where is thy sting ? 
 O grave, where is thy victory ?" 
 
 III. LONGFELLOW'S ENDEAVOUR AFTER THE 
 HIGHER LIFE. But perhaps, after all, what has 
 gained the firmest hold over the English mind are, 
 not the meditations on death, but the practical 
 grappling with the affairs of every-day life, the 
 trumpet calls to duty, the oft declared need 
 for patience, perseverance, and tireless endeavour.
 
 Longfellow. 2 1 
 
 There is a practical sense about Longfellow which 
 redeems him from every charge of sentimentality. 
 If you ever find him indulging in anything like 
 what we may call " sentiment," it is only to nerve 
 and inspire us with energy for manly action ; and 
 I should be unjust to the genius of the greatest 
 American poet if I did not here remind you of his 
 oft repeated " Psalm of Life." 
 
 Tell me not, in mournful numbers, 
 
 Life is but an empty dream ! 
 For the soul is dead that slumbers, 
 
 And things are not what they seem. 
 
 Life is real ! Life is earnest ! 
 
 And the grave is not its goal : 
 " Dust thou art, to dust returnest," 
 Was not spoken of the soul. 
 
 Not enjoyment, and not sorrow, 
 
 Is our destined end or way ; 
 But to act that each to-morrow 
 
 Finds us farther than to-day. 
 
 Art is long, and time is fleeting, 
 
 And our hearts, though stout and brave, 
 
 Still, like muffled drums, are beating 
 Funeral marches to the grave. 
 
 In the world's broad field of battle, 
 In the bivouac life,
 
 2 2 Poets in the Pzdpit. 
 
 Be not like dumb, driven cattle ! 
 Be a hero in the strife ! 
 
 Trust no Future, howe'er pleasant ! 
 
 Let the dead Past bury its dead ! 
 Act, act in the living Present ! 
 
 Heart within, and God o'erhead ! 
 
 Lives of great men all remind us 
 We can make our lives sublime, 
 
 And departing, leave behind us 
 Footprints on the sands of time : 
 
 Footprints, that perhaps another, 
 
 Sailing o'er life's solemn main, 
 A forlorn and shipwrecked brother. 
 
 Seeing, shall take heart again. 
 
 Let us, then, be up and doing, 
 
 With a heart for any fate ; 
 Still achieving, still pursuing, 
 
 Learn to labour and to wait. 
 
 And in the matter of earnest moral activity 
 there is another poem, called the " Ladder of St. 
 Augustine," much less known, but also sounding a 
 practical note, the opening lines of which are in- 
 teresting because they remind us of Tennyson's 
 lines referring to the same quotation from St. 
 Augustine. 
 
 I hold it truth, with him who sings 
 To one clear harp in divers tones,
 
 L ong fellow. 2 3 
 
 That men may rise on stepping-stones 
 Of their dead selves to higher things. 
 
 Many persons on reading the " In Memoriam," 
 have inquired who it is that is referred to. Long- 
 fellow informs us : 
 
 Saint Augustine ! well hast thou said 
 
 That of our vices we can frame 
 A ladder, if we will but tread 
 
 Beneath our feet each deed of shame ! 
 
 All common things each day's even's 
 That with the hour begin and end, 
 
 Our pleasures and our discontents, 
 Are rounds by which we may ascend. 
 
 The low desire the base design 
 That makes another's virtues less, 
 
 The revel of the giddy wine, 
 And all occasions of excess ; 
 
 The longing for ignoble things, 
 
 The strife for triumph more than truth, 
 
 The hardening of the heart, that brings 
 Irreverence for the dreams of youth ; 
 
 All thoughts of ill all evil deeds 
 
 That have their root in thoughts of ill, 
 
 Whatever hinders or impedes 
 The action of the nobler will, 
 
 All these must first be trampled down 
 Beneath our feet, if we would gain,
 
 24 Poets in the Ptilpit. 
 
 In the bright field of Fair Renown, 
 The right of eminent domain ! 
 
 The heights by great men reached nnd kept, 
 Were not attained by sudden flight ; 
 
 But they, while their companions slept, 
 Were toiling upward in the night. 
 
 Standing on what too long we bore, 
 
 With shoulders bent and downcast eyes, 
 
 We may discern, unseen before, 
 A path to higher destinies. 
 
 Nor deem the irrevocable past 
 
 As wholly wasted, wholly vain, 
 If, rising on its wrecks, at last 
 
 To something nobler we attain. 
 
 So there is practical, wise, and solid counsel for 
 us here, although perhaps in the " Psalm of Life" 
 Longfellow is sweetest and most powerful as, 
 indeed, there he is most admirably concise. 
 
 IV. LONGFELLOW'S PHILANTHROPY AND 
 CHARITY. Yet the strictly philanthropic and 
 charitable side of the poet remains ; and when he 
 calls us to remember the sufferings he has so 
 deeply felt himself, and bids us turn away from our 
 own hours of selfishness or idle enjoyment, there
 
 Longfellow. 25 
 
 seems to be a lesson for us, especially in the 
 present day, which is full of so much selfishness, 
 pleasure seeking, money making, and money 
 spending, without a care by those who have for 
 those who want, so that if a man struggles a little 
 to the front himself, he heeds not what becomes 
 of his brother who toils when, if you have enough 
 for yourselves you cease to feel for the sufferings 
 of others and, surrounded by comforts, you care 
 not who " goes bare, goes bare." 
 
 Friends, whilst at this bitter Christmas season * 
 your houses are lighted up with feasting, and 
 revelry and the songs of rejoicing are ringing 
 through your rooms a cry of distress comes up, 
 which you cannot well drown, and which you 
 should never forget. 
 
 You cannot take up a newspaper without read- 
 ing of fearful distress in the north of England, 
 where trade is paralyzed to such an extent that 
 hundreds and thousands cannot get the necessaries 
 of life. It is not only the ordinary workman, 
 but the small trader, and the small dealer with 
 whom he deals the retail dealer seem at last 
 
 * The winter of 1878 was one of unusual severity, coinci- 
 dent with exceptional commercial depression.
 
 26 Poets in the Piilpit. 
 
 to be suffering. And this sad cry, which has 
 begun too early in the winter, is likely to go on 
 increasing until the spring. And although the 
 present distress may be exceptional remember, 
 the poor ye have always with you there is never 
 a dearth of famine, or pain, or poverty ; and you 
 have no right to be comfortable in your warm 
 homes, unless you have done what you can for 
 the homeless or to sit at your Christmas feasts, 
 unless you have tried to feed the hungry or to 
 rejoice, unless you have helped to comfort the 
 afflicted. 
 
 The poet shall here take his place in the 
 pulpit, and preach you this short but powerful 
 
 sermon : 
 
 I have a vague remembrance 
 
 Of a story that is told, 
 In some ancient Spanish legend, 
 
 Or chronicle of old. 
 
 It was when brave King Sanchez, 
 
 Was before Zamora slain, 
 And his great besieging army 
 
 Lay encamped upon the plain. 
 
 Don Diego de Ordonez 
 
 Sallied forth in front of all, 
 And shouted loud his challenge 
 
 To the warders on the wall.
 
 Longfellow. 27 
 
 All the people of Zamora, 
 
 Both born and the unborn, 
 As traitors did he challenge, 
 
 With taunting words of scorn : 
 
 The living, in their houses ; 
 
 And in their graves, the dead ; 
 And the waters of their rivers, 
 
 And their wine, and oil, and bread ! 
 
 There is a greater army, 
 
 That besets us round with strife, 
 A starving, numberless army, 
 
 At all the gates of life. 
 
 The poverty-stricken millions, 
 
 Who challenge our wine and bread, 
 And impeach us all as traitors, 
 
 Both the living and the dead. 
 
 And whenever I sit at the banquet, 
 
 Where the feast and song are high, 
 Amid the mirth and the music 
 
 I can hear that fearful cry. 
 
 And hollow and haggard faces 
 
 Look into the lighted hall, 
 And wasted hands are extended 
 
 To catch the crumbs that fall 
 
 For within there is light and plenty, 
 
 And odours fill the air ; 
 But without there is cold and darkness, 
 
 And hunger and despair.
 
 28 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 And there in the camp of famine, 
 
 In wind, and cold, and rain, 
 Christ, the great Lord of the army, 
 
 Lies dead upon the plain ! 
 
 V. LONGFELLOW'S FAITH AND HOPE. So 
 with thoughts like these we come to our last 
 poem of "The Christmas Bells." They are about 
 to sound a very sad peal to some of us, with much 
 of mournful irony, when we think how far we are 
 from that peace on earth and good will towards 
 men of which they are meant to remind us. And 
 some perhaps are inclined to take a pessimist view 
 of life, as they recall the bright and beneficent 
 doctrines of Christianity, and perceive how little 
 effect they have in allaying, not only the distress 
 and sorrow, but the violence and malice of the 
 world about us. And others ask, where is God ? 
 Why does He not show His arm ? Why does He 
 not disperse want, and hunger, and sin ? Why does 
 He not put a stop to war? If people are 
 Christians, and the kingdoms of this world are 
 becoming the kingdoms of our God and of His 
 Christ, why does not Christianity triumph ? why 
 do not men settle disputes by arbitration ? why 
 do nations rise one against another ? why are
 
 Longfellow. 29 
 
 the resources of industry and science lavished 
 on fearful and diabolical engines, to enable men to 
 murder those who never did them any harm, and 
 against whom they have no unfriendly feeling, but 
 who are hurled against each other in masses, 
 both armies perhaps professing the same Chris- 
 tianity as was the case in the great war between 
 North and South America, or between France 
 and Prussia, or between England, Italy, France, 
 and Russia, in the Crimea Christian people, 
 belonging maybe to different churches, but still 
 Christian people ? And why are thousands of 
 homes made miserable, by loss, and want, and 
 despair, whilst Christmas bells are ringing out 
 " Peace on earth and good will towards men " ? 
 Ah ! you have sometimes felt inclined to despair 
 of humanity. But despair is not the note of 
 the spiritual life ; the victory lies not with the 
 seen and temporal, but with the things unseen 
 and eternal ; and you are pessimists in spite of 
 yourselves. You who have ceased to believe in the 
 progress of right and the victory of good, may be 
 recalled to a healthier and nobler view by the indo- 
 mitable hopefulness and deep trust to be found in 
 the utterances of Longfellow, and, I significantly
 
 3O Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 add, Tennyson. So the two great characteristic poets 
 of the Old and New Worlds, amid our infidelities, 
 our pessimist views of life, our failures, and our 
 sins, still hold high the torch of redemptive good- 
 still bear aloft the soiled and tattered banner of 
 our heavenly King still proclaim that all is well, 
 as those that hear the " deeper voice beyond the 
 storm." And so I am not ashamed to sound the 
 same note at this festival of Christmas, and to 
 keep before a world darkened with malice and 
 stained with bloodshed the immortal refrain of the 
 Christmas Bells. 
 
 I heard the bells on Christmas-day 
 Their old familiar carols play, 
 
 And wild and sweet 
 
 The words repeat 
 Of peace on earth, good will to men ! 
 
 And thought how, as the day had come, 
 The belfries of all Christendom 
 
 Had rolled along 
 
 The unbroken song 
 Of peace on earth, good will to men ! 
 
 Till, ringing, singing on its way, 
 
 The world revolved from night to-day, 
 
 A voice, a chime, 
 
 A chant sublime, 
 Of peace on earth, good will to men !
 
 Longfellow. 3 1 
 
 Then from each black, accursed mouth 
 The canon thundered, in the South, 
 
 And with the sound 
 
 The carols drowned 
 Of peace on earth, good will to men ! 
 
 It was as if an earthquake rent 
 The hearthstones of a continent, 
 
 And made forlorn 
 
 The households born 
 Of peace on earth, good will to men ! 
 
 And in despair I bowed my head : 
 " There is no peace on earth," I said ; 
 
 " For hate is strong, 
 
 And mocks the song 
 Of peace on earth, good will to men ! " 
 
 Then pealed the bells more loud and deep : 
 " God is not dead, nor doth He sleep ! 
 
 The wrong shall fail, 
 
 The right prevail, 
 With peace on earth, good will to men ! 
 
 This is the Resurgam of hope ; I leave it with 
 you to-night. In it Longfellow conducts us to 
 the very threshold of the New Year, with the vigour 
 of inexhaustible life. 
 
 Take home to your hearts the warmth of his 
 sweet natural religion; take home the peaceful and 
 quiet contemplation of death and the grave, and 
 the bright glimpses of the shining fields beyond ;
 
 32 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 take home his manly courage, his earnest endeavour 
 after all that is noble, and sweet, and upward ; take 
 home his unstained aspirations, his sense and belief 
 in the triumph of good. He sends you forth into 
 the New Year, but he bids you tread its threshold 
 with a firm and light step ; before you lies an 
 unknown, untravelled world. 
 
 Into what land of harvests, what plantations, 
 Bright with Autumnal foliage and the glow 
 
 Of sunsets burning low ; 
 
 Beneath what midnight skies, whose constellations 
 Light up the spacious avenues between 
 
 This world and the unseen ; 
 
 Amid what friendly greetings and caresses, 
 What households, though hot alien, yet not mine, 
 
 What bowers of rest divine ; 
 To what temptations in lone wildernesses, 
 What famine of the heart, what pain and lo^, 
 
 The bearing of what cross, 
 
 I do not know ; nor will I vainly question 
 Those pages of the mystic book which hold 
 
 The story still untold ; 
 But without rash conjecture or suggestion, 
 Turn its last leaves, in reverence and good heed, 
 
 Until " The End " I read.
 
 II. 
 
 Cennpsom 
 
 ST. SIMEON STYLITES AND ST. AGNES.
 
 II. 
 
 ST. SIMEON STYLITES AND ST. AGNES. 
 
 SPECIAL introduction to Tennyson 
 might be desirable, but I caYi only, in 
 the time and space at my disposal, 
 attempt to place him generally before you, and 
 point to some of the influences which formed him, 
 and upon which he has reacted. 
 
 Tennyson is emphatically the man of his age ; 
 he is intimately connected, in their wider aspects, 
 with the political, social, and intellectual, as well 
 as the poetical and spiritual, movements of the 
 nineteenth century. 
 
 Born in 1809, he came into public notice be- 
 tween 1830-40, and soon embodied in poetic 
 literature the romantic movement then at its 
 zenith on the continent. But the literary and 
 artistic movement, at home and abroad was only 
 a part of a general upheaval, in politics and 
 religion. 
 
 D 2
 
 36 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 In 1830 the revolution broke out in Paris, arid 
 was followed in England by a long and successful 
 agitation for Reform. Whilst in literature the 
 forces set loose by the severe continental agita- 
 tion took splendid and spontaneous shape in the 
 wide embracing and inexhaustible excursions of 
 Scott into untrodden realms of poetry, history, and 
 romance ; Coleridge gave expression to the mystic 
 side of an intense and earnest religious philosophy; 
 Southey added clearness and common sense to 
 every subject he touched ; Byron uttered the 
 fierce revolt of his age against social fetters, 
 hypocrisy, and shams not always wisely, but too 
 well ; Shelley seized the finer elements of the deep 
 spiritual reaction against dogmatic theology, and 
 bade the world bathe once more in the Arethusan 
 fountain of wild unsullied nature; Wordsworth, 
 mellow with years and wisdom, standing a little 
 apart from the strife of tongues, was yet deeply 
 affected by the new social and political ideas, 
 but sought the calm they could not give in 
 quiet contemplation; and with an eye turned 
 now upon the fair sky, and sea, and earth, 
 and now inwardly upon the panorama of the 
 soul, uttered thoughts so high, and sweet, and
 
 Tennyson. 37 
 
 gentle, that his own age could hardly hear them 
 aright, until the lips of stormier bards had grown 
 silent. 
 
 Tennyson was Wordsworth's successor in the 
 Laureateship. He received that poet wreath, as 
 he himself says, " greener from the brows of him 
 (Wordsworth) that uttered nothing base ;" and 
 he himself has nobly followed in that shining 
 track. 
 
 Before I proceed to mark the characteristic 
 qualities of Tennyson before I dwell on his 
 depth and power of thought, his keen and 
 wide range of sympathy, or point out the great 
 spirituality and religiousness of his mind, I note 
 in him the primal qualities common to all 
 true poets. Let us define Poetry. " Poetry," 
 says John Stuart Mill, "is the expression of 
 thought coloured by emotion or feeling, expressed 
 in metrical language, and overheard." When 
 first I read the definition I thought it cumber- 
 some and too long ; but the more I pondered it, 
 the more complete and adequate did it appear 
 to be. Read it through once more: " Poetry is 
 thought coloured by emotion or feeling, expressed
 
 38 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 in metrical language, and overheard." Notice the 
 significance of " overheard." The poet is not like 
 an orator, he does not appeal directly to his 
 audience ; he is not a mere rhetorician otherwise 
 poetry might be merely thought coloured by emo- 
 tion or feeling. That is oratory. It is combined, 
 after a manner in art, often with a certain rhythmic 
 flow and cadence, though without metre. And all 
 high and impassioned, or even angry utterance, 
 runs naturally into a sort of rhythm, which is not 
 necessarily poetry ; oratory may be poetical, with- 
 out being poetry. But the poet, though he does 
 not address you directly, allows you to listen to 
 what he has to say ; standing apart, he still takes 
 you sympathetically into his confidence, therefore 
 he is by you " overheard" 
 
 I. ACTIVE AND PASSIVE SENSIBILITY. 
 Now to proceed ; what is the first indispensable 
 quality for a poet ? It is sensibility ; that ex- 
 quisite response to the external world, coupled with 
 a certain intense perception of the interior life. 
 Poetic sensibility is both active and passive. 
 When the poet's mind is intensely and actively 
 possessed, he is able to impress all things with his
 
 Tennyson. 39 
 
 mood he imposes his own emotional atmosphere 
 on his surroundings. 
 
 " He sees himself in all he sees." 
 That is the active part of sensibility. 
 
 Then there is the passive side. The poet stands 
 with open heart and mind, ready to receive and 
 register impressions. He is the great High Priest 
 of nature. He is here to interpret her mandates, to 
 overhear her secret whispers long before he him- 
 self is 'overheard of men. His heart beats in 
 time with the universe ; he is one with all nature 
 in praise, and in sympathy with all human beings 
 in sorrow and joy. His mind is like that sensitive 
 plate, which, steeped in chemicals, retains every 
 gradation of light and shade ; nay, more than 
 this, for the poet reflects the changing hues of 
 emotion as well, and chronicles its vigour and 
 varying temperatures ; he is like the ^Eolian lyre, 
 responsive and melodious to the faintest breath of 
 wind. He falls into a trance, having his eyes 
 open, and sees the kingdoms of heaven and earth, 
 and the glory of them. 
 
 There are many illustrious examples of pure 
 writers among us at the present time possessing 
 this high active and passive sensitiveness. They
 
 4O Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 are poetic although they do not write poetry. 
 John Ruskin is a great poet, and some of the 
 finest of modern poetical utterances are to be 
 found in his writings. I know nothing more 
 magnificent, for instance, than the description of 
 the Old Fighting Temeraire being towed to her 
 last resting-place a description in which the ex- 
 ternal object first impresses the passive mind, and 
 the mind in its turn is roused into an atmospheric 
 excitement, which at last completely reacts upon, 
 and impresses with its own stamp, the pathetic 
 symbol of French defeat and English victory. 
 
 Tennyson has in a high degree this active 
 poetic sensibility, this power of impressing his 
 mood upon outward nature. Hear the lone 
 (Enone as she watches her beloved pine forests 
 on the dewy slopes of Ida. The scene is sad- 
 dened with her own sad soul ; every object is 
 coloured by the grief and passion of her irreparable 
 loss, as she marks the tall pines 
 
 " From beneath 
 
 Whose thick mysterious boughs, in the dark morn, 
 The panther's roar came muffled, while I sat 
 Low in the valley. Never, never more 
 Shall lone CEnone see the morning mist 
 Sweep through them ; never see them overlaid
 
 Tennyson. 41 
 
 With narrow moon-lit slips of silver cloud, 
 Between the loud stream and the trembling stars." 
 
 It is to her over-excited nervous system that 
 the music of the leaping cataract roars so hoarsely 
 a loud stream ; it is through her tears that, as 
 she looks up, the pitiless cold fires become " trem- 
 bling stars ; " it is the self-impressing power of 
 excited sensibility. The poets teem with examples. 
 How has night been variously coloured by their 
 imperious moods ! In the happy spirit of Long- 
 fellow's verse, " The night shall be filled with 
 music." But to one suffering from an immense 
 
 loss 
 
 " All night the darkness seemed to flow 
 Beside me, in my utter woe." 
 
 Or to one smarting under a self-inflicted heart 
 wound, inflicted in youth 
 
 * 
 
 " Drug thy memories lest thou learn it, 
 
 Lest thy heart be put to proof, 
 In the dead unhappy night, and when the rain is on the roof." 
 
 II. THE POWER OF EXPRESSION. The 
 second poetic quality is the power of expression ; 
 the poet invents those golden sentences which in 
 a few words sum a volume of thought, a lifetime 
 of feeling.
 
 42 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 His thought takes form in admirably selected 
 periods, which exactly reproduce, without peri- 
 phrasis or explanation, the thought or impulse that 
 stirs him ; and often an exquisite image or subtly 
 chosen adjective comes to his aid, than which 
 nothing fitter can be imagined. How lovely are the 
 fast- fixed things of childish memory, that outlast 
 the shocks of time and all the troubled days of 
 middle life ! 
 
 " Those priceless flowers, which in the rudest wind 
 
 Never grow sere, when rooted in the garden of the mind." 
 
 How noble and dignified are the deliverances of 
 memory to one who recalls, not only in his own 
 life, but in the life of the world, the scenes and 
 events of the past, until like strains of weird melody 
 come back to us the voices of the dead, the legend 
 of the ages, 
 
 " And thou listenest the lordly music 
 Flowing from the illimitable years ! " 
 
 III. WORD-PAINTING. The third indispen- 
 sable quality is word-painting, or the power of 
 producing to the mind's eye a whole picture, 
 with a few touches. The goddesses in the vale of 
 Ida 
 
 " And at their feet the crocus brake like fire."
 
 Tennyson. 43 
 
 No colour art could raise a more dazzling glimpse. 
 Or here, in a river winding to its source amongst 
 the distant hills, we have a study in words, which 
 reminds us of a David Cox, or a Copley Fielding, 
 as the poet stands 
 
 " To watch the long bright river, drawing slowly 
 His waters from the purple hills." 
 
 Or here is a vignette of bells : 
 
 " As one who from a casement leans his head 
 When midnight bells cease ringing suddenly, 
 And the old year is dead ! " 
 
 Or here is a study in white and sepia, or grey 
 and silver : 
 
 " A still salt pool, locked in with bars of sand, 
 
 Upon the shore, that hears all night 
 The plunging seas draw backward from the land 
 Their moon-lit waters white," 
 
 IV. No true poet is without a fourth, and allied 
 quality, which Richard Hutton has called the phy- 
 sical atmosphere of words. It is the semi-musical 
 use of words, exciting an emotion, almost indepen- 
 dently of their sense or logical construction a 
 something which gives a feeling of the place 
 through the sound; as when Sir Bedivere, loth to 
 hurl the good sword Excalibur into the mere,
 
 44 Poets in the Pztlpit. 
 
 returns to the dying King Arthur, and makes 
 answer, 
 
 " I heard the ripple washing in the reeds, 
 And the wild water lapping on the crag," 
 
 we are at once on the brink of the broad lake in 
 the moonlight. Or in that ambrosial passage, 
 
 " O, art them sighing for Lebanon, 
 Dark cedar, in the long breeze which streams 
 From thy delicious East ? " 
 
 " Sighing for Lebanon ! " the very feeling of Eden 
 comes upon us. Or who cannot feel the sea coast 
 and the sea at night in olden time in 
 
 " Only the rounded moon 
 Through the tall oriel on the rolling sea " ? 
 
 Or some long avenue of odorous limes, like the 
 Trinity Avenue at the Cambridge " backs " in 
 spring, in 
 
 " The moan of doves in immemorial elms, 
 And murmuring of innumerable bees." 
 
 This power of swaying words to the rhythm 
 of poetic sensibility is one of Tennyson's finest 
 enchantments. Thus, sensibility active and pas- 
 sive, expression, word-painting, and the physical 
 atmosphere of words, combined with artistic finish,
 
 Tennyson. 45 
 
 are the primal qualities indispensable to all poets ; 
 and Tennyson has them in the highest degree. 
 
 V. TENNYSON'S CHARACTERISTICS. But 
 others have had the word-power, the sensibi- 
 lity, the artistic finish. I pass to notice that ex- 
 ceptional combination which constitutes Tenny- 
 son's special strength. If I were asked what are 
 Tennyson's chief characteristics, I should reply, 
 
 i st. His depth and sobriety of thought. 
 
 2nd. His wide sympathies. 
 
 3rd. His moral and religious instincts. 
 
 First characteristic Depth and Sobriety of 
 Thought. We have had brilliant poets unable to 
 think, and powerful thinkers unable to express 
 their thoughts and feelings poetically ; we have had 
 passionate thinkers fully endowed with expression, 
 but wanting in judgment, proportion, and sobriety. 
 Tennyson is distinguished by depth of thought 
 and sobriety of judgment. How dignified is his 
 address to Queen Victoria, on receiving from her 
 the Laureate's crown ! What a contrast to the 
 sort of poor adulation, often lavished upon the 
 reigning sovereign ! how full of just perception, how 
 delicately true 1
 
 46 Poets in the 
 
 " Her court was pure, her life serene ; 
 God gave her peace, her land reposed. 
 A thousand claims to reverence closed, 
 In her as Mother, Wife, and Queen. 
 
 And statesmen at her council met, 
 Who knew the seasons when to take 
 Occasion by the hand, and make 
 
 The bounds of freedom wider yet, 
 
 By shaping some august decree, 
 
 Which kept her throne unshaken still, 
 Broad-based upon her people's will, 
 
 And compassed by th' inviolate sea." 
 
 Or when, at a very critical time in our country's 
 history, he touches on freedom instead of flaming 
 out into anything like revolution, he uses language 
 which, after the lapse of years, although written at 
 a moment of great public excitement, can still be 
 read with approval he seizes the heart of poli- 
 tical freedom, which is universally sound, and 
 treats it apart from its accidental surroundings. 
 The prophet or poet sees in everything the un- 
 transitory element, the residuum of human and 
 universal interest, therefore he writes what is true 
 for the ages, " speaks to time and eternity." 
 
 " You ask me why, though ill at ease, 
 Within this region I subsist,
 
 Tennyson. 47 
 
 Whose spirits falter in the mist, 
 And languish for the purple seas ? 
 
 It is the land that freemen till, 
 
 That sober-suited Freedom chose 
 The land where, girt with friends or foes, 
 
 A man may speak the thing he will. 
 
 A land of settled government, 
 A land of just and old renown, 
 Where freedom broadens slowly down 
 
 From precedent to precedent. 
 
 Where faction seldom gathers head ; 
 But, by degrees to fulness wrought, 
 The strength of some diffusive thought 
 
 Hath time and space to work and spread." 
 
 Hear him now on the critical subject of war, a 
 topic which seems to rouse the hot blood of 
 Englishmen whenever it is mentioned in connexion 
 with impending or actual struggle. How sober and 
 impressive are his views ! 
 
 " If New and Old disastrous feud 
 Must ever shock, like armed foes, 
 And this be true till time shall close, 
 That principles are rained in blood, 
 
 Not yet the wise of heart would cease 
 To hold his hope through shame and guilt ; 
 But, with his hand against the hilt, 
 Would pace the troubled land, like Peace.
 
 48 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 Not less though dogs of faction bay, 
 Would serve his kind in deed and word, 
 Certain if knowledge bring the sword, 
 That knowledge takes the sword away ; 
 
 Would love the gleams of good that broke 
 From either side, nor veil his eyes ; 
 And if some dreadful need should rise, 
 Would strike, and firmly, and one stroke." 
 
 Here everything is reasoned, sober, balanced. 
 But he more delights to pass on to the prophetic 
 vision, in which he sees war disappearing finally. 
 Our poet, like all good men and all good women, is 
 at the bottom an optimist. He won't believe we 
 are always going to be struggling and fighting ; 
 he believes in the reign of peace, and goes on 
 working and hoping for the cause, through evil 
 report and good report; so that his vision 
 endured 
 "Till the war-drum throbb'd no longer, and the battle flags 
 
 were furl'd, 
 
 In the parliament of man, the federation of the world. 
 There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in 
 
 awe, 
 And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law." 
 
 Nor is he less wise and hopeful when facing the 
 great social questions of the time, which he calls 
 the " fair new forms that float about the threshold
 
 Tennyson. 49 
 
 of an age." How sound and sweet are his words 
 on that great question of the redistribution of pro- 
 perty. Some people seem to get all, and others 
 nothing. How much envy is there of the great 
 hereditary landowners, who are buying up every- 
 thing, and treating people as serfs, or ejecting 
 them at will, clearing a wide country, as we have 
 cleared Scotland, in order to make it a happy 
 hunting-ground for the rich natural rights 
 ignored, and a state of things created which is 
 now making it difficult for small farmers to live. 
 In view of which Tennyson looks forward to a 
 time when, 
 
 " Wealth will no more rest on mounded heaps, 
 But, smit with freer light, shall slowly melt, 
 In many streams, to fatten lower lands, 
 And light shall spread, and man be liker man, 
 Through all the seasons of the golden year." 
 
 I note one more phase of his sobriety of feeling ; 
 it is where he touches on sorrow. I am specially 
 glad, when speaking of Tennyson's moderation, to 
 point out to you the delicate manner in which he 
 handles sorrow and grief in another's case, 
 just as we shall see by-and-by how forcibly he 
 handles his own sorrow and grief ; for Tennyson 
 
 E
 
 5O Poeis in the Pulpit. 
 
 has been accused of sentimentality, and of whin- 
 ing and weeping in a sort of maudlin way, instead 
 of bearing his troubles like a man ; and of not 
 really comforting other people, because he him- 
 self is apt to fall into such a weak mood when he 
 contemplates their sorrows or his own. To this 
 oft-repeated charge, which has been chiefly 
 brought against the " In Memoriam" as destructive 
 of its wholesome tendency, the lines "to J. S." 
 (John Sterling, I believe, the friend of Carlyle) 
 are a fit reply. They contain all that a sym- 
 pathizing friend could say, without intruding too 
 far into the sorrow of others or losing heart in 
 one's own : 
 
 " "Tis strange that those we lean on most, 
 
 Those in whose laps our limbs are nursed, 
 Fall into shadow, soonest tost : 
 Those we love first are taken first. 
 
 God gives us love. Something to love 
 
 He lends us ; but, when love is grown 
 To ripeness, that on which it throve 
 
 Falls off, and love is left alone. 
 * * * * 
 
 I knew your brother ; his mute dust 
 
 I honour, and his living worth : 
 A man more pure, and bold, and just; 
 
 Was never born into the earth.
 
 Tennyson. 5 1 
 
 I have not looked upon you nigh 
 
 Since that dear soul hath fall'n asleep. 
 Great Nature is more wise than I, 
 
 I will not tell you not to weep. 
 
 ***** 
 
 Let grief be her own mistress still ; 
 
 She loveth her own anguish deep, 
 More than much pleasure. Let her will 
 
 Be done to weep or not to weep. 
 
 I will not say, ' God's ordinance 
 
 Of death is blown in every wind ;" 
 For that is not a common chance, 
 
 That takes away a noble mind. 
 
 His memory long will live alone 
 
 In all our hearts, as mournful light 
 That broods above the fallen sun, 
 
 And dwells in heaven half the night." 
 
 Second characteristic Tennyson's wide sym- 
 pathy. We come now to the almost inexhaustible 
 question of Tennyson's variety of subject. Here, if 
 you will glance at the immense scope of his works, 
 written on different questions, you will start with 
 amazement at the comprehensiveness at the 
 versatility, of the man who could write " Maud," 
 after treating the philosophic and scientific, as 
 well as the religious and psychological problems, 
 in the " In Memoriam ; " then sound to their 
 
 E 2
 
 52 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 depth the peculiarities of the bucolic mind, in the 
 "Northern Farmer;" scan the great Woman's 
 Rights question, in the poem of "The Princess ;" 
 and analyse psychologically the state into which 
 the human mind falls in extreme old age, in 
 "The Grandmother;" and prove the prince of 
 storytellers in the " Idylls of the King " and how 
 rare is the storytelling faculty, in prose or poetry, 
 the reading public know to their cost ; but the 
 Idylls are more than interesting tales well told, 
 for, couched in the frame-work of the past, those 
 old tales of the Round Table positively teem with 
 the thoughts and feelings of our modern times ; 
 they repeat our own life dramas, until all the 
 people there seem drawn out of the past and 
 brought very near to us, by the intimate way in 
 which we find them animated like ourselves, with 
 the same hopes, and fears, and aspirations and 
 lastly, a man who in later life can pass easily to 
 the creation of dramas, such as " Queen Mary," 
 and " Harold," and " A'Beckett," and, after a 
 comparatively brief study, seize those historical 
 scenes and persons with a vigour of grip which 
 might well make the despair of a Macaulay, a 
 Froude, or a John Richard Green ; such a poet is
 
 Tennyson. 5 3 
 
 indeed highly characteristic, and intensely repre- 
 sentative, of the nineteenth century. 
 
 Third characteristic Tennyson's Moral and 
 Religious Instincts. In dealing now with Tenny- 
 son's religious sensibility, I come first to Tenny- 
 son's imaginative hold over past religious phases of 
 Christian thought and feeling, and I dwell upon his 
 deeply spiritual view of those two eternally recurrent 
 phenomena of human intellect and passion in 
 religion, the asceticism of Stylites, the ecstasy of 
 St. Agnes the Christianity of the Wilderness 
 and of the Convent. 
 
 The sympathetic exercise of the imagination 
 which enables a man to live and move in alien 
 atmospheres to realize other men's notions of 
 life, to see things through their eyes is the 
 power which will alone enable us to take a wide 
 interest in the condition of others, or to do justice 
 to their religious, political, and social views when 
 differing from our own. 
 
 It is just for want of seeing how people come to 
 think and feel thus and thus, that sectarians in 
 Church and State bite and devour one another. 
 No one can understand his neighbour's creed 
 without a certain exercise of imagination ; and had
 
 54 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 we a little more of this faculty we should be able 
 to live more calmly with Roman Catholics, dissent- 
 ers, and other people who hold diverse opinions. 
 And the moral lesson of a great imaginative effort 
 like the poem of St. Simeon Stylites is put your- 
 self in his mental atmosphere, live in his age. 
 
 VI. THE CHRISTIANITY OF THE WILDERNESS 
 St. Simeon Stylites. If there is one thing more 
 puzzling than another to the mind of an ordinary 
 Englishman, it is the asceticism which prevailed in 
 the primitive church. We ask, why did these men 
 leave their comfort and their city life, to wander 
 about in the wilderness in hunger and thirst and 
 nakedness, living in dens and caves, and inflicting 
 ceaseless self-torment ? They went out from the 
 great cities, such as Alexandria, or Rome, and 
 mortified their bodies with fasting and prayer, until 
 they became Saints, and people flocked from all 
 quarters to see them, and finally worshipped them 
 as half divine ; and all this was at its height in the 
 fourth and fifth centuries, and it is no little puzzle 
 to some of us. The poem of which I am about to 
 read a portion is that of St. Simeon Stylites, the 
 prince of ascetics, who, because he could not
 
 Tennyson. 5 5 
 
 sufficiently mortify his body by hunger and wander- 
 ing, got on to the top of a pillar and lived there. 
 There he stopped, and would come down only to 
 mount a higher pillar, where he remained three 
 years. The people crowded out to see him and 
 bring him food; and thus he remained, exposed to 
 all the inclemencies of the weather, preaching to the 
 crowds, falling sometimes into long trances, until 
 his fame spread as the greatest worker of miracles 
 and the greatest saint in Christendom ! One day 
 he seemed to have been still for a longer time 
 than usual. He was in the habit of bowing his 
 head down to his knees, and he had not bowed him- 
 self for a long time. A devotee once counted that 
 he bowed himself 1250 times, and then he left 
 off counting. But when he had been now long 
 motionless they climbed up to see what was the 
 matter with him, and found he had been dead 
 for some time ! 
 
 Now, without realizing by the imagination, that 
 age and atmosphere, it is impossible for us to 
 understand how such conduct could commend 
 itself to the multitude, or why they reckoned the 
 ascetic a saint. But were you a poet, like Tenny- 
 son, you would seize the truth enshrined. Look
 
 56 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 at what Alexandria, Antioch, and the whole East 
 was at that time. It was an age of gigantic 
 crime, luxury, lawlessness, and selfishness ; an 
 age too of prodigies, superstitions, and portents ; 
 and if a man wanted to go right, he had to turn 
 his back on the cities, and fly to the deserts. It 
 was an age in which a man could hardly believe 
 in the mastery of the soul over the body ; and he 
 who did believe, was constrained to sum up his 
 belief in some immense symbol nay, to become 
 himself that symbol, as did Simeon upon his 
 pillar. That spectacle meant there is some- 
 thing in man that is greater than his body, that 
 can master and even extinguish all its natural 
 hunger and appetite this body, which is always 
 getting in the way of soul-progress ! As the 
 saint looked around, he saw men swept away by 
 their bodily lusts, and ruled by all things which are 
 transitory and ephemeral; and if, in the old days of 
 Alexandria and Rome you would be a saint, surely 
 you must get away from all that external world 
 mortify yourself, and treat every motion of the 
 flesh as if it were a temptation of the devil ! 
 Thus you would at last have brought yourself into 
 a state in which you were all spirit, and seemed
 
 Tennyson. 5 7 
 
 lifted into a kind of supersensuous atmosphere 
 above the world. That was, in exaggerated 
 terms, in the language of a tremendous reaction, 
 the simple announcement of the spiritual part of 
 man's nature, the solitary supremacy of the soul ! 
 And it is as true now as then. Yes, there is 
 something in man which is able to triumph over 
 the body, which is able to keep in subordination 
 the empire of the flesh ; something which makes 
 a man strong to put aside the blandishments of 
 present delight, to come boldly to the Calvary of 
 pain and grief, and lay down his life there with 
 Christ. Unless you have got some of this power 
 you are not fit for much in time or in eternity ; 
 unless you can subdue your appetites to noble 
 ends, and walk straight on in the path of duty, cost 
 what it may, and do this through the years, you 
 are not worthy to be His disciple whom St. Simeon 
 Stylites stood and witnessed for in the wilder- 
 ness ! 
 
 Before approaching that pillar of agony and 
 ecstasy you must understand that far back age. 
 The unscrupulous bishops ; the massacres of the 
 monks by the people, of the people by the monks ; 
 the games of the bloody arena ; the violence and
 
 58 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 licentiousness of the emperors ; the public atheism 
 and demoralization ; the universal corruption. 
 Then, in the spirit of St. Simeon Stylites, turn 
 your back on that evil and perverse generation, 
 deaf alike to entreaty and menace, and fly for 
 your life to the wilderness, and show that there 
 is still some power in man which can afford to de- 
 spise all the ambitions, pleasures, and degrading 
 follies of the flesh. Let me read to you some of 
 that strange rhapsody in which the man's mind 
 sometimes seems to give way ; and it is quite 
 evident that at certain points he is wandering, at 
 other times he sinks into simple weakness and 
 despondency ; then he sees visions, and is lifted 
 into ecstasy. But all through he holds on con- 
 sistently to the great moral and spiritual truth 
 which is at the bottom of his good confession ; and 
 just at the hour of his death you will see how he re- 
 turns to perfect clearness and calmness, and holds 
 up on high, above all the confusion and turmoil, 
 the spiritual truth which has been proclaimed and 
 set forth amidst the hallucinations of the mystic. 
 
 "Although I be the basest of mankind, 
 From scalp to sole one slough and crust of sin, 
 U nfit for earth, unfit for heaven, scarce meet
 
 Tennyson. 59 
 
 For troops of devils mad with blasphemy, 
 
 I will not cease to grasp the hope I hold 
 
 Of saintdom, and to clamour, mourn, and sob, 
 
 Battering the gates of heaven with storms of prayer, 
 
 Have mercy, Lord, and take away my sin." 
 
 Then he begins to recount all his sufferings, 
 and at last, in order to be more alone with God, 
 
 " Three years I lived upon a pillar, high 
 Six cubits, and three years on one of twelve ; 
 And twice three years I crouched on one that rose 
 Twenty by measure ; last of all I grew 
 Twice ten long weary weary years to this, 
 That numbers forty cubits from the soil." 
 
 And now comes on his soul the ever-recurrent 
 agony for the sinfulness of his nature. Every 
 pain of his charing body, and every resistance to 
 the torture which he is undergoing, seems to him 
 to be but another sign of the wretched depravity 
 of his flesh; and after giving way to a fit of 
 contrition for what he calls his " miserable sins," 
 he addresses the crowd at his feet. After a long 
 and bitter burst of emotion the mood of self- 
 reproach is exhausted, and he turns to the people 
 in a soberer strain, which soon yields to the semi- 
 prophetic elation of the miracle worker.
 
 60 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 " Good people, you do ill to kneel to me. 
 What is it I can have done to merit this ? 
 I am a sinner viler than you all. 
 It may be I have wrought some miracles, 
 And cured some halt and maim'd ; but what of that ? 
 It may be no one, even among the saints, 
 May match his pains with mine ; but what of that? 
 Yet do not rise ; for you may look on me, 
 And in your looking you may kneel to God. 
 Speak ! is there any of you halt or maim'd ? 
 I think you know I have some power with heaven, 
 From my long penance ; let him speak his wish. 
 Yes, I can heal him. Power goes forth from me, 
 They say that they are heal'd. Ah, hark ! they shout 
 'St. Simeon Stylites.'" 
 
 Then he begins to recount his own method 
 of dealing with sin to the people. 
 
 " O my sons, my sons, 
 I, Simeon of the pillar, by surname 
 Stylites among men; I, Simeon, 
 The watcher on the column till the end ; 
 I, Simeon, whose brain the sunshine bakes ; 
 I, whose bald brows in silent hours become 
 Unnaturally hoar with rime, do now, 
 From my high nest of penance here, proclaim 
 That Pontius and Iscariot by my side 
 Show'd like fair seraphs. On the coals I lay, 
 A vessel full of sin ; all hell beneath 
 Made me boil over. Devils pluck'd my sleeve 
 Abaddon and Asmodeus caught at me ; 
 I smote them with the cross.
 
 Tennyson. 61 
 
 Mortify 
 
 Your flesh, like me, with scourges and with thorns ; 
 Smite, shrink not, spare not It may be, fast 
 Whole Lents, and pray. I hardly, with slow steps 
 With slow, faint steps, and much exceeding pain, 
 Have scrambled past those pits of fire that still 
 Sing in mine ears. But yield not me the praise. 
 God only through His bounty hath thought fit, 
 Among the powers and princes of this world, 
 To make me an example to mankind, 
 Which few can reach to. Yet I do not say 
 But that a time may come yea, even now, 
 Now, now, his footsteps smite the threshold stairs 
 Of life I say, that time is at the doors 
 When you may worship me without reproach ; 
 For I will leave my relics in your land, 
 And you may carve a shrine about my dust, 
 And burn a fragrant lamp before my bones, 
 When I am gathered to the glorious saints." 
 
 Then, after another crisis of feeling, approach- 
 ing at the end to ecstasy, he goes on 
 
 " Speak, if there be a priest, a man of God, 
 Among you there, and let him presently 
 Approach, and lean a ladder on the shaft, 
 And, climbing up into my airy home, 
 Deliver me the blessed sacrament ; 
 For by the warning of the Holy Ghost 
 I prophecy that I shall die to-night, 
 A quarter before twelve.
 
 62 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 But Thou, O Lord, 
 
 Aid all this foolish people ; let them take 
 Example, pattern ; lead them to Thy light." 
 
 His death is quite calm, quite collected. Note 
 how with his latest breath returns the greatest, 
 sanest expression of the spiritual life to which he 
 bears witness. 
 
 VII. THE CHRISTIANITY OF THE CONVENT 
 ST. AGNES. I pass, in conclusion, to the best 
 and purest type of conventual asceticism, in the 
 gentle piety of St. Agnes. 
 
 Once more we find reflected in this clear image 
 eternally recurrent states of the soul. We too 
 meditate like St. Agnes ; our meditation rises into 
 prayer, our prayer again rises into an atmosphere 
 which cannot be described ; in it we seem like 
 St. Paul to be lifted into heaven, hearing words 
 which it is not lawful or possible to utter those 
 blessed moments which Robertson calls the very 
 " bridal hours of the soul," when we get strength 
 and refreshment to return to the world, to go on 
 with the daily drudgeries of life. How quiet is 
 her image, how pure her soul, as she stands 
 looking out dreamily on to the fair expanse of
 
 Tennyson. 63 
 
 moonlit snow. Note how her calm thoughts flow 
 naturally into prayer, which in its turn broadens 
 into fuller life, as she rises at last out of meditation 
 and prayer, and is lifted up into the imaginative 
 ecstasy of the rushing and glowing close. The 
 whole poem is a most beautiful example of the 
 convent piety of the Middle Ages ; and although 
 it may to some extent be out of the range of our 
 modern taste, yet it has the elements of truth in 
 it, and is genuinely and everlastingly illustrative 
 of the elements of human character and the ex- 
 periences of the spiritual life : 
 
 " Deep on the convent roof the snows 
 
 Are sparkling to the moon : 
 My breath to heaven like vapour goes : 
 
 May my soul follow soon ! 
 The shadows of the convent towers 
 
 Slant down the snowy sward, 
 Still creeping with the creeping hours 
 
 That lead me to my Lord : 
 Make Thou my spirit pure and clear 
 
 As are the frosty skies, 
 Or this first snowdrop of the year 
 
 That in my bosom lies." 
 
 The second verse also begins in meditation and 
 ends in prayer, but the last verse rises out of 
 prayer into ecstasy.
 
 64 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 " He lifts me to the golden doors ; 
 
 The flashes come and go; 
 All heaven bursts her starry floors, 
 
 And strows her lights below, 
 And deepens on and up ! The gates 
 
 Roll back, and far within 
 For me the Heavenly Bridegroom waits, 
 
 To make me pure of sin. 
 The sabbaths of Eternity, 
 
 One sabbath deep and wide 
 A light upon the shining sea 
 
 The Bridegroom with His bride."
 
 III. 
 
 Cennpsom 
 
 THE VISION OF SIN, AND THE PALACE OF ART.
 
 III. 
 
 THE VISION OF SIN, AND THE PALACE OF ART. 
 
 DEVELOP further to-night Tennyson's 
 third characteristic, Moral and Religious 
 Sensibility. Teaching by allegory has 
 ever been a favourite practice with prophet and 
 poet ; but before I select the two great Tenny- 
 sonian allegories of the " Vision of Sin," and the 
 " Palace of Art," I must call your attention to 
 that conception or theory of human nature on 
 which they are based. 
 
 We are held to be tripartite body, mind, and 
 spirit. Man is not a mere animal or body ; not a 
 mere calculating machine, or intellect ; not a mere 
 spirit, independent of either. He is tripartite unity. 
 We have just seen, in St. Simeon Stylites, and 
 St. Agnes, the attempt of ascetic and conventual 
 Christianity to isolate the spirit, to crush the body 
 and ignore the mind ; we now come with the 
 " Vision of Sin " upon man's attempt to live 
 
 F 2
 
 68 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 merely as a thing of body, ignoring both intellect 
 and soul. Of course such presentations of life 
 are ideal ; no one can utterly and consistently 
 ignore all but one side ; we are too cunningly made 
 for that ; still there is the tendency, and here in 
 this tremendous allegory of the " Vision of Sin," 
 the poet embodies that tendency, showing the 
 sensual youth, the degraded old age, and while 
 pointing to the terrible Nemesis manifest to all, 
 reverently suspending the sentence upon each. 
 All through we cannot forget that man is a being 
 of common sense and common reason ; yet we have 
 before us the future of a man who throws aside 
 all this, and delights only in what he can touch, 
 and taste, and see. Gratification of the senses, 
 and the luxurious moment the nerve dissolving 
 melody, followed by " the cold heavy hueless 
 vapour" of reaction the apathy, dissipation, and 
 wreck of the whole man ; all this is made to pass 
 before us in a series of vivid and poetical cartoons ; 
 immense human pleasure, and passion, and suffer- 
 ing and brooding over all the sad Nemesis of the 
 senses. And as I look around me I see the giddy 
 way in which the men and women not only of 
 this age, but of every age hurry on and on after 
 pleasure, without thinking of the consequences ;
 
 Tennyson. 69 
 
 seizing one butterfly after another ; never asking 
 of the appetites what they were really meant for, 
 how they should be used, what may be their right 
 proportion in the general economy of human life, 
 or what the duty of providing pleasure for others ; 
 but dead, wrapt up in self the lowest self; eat, 
 drink, smoke, sleep until the blood thickens, 
 and the nerves rot with indulgence in every kind 
 of licentious living. Is this one side of our age? 
 Mark how men drain every cup of pleasure, until 
 sensibility wears out ; and then health wears out ; 
 and then ability to feel wears out. Give me the 
 poet or teacher who will put a true picture of this 
 before men ; and he shall do the age golden 
 service. Well, what if this " Vision of Sin " be 
 an ideal picture, isolating one side of man ! let us 
 admit that man is never wholly like what one side 
 of himself may become. What if, because you are 
 spiritually constituted, you will be ever haunted with 
 the overtones of the soul still let the allegory of 
 Sin pass before you as an embodied tendency. 
 
 I. THE VISION OF SIN. There rises before us 
 the image of a man, glowing with health and youth, 
 eager for all that these alone can bestow, riding a 
 winged horse, the horse being his own soul ; but he
 
 70 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 weighs down that Pegasus with the dull leaden 
 weight of his own sensual personality. The soul 
 within him frets and chafes struggling, impatient, 
 restless yet plods on, but with slow and flagging 
 paces. Such an one is put before us, approaching 
 the palace gates of Pleasure. Then follow the revels 
 and then comes an awful pause of meditation 
 and then the lapse of time ; and when the curtain 
 is raised again we see the same figure yet not the 
 same, for it is one over whom the tide of years has 
 rolled, over whom the wearing storm of passion 
 has swept, and left its victim to a miserable, 
 drivelling, degraded, incapable old age. And so 
 these two pictures are put before you, and the 
 solemn verdict is reverently suspended ; and the 
 highest flight of the poet and teacher is reached 
 in this reverent suspension of judgment. 
 
 The 
 
 poem opens : 
 
 " I had a vision when the night was late : 
 A youth came riding toward a palace-gate ; 
 He rode a horse with wings, that would have flown, 
 But that his heavy rider kept him down." 
 
 Let us throw a veil over the wild revel in the 
 halls of sensual delight. The poet is suddenly
 
 Tennyson. 7 r 
 
 rapt away in contemplation: the maddening giddy 
 dance, the delirious groups, are shut out ; and 
 we seem to move aside, and look upon the eternal 
 outcome of all these things : we see the conse- 
 quences inexorably working out ; we see the great 
 moral tides as they ebb and flow through the ages. 
 The poet stands in the midst of a solemn landscape, 
 and, absorbed in the contemplation of eternal 
 principles, he marks the great tide, as of record- 
 ing fate, like a thick hueless vapour, floating on 
 and on towards him, from the still heights : 
 
 " And then I look'd up toward a mountain tract, 
 That girt the region with high cliff and lawn : 
 I saw that every morning, far withdrawn 
 Beyond the darkness and the cataract, 
 God made Himself an awful rose of dawn, 
 Unheeded : and detaching, fold by fold, 
 From those still heights, and slowly drawing near, 
 A vapour heavy, hueless, formless, cold 
 Came floating on, for many a month and year, 
 Unheeded : and I thought I would have spoken, 
 And warn'd that madman ere it grew too late : 
 But as in dreams, I could not. Mine was broken. 
 When that cold vapour touch'd the palace -gate, 
 And link'd again " 
 
 When the prophetic vision is resumed, the same 
 figure, and yet not the same, is before us :
 
 72 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 " I saw, within my head, 
 A gray and gap-tooth'd man, as lean as Death, 
 Who slowly rode across a wither'd heath, 
 And 'lighted at a ruin'd inn." 
 
 Note the careful contrast : instead of the young 
 man, a " gray and gap-tooth'd man ;" instead of 
 one in the bloom of youth, a man " as lean as 
 Death ;" instead of a noble courser with wings, 
 he slowly rides a miserable worn-out hack ; and 
 instead of arriving at a " palace gate," he came 
 to a " ruin'd inn," and said, 
 
 " Wrinkled ostler, grim and thin ! 
 Here is custom come your way ; 
 Take my brute, and lead him in ; 
 Stuff his ribs with mouldy hay." 
 
 Next we perceive his loss of belief not only in 
 friendship and human love, but in all the great 
 social and political virtues ; all has gone down in 
 the great charnel-house of ruined appetites, and 
 the man has lost faith in everything worth living 
 for. 
 
 Then follow the ghastly pleasantry, and the 
 free cynical rant of a worn-out sensualist, totter- 
 ing, with gibe and semi-drunken maunder, on the 
 brink of the grave. Having lost all self-respect, 
 he mixes as an equal with the lowest tipplers ; hav-
 
 Tennyson. 73 
 
 ing lost all religion, he mocks at any chance phrase 
 of theology that he can recollec i ; sneers at friend- 
 ship, love, virtue ; denounces as delusive all 
 social and political aspirations freedom, reform, 
 'tis all one 
 
 " Drink we last the public fool, 
 Frantic love, and frantic hate." 
 
 And even there as, he sits, his blood begins to 
 chill ; his fancies grow more pale and ghastly ; the 
 old skeleton hopes and fears, dead and horrid 
 memories, come thronging like a troop of furies 
 towards him : shall he greet them with awful 
 tremblings, or wild delirium ? Drink ! drink to the 
 end ! 
 
 " Trooping from their mouldy dens, 
 The chapfallen circle spreads : 
 Welcome ! fellow-citizens, 
 
 Hollow hearts and empty heads ! 
 You are bones and what of that ? " &c. 
 
 But the last dull spark in his own old worn-out 
 carcass is beginning to fade. A sort of feeble 
 lethargy takes possession of brain and limb, 
 against which he continues to fill the can, and 
 struggle in vain ; and looking at his companion, he 
 sees the same torpor creeping over him :
 
 74 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 " Thou art mazed ! the night is long, 
 And the longer night is near." 
 
 And then, feeling the very chills of death begin- 
 ning to come upon him, the wretched worn-out 
 creature blurts forth, with a kind of vindictive 
 scream of terror, and mad clinging to existence, 
 
 " Dregs of life, and lees of man, 
 Yet we will not die forlorn ! " 
 
 As the voice grows faint the ghastly scene is 
 rolled away like a scroll, and the poet finds him- 
 self once more contemplating the eternal results 
 of inexorable and Divine principles. The moral 
 teaching is emphasized in the three oracular 
 
 utterances : 
 
 " Behold, it was a crime 
 Of sense avenged by sense, that wore with time ! " 
 
 " The crime of sense became 
 The crime of malice, and is equal blame." 
 
 " He had not wholly quench'd his power : 
 A little grain of conscience made him sour. " 
 
 Then comes a wild cry, beating to the heights 
 the cry of fallen despairing humanity, when 
 the veil falls off, and all is seen in the hideous and 
 naked deformity and ruin of sin. 
 " Is there any hope ? "
 
 Tennyson. 75 
 
 And with the truest deepest reverence the seer 
 pauses to record 
 
 " An answer pealed from that high land, 
 But in a tongue no man could understand. 
 And on the glittering limit, far withdrawn, 
 God made Himself an awful rose of dawn. 
 
 So we must leave them the frail, the tempted, the 
 sinful ones alone with their God. Still the Vision 
 of Sin haunts us ! that awful spectacle of shattered 
 sensibilities lost, wasted capacities Divine in- 
 stincts smothered all that makes life worth living 
 trampled under foot ; and as we contemplate them 
 closely the awful Nemesis of lust, and the collapse 
 of the whole spiritual fabric might we not involun- 
 tarily cry out, like Balaam, " May I die the death 
 of the righteous, and may my last end be like his ? " 
 
 II. THE PALACE OF ART. Here you have the 
 isolation of another side of human nature. This 
 time it is the intellectual side that of the man who 
 lives entirely for culture. You have seen what be- 
 came of the merely sensual man ; now we are to 
 contemplate the merely intellectual man. This sel- 
 fish, solitary, isolation of self-culture is a besetting 
 tendency of the age, both in art and literature ; to
 
 76 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 cultivate everything for selfish enjoyment; to ignore 
 the rights, the feelings, the sympathies of others ; 
 to forget that they have any claims upon us. The 
 fair scenes of earth, the religions of the world, the 
 wise and great, the seers of the age all are to be 
 pressed into the service of intellectual pleasure ; 
 but the great lesson of human life the training, 
 through human sympathy, grief, helpfulness, and 
 manly endeavour, for eternity this is missed ; 
 nothing is allowed to bring home its deeper teach- 
 ing ; everything is used for pleasure pleasure 
 more than animal intellectual, imaginative but at 
 best selfish, isolated ; and this course also leads to 
 despair, disappointment, and misery. 
 
 Practically no human being can do what is sup- 
 posed to be done in the poem. It is again the ten- 
 dency that is dealt with. Just as no man can live 
 for his body alone until he becomes a mere driveller 
 in delirium tremens, so no man can live for his mind 
 alone. In neither case can he wholly quench his 
 power ; " a little grain of conscience makes him 
 sour." 
 
 You may go along this road, living in your 
 Palace of Art a life of selfishness and self-isolation, 
 and enjoying your own happiness, without thinking 
 or caring for that of others. This course Tenny-
 
 Tennyson. 7 7 
 
 son sketches, its progress and its inevitable fate 
 a fate written upon the page of history itself, in 
 characters of fire and blood. 
 
 In Athens, sensuality and culture at their best 
 ended with the murder of Socrates ; at their worst 
 in Nero's reign, with the Christian massacres and the 
 fire of Rome. In this nineteenth century the same 
 state of feeling is approached by men who despise 
 the people, who narrow their sympathies to a small 
 and confined aesthetic circle, whether in music, 
 art, or science. The habit of mind is the same in all 
 men who live solely for their own pleasure, who 
 shut out as far as they can everything else from 
 life, and deem themselves the princes of intellect, 
 the cultured elect of the earth. For whom indeed 
 need they care but for their own sweet selves ? what 
 else is worth caring about ? 
 
 I warn you against this insidious tendency of 
 our day to love and pamper self, to ignore and de- 
 spise your fellow creatures en masse the " people 
 that are cursed, and know nothing." It is a narrow, 
 selfish, mean policy ; and upon it is pronounced a 
 true verdict in this allegory of the "Palace of 
 Art." 
 
 " I built my soul a lordly pleasure-house, 
 Wherein at ease for aye to dwell
 
 78 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 I said, ' O soul, make merry and carouse, 
 Dear soul, for all is well.' 
 
 A huge crag-platform, smooth as burnish'd brass, 
 I chose. The ranged ramparts bright 
 
 From level meadow bases, of deep grass, 
 Suddenly seal'd the light. 
 
 Thereon I built it firm. Of ledge or shelf 
 
 The rock rose clear, or winding stair. 
 My soul would live alone unto herself, 
 
 In her high palace there. 
 
 And ' While the world runs round and round,' I said, 
 
 ' Reign thou apart, a quiet king, 
 Still as, while Saturn whirls, his steadfast shade 
 
 Sleeps on his luminous ring.' 
 
 To which my soul made answer readily: 
 
 ' Trust me, in bliss I shall abide 
 In this great mansion, that is built for me, 
 
 So royal-rich and wide.' " 
 
 So then a palace is built, with every conceivable 
 beauty of architecture ; and inwardly it is equally 
 adorned : 
 
 " Full of great rooms and small the palace stood, 
 
 All various, each a perfect whole 
 From living Nature, fit for every mood 
 And change of my still soul." 
 
 But in all this the " still soul " finds no spiritual
 
 Tennyson. 79 
 
 meaning. For it there is nothing beneath the 
 surface of life. To the loving heart all this 
 world's beauty and grace is filled with fair and 
 heavenly images, fit to draw the heart nearer 
 to man because nearer to God. Not so in the 
 Palace of Art ; here man only looked at the things 
 which were for himself, which promised immediate 
 entertainment, and solace for his transient fancy. 
 
 Ah ! there was one whom the cloudy summer 
 morn reminded of those whose "goodness was 
 as a morning cloud, and as the early dew that 
 vanished away" (Hos. vi. 4). Another, when he 
 saw the sun unfailing in the regularity of his 
 course, exclaimed, " His compassions fail not ; 
 they are new every morning" (Lam. iii. 22). The 
 spring reminded David of the heart of an upright 
 ruler : " He that ruleth over men must be just, 
 ruling in the fear of God ; and he shall be as 
 the light of the morning when the sun riseth, 
 even a morning without cloud, as the tender 
 grass springing out of the earth by clear shining 
 after rain " (2 Sam. xxiii. 3, 4). 
 
 To the Psalmist, the vision of " a tract of barren 
 sand, "which in the "Palace of Art "is a mere imagi- 
 native freak, was a symbol of the soul without God :
 
 8o Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 "in a barren and dry land, where no water is." 
 To the Prophet " an iron coast and angry waves, 
 you seemed to hear them climb and fall," told of 
 the " wicked who were like a troubled sea, that 
 could not rest." 
 
 To David, "a full-fed river, winding slow by herds 
 upon an endless plain," gave the sweet promise, 
 "They shall drink of the pleasures as out of a 
 river ;" whilst " the reapers at their sultry toil " 
 told of those who had sown in tears, but should 
 " doubtless come again with rejoicing, and bringing 
 their sheaves with them." 
 
 But all these fair symbols in the Palace of Art 
 did but reflect back to the man his own selfish 
 spirit. His eyes were fast sealed to the opening 
 revelations of God's many-sided world. And as the 
 outward scenes of earth passed before him, mere 
 idle or amusing visions, so did he pass in review 
 the forms of faith, and the great religions of the 
 world. For a moment the Roman Catholic Faith 
 smiled to him, with its 
 
 " Maid-mother by a crucifix, 
 In tracts of pasture sunny warm." 
 
 In that fair symbol there was no deeper teaching, 
 no lesson of history, or feeling of universal interest
 
 Tennyson. 8 1 
 
 and significance. It was simply " the maid-mother 
 by a crucifix " a very pretty and pleasant thing for 
 you to have in your room, of which to say how fairly 
 it is painted, or how well the anatomy is studied, or 
 how " nicely felt "and harmonious the colouring. 
 No pathetic memory of the time when to the devout 
 heart the love of the Virgin was all in all ; when 
 mediaeval theology had turned God into a despot 
 seeking vengeance, and Christ into the victim upon 
 whom the Divine fury was exhausted, and thus left 
 to man a terror in place of a Father a sacrificial 
 victim instead of a friend. Then " the maid-mother 
 with the crucifix " took, indeed, in popular theology 
 the place of her Son, who had been thrust beyond 
 the region of human friendship, for she thus 
 summed up in herself the human loving side of God, 
 and restored to religious contemplation that in- 
 dispensable element of Christian devotion. But of 
 all this no faint perception in the Palace of Art. 
 
 As a caprice of the mind, the Mahomedan 
 religion next had its turn, as 
 
 " Thronging all one porch of Paradise, 
 
 A group of houris bow'd to see 
 The dying Islamite, with hands and eyes 
 That said, ' We wait for thee.' " 
 
 G
 
 82 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 There was something beautiful about the group 
 of houris bowing to see the dying Islamite ; but it 
 was a mere image, which struck upon the superfi- 
 cial sense; this self-centred and self-satisfied epicu- 
 rean smiled approvingly on houri and Islamite alike. 
 But he who looked rightly upon Mahomedanism, 
 would have seized with emotion its central truth 
 of the one great God. The Palace of Art could 
 only make room for the lowest and most sensual 
 aspect of Mahomedanism the Paradise, and the 
 Houri. 
 
 The great religions of Greece and of Rome 
 next pass before him ; but how ? They come robbed 
 of their old vitality ; no more the faith of a wor- 
 shipping people who seemed to see a Deity every- 
 where in the woods, the rivers, the skies, the 
 seas, filled with youth and Divine life. To this 
 earth-encrusted spirit the meaner, grosser aspects 
 of Greek religion alone offered themselves natu- 
 rally. The excesses of the gods : 
 
 " Europa's mantle blew unclasp'd, 
 From off her shoulder backward borne." 
 
 Or else : 
 
 " Flush'd Ganymede, his rosy thigh 
 Half buried in the Eagle's down."
 
 Tennyson. 83 
 
 Alas ! if Greek and Roman religion could 
 teach us no more than this ! So, after exhaust- 
 ing in its own vampire way the fair scenes and 
 religions of the world, the very seers of the ages 
 have now to be pressed into this fruitless barren 
 service of a barren soul. So, 
 
 " With choice paintings of wise men I hung 
 
 The royal dais round. 
 For there was Milton, like a seraph strong ; 
 Beside him Shakespeare, bland and mild ; 
 And there the world-worn Dante grasp'd his song, 
 And somewhat grimly smiled." 
 
 And in this noble assembly, dumb oracles to deaf 
 ears, the soul sat herself down on her throne at last. 
 Then comes the song of the soul, as she sings to 
 her own secret isolated self in her Palace of Art : 
 " She sat betwixt the shining oriels, 
 To sing her songs alone. 
 
 Singing and murmuring in her feastful mirth, 
 
 Joying to feel herself alive, 
 Lord over nature, lord of the visible earth, 
 
 Lord of the senses five ; 
 
 Communing with herself: ' All these are mine ; 
 
 And let the world have peace or wars, 
 Tis one to me."' 
 
 To this habit of mind 'all the rest of the world 
 is entire dross. The sense of moral responsibility 
 
 G 2
 
 84 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 is gone. What care you for the suffering, toiling 
 millions ! No thought of ameliorating or soothing 
 by attempting to enter into their sufferings ; they 
 are only so many 
 
 " Darkening droves of swine 
 That range on yonder plain," 
 
 And may they never come any nearer ! so saith 
 the soul from her Palace of Art. 
 
 " And so she throve and prosper'd : so three years 
 
 She prosper'd : on the fourth she fell, 
 Like Herod, when the shout was in his ears, 
 Struck through with pangs of hell. 
 
 Lest she should fail and perish utterly, 
 
 God, before whom ever lie hare 
 The abysmal depths of Personality, 
 
 Plagued her with sore despair. 
 
 '*' 
 
 Deep dread, and loathing of her solitude, 
 Fell on her ; from which mood was born 
 
 Scorn of herself; again, from out that mood, 
 Laughter at her self-scorn. 
 
 * What ! is not this my place of strength,' she said, 
 
 My spacious mansion built for me, 
 Whereof the strong foundation stones were laid 
 
 Since my first memory ? ' 
 
 * * * % *
 
 Tennyson. 85 
 
 So when four years were wholly finished 
 
 She threw her royal robes away ; 
 ' Make me a cottage in the vale,' she said, 
 'Where I may mourn and pray. 
 
 Yet pull not down my palace towers that are 
 
 So lightly, beautifully built : 
 Perchance I may return with others there 
 
 When I have purged my guilt.' " 
 
 So, you see after all, the healthy instincts are bound 
 to triumph at last ; the soul must get back to nature 
 out of herself, her isolation her selfish isolation, 
 and learn to help others in their lonely suffering. 
 And when the lesson of humanity is learned, and 
 not before, the lesson of art is wholesome ; then 
 you may return with others there : but the guilt 
 of selfishness and spiritual isolation must first 
 be purged ; man and nature must bind us to God. 
 
 Great allegories these, of life and sin, but not 
 of despair. I have now followed, with the poet 
 as my teacher, the three sides of human isolation, 
 summed up in three separate visions. The first 
 and noblest shows the tendency to believe that 
 we are all soul, and to ignore the bodily vehicle of 
 soul so fearfully and wonderfully made, so inti- 
 mately married to it. Whether this culminate in
 
 86 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 the religion of the solitary pillar or the secluded 
 convent, it is false. The second error lies in 
 supposing that you are merely a sensual being, 
 and that you can be happy solely in the gratifica- 
 tion of your body. The third fallacy is to think 
 that you are merely intellectual and not spiritual, 
 and that you can live for ever in a Palace of Art. 
 
 It remains for us to knit together these three 
 sides of human nature, and to this Tennyson will 
 guide us in " In Memoriam." There the whole 
 man is displayed in right proportion body, mind, 
 and spirit. All three, seen before as disjointed 
 and one-sided manifestations, are there welded 
 together into one perfect whole. Man rises, in 
 body, mind, and spirit, into the glorious liberty 
 of a child of God, and is seen aspiring to some- 
 thing like " the measure of the stature of the 
 fulness of Christ."
 
 IV. 
 
 IN MEMORIAM.
 
 IV. 
 
 Cntngfiion* 
 
 IN MEMORIAM. 
 
 |E have seen in the asceticism of Sty- 
 lites, and in the conventual devotion 
 and ecstasy of St. Agnes, what becomes 
 of human nature when considered as nothing 
 but spirit. We have noted the wreck of the 
 body, and the overthrow of the mind. We have 
 seen in the " Vision of Sin " what became 
 of human nature regarded simply as body : the 
 worship of the senses was shown to be, not only 
 the wreck of the body, but the palsy of the soul 
 and the paralysis of the intellect. We have seen 
 in the " Palace of Art " what became of the culture 
 of the body and the mind the life of the senses, 
 the intellect, and the imagination, apart from the 
 spirit ; we noted how nearly the spirit succumbed 
 to that treatment ; we assisted at the desperate 
 struggle. But it remained for us to learn what 
 human nature might be when treated as St. Paul
 
 go - Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 treats it, in body, mind, and spirit. The isolated 
 elements combine at last to make the whole man 
 the sublime humanity as conceived by God like 
 God Himself, tripartite and triune. 
 
 This is the lesson of the " In Memoriam :" the 
 developed humanity stands forth at last, dis- 
 ciplined by loss, purified by suffering, and lifted 
 up into heavenly places through the earth-born 
 love. 
 
 In the " In Memoriam " you have a man who 
 thrills and kindles to all outward impressions ; 
 his senses are keenly alive to every change of the 
 seasons, to all external nature, to every pulse of 
 pleasure and pain ; his mind is alert "who loves 
 not knowledge? who shall rail against her beauty?" 
 his affections are active they cannot always 
 acquiesce in purely intellectual speculation, the 
 heart stands up and answers, " 1 have felt ;" and 
 above all there is the brooding sense of the infinite 
 mystery about us, and the longing for the inhnite 
 love, and the inspired eye which looks through 
 nature up to nature's God that God who ever 
 lives and loves " one God, one law, one element, 
 and one far off Divine event, to which the whole 
 creation moves."
 
 Tennyson, 9 1 
 
 Now the key-note of this great poem is sorrow 
 sorrow coming out of the shadow of a great loss ; 
 and the atmosphere of sorrow is just the atmo- 
 sphere in which it is the most instructive to study 
 human nature. Do you want to know about the 
 body ? It is not best to study it in a state of 
 health, but when it is diseased. Doctors will tell 
 you that is the time to make discoveries and 
 experiments, and to add permanently to our 
 understanding of the human framework ; and in- 
 deed, most of our medical knowledge is derived not 
 merely from morbid anatomy, but from the diag- 
 nosis of various diseases not the monotonous 
 chronicle of healthy days and nights. And to 
 prove a man, you must find him out in seasons of 
 sorrow and pain : how does he bear it, how docs 
 he act ? And a man who will note such an 
 experience adds to our stock of knowledge, and 
 thought, and feeling ; he is a teacher, and his 
 book is the book of nature, and of life. And what 
 he does for one he does for all : one man's 
 inner life is really a thousand inner lives ; he reads 
 them the open secrets of their hearts, by showing 
 them his own ; he and they are no longer solitary 
 units, but are seen, in a great work of art a
 
 92 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 picture or a poem to have universal elements, 
 to belong to a whole. That is why we listen 
 with wrapt attention to him " who sings to one 
 clear harp in divers tones." And the tones of 
 sorrow invariably arrest; they are of profound and 
 general interest ; they draw us in spite of our- 
 selves ; they win us and cling to us because they 
 reflect some of the deepest and most universal 
 aspects of our common humanity. That is why 
 Jesus Christ, who was " a man of sorrows," stands 
 for ever by the wayside in the great thoroughfares 
 of time, saying, " Behold and see, if there is any 
 sorrow like unto my sorrow." And because he 
 was " a man of sorrows, and acquainted with 
 grief," therefore he could say, " Come 'unto me, 
 all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will 
 give you rest." 
 
 Sorrow, as W. F. Robertson has remarked, acts 
 very differently upon different constitutions. It is 
 like fire it melts some like wax, and hardens others 
 like clay ; it sifts a man's heart, it finds out weak- 
 nesses, it tries him like gold; and that is its best 
 work. The fire of tribulation has often a great 
 cleansing and purifying effect ; it wakes up a 
 man's inner life, smelts the dross out of him, leav-
 
 Tennyson. 93 
 
 ing him pure gold. And the work of sorrow was 
 never shown so noble and so complete as in this 
 great poem of " In Memoriam." 
 
 The circumstances from which it sprang are 
 probably known to every one here present. 
 Alfred Tennyson, in his youth, formed a very close 
 friendship with Arthur Hallam, son of the great 
 historian Henry Hallam. The Hallams at that 
 time lived in Wimpole Street ; the historian and 
 his son used to sit in this church of St. James, 
 Westmoreland Street, in a pew just behind the 
 first pillar, about forty-five years ago ; and it is a 
 curious incident, that the first time I saw Alfred 
 Tennyson, in this church not very long ago, he 
 was sitting, with his son Hallam Tennyson, almost 
 in the same place. 
 
 In the early Autumn of 1833, Arthur Hallam 
 went abroad: on the i6th of September, at 
 Vienna, a sudden rush of blood to the head, put 
 an instantaneous end to his life. " God's finger 
 touched him, -and he slept." On the 3rd of Jan 
 uary, 1834, he was buried in the chancel of the 
 church at Clevedon, on the Severn. Tennyson's 
 whole soul seems to have been wrapped up in this 
 early affection . For a time he seems to have been
 
 94 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 almost paralyzed with sorrow ; and when the heavy 
 cloud began to lift, out of the great calamity 
 came those tender voices of passion, despair, 
 remonstrance, and hope, which have comforted so 
 many forlorn spirits, and are perhaps destined to 
 be Tennyson's most precious legacy to posterity. 
 
 The opening of the " In Memoriam," and its close, 
 are like the calm deep sea water. We go from a 
 noble port of peace, across a stormy restless 
 ocean, and we come at last to the shining coast, 
 to the fair haven of the soul, to the eternal rest. 
 
 Although the " In Memoriam " is full of wild cries, 
 doubts, difficulties, and sorrows, it begins, as it 
 ends, with a triumphant strain of praise : 
 
 " Strong Son of God, immortal Love, 
 
 Whom we, that have not seen Thy face, 
 By faith, and faith alone, embrace, 
 
 Believing where we cannot prove ; 
 
 Thine are these orbs of light and shade ; 
 Thou madest life in man and brute ; 
 Thou madest Death ; and lo, Thy foot 
 
 Is on the skull which Thou hast made. 
 
 Thou wilt not leave us in the dust : 
 Thou madest man, he knows not why ; 
 He thinks he was not made to die ; 
 
 And Thou hast made him : Thou art just.
 
 Tennyson. 95 
 
 Forgive these wild and wandering cries, 
 
 Confusions of a wasted youth ; 
 
 Forgive them where they fail in truth, 
 And in Thy wisdom make me wise. 
 
 Some old Father of the Church says, that every 
 human life may be divided into four periods. 
 The first period is that one in which a man is 
 overcome without a struggle ; the second period 
 is that in which a man struggles, but is overcome ; 
 the third is that one in which a man struggles and 
 overcomes ; and the fourth is a period of peace. 
 Those divisions may be applied to the psychology 
 of the " In Memoriam." It is the story of, ist, 
 sorrow unopposed ; 2nd, sorrow opposed ; 3rd, 
 sorrow conquered ; 4th, peace. Of course, as 
 these phases run into each other the- divisions 
 must not be too closely pressed, although I have 
 marked them at certain stanzas. 
 
 I. SORROWUNOPPOSED. All through the long 
 first period, running from the ist to the 55th stanza, 
 certainly we have the spectacle of a mind tossed 
 about on an uneasy sea of sorrow. At first, Sorrow 
 seems to be accepted as- his natural companion, 
 though her's is " a cruel fellowship," and she a
 
 gS Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 "Priestess in the halls of Death." The world 
 seems like a dream, and 
 
 " Nature like a phantom stands, 
 With all the music in her tone, 
 A hollow echo of our own 
 A hollow form, with empty hands." 
 
 He walks abroad : he gets no comfort from out- 
 ward nature. Just as you or I may have looked up 
 to the silent stars, and gazed upon the glory of the 
 summerfields,andhavehadtofeelasif they mocked 
 us. All joy seems to have been taken out of the 
 world, when grief is too heavy and loss too recent. 
 
 Slowly the ministry of nature begins, by reflect- 
 ing his moods ; for " he sees himself in all he sees." 
 But the saddest aspects alone arrest him : in the 
 churchyard, the old yew netting its fibres about the 
 dreamless head ; or " from waste places comes a 
 cry, and murmurs from the dying sun." For him no 
 cheerful strain streams from the earthly paradise 
 of summer ; but the dove sings her dolorous mes- 
 sage. The winds wail sadly ; Autumn comes, and 
 " the last red leaf is whirled away," and " the rooks 
 are blown about the skies," till at last the pressure 
 of outward nature is almost too much for him : 
 " I scarce could brook the strain and stir 
 Which make the barren branches bound."
 
 Tennyson. 97 
 
 And the nearest approach to solace comes to 
 him in the peace and silence of the lonely Autumn 
 mornings, on the wild heath : 
 
 " Calm and deep peace in this wide air, 
 These leaves that redden to the fall; 
 And in my heart, if calm at all, 
 The calmness of a calm despair." 
 
 The usual letters of condolence arrive : 
 " One writes that ' Other friends remain/ 
 That ' Loss is common to the race,' 
 And common is the common-place, 
 And vacant chaff, well meant for grain." 
 
 But his heart is elsewhere. In imagination he 
 traverses distant waters, and reaches the ship 
 coming homewards with its sad freight, the body 
 
 of his friend : 
 
 " I hear the noise about the keel ; 
 
 I hear the bell struck in the night ; 
 I see the cabin window bright ; 
 I see the sailor at the wheel" 
 
 At last the ship enters English waters, and the 
 transference of his friend's body from foreign to 
 English soil is memorialized in these exquisite 
 
 lines : 
 
 " The Danube to the Severn gave 
 
 The darken'd heart that beat no more ; 
 They laid him by .the pleasant shore, 
 And in the hearing of the wave. 
 
 II
 
 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 There twice a day the Severn fills j 
 The salt sea-water passes by, 
 And hushes half the babbling Wye, 
 
 And makes a silence in the hills. 
 
 The Wye is hush'd, nor moved along, 
 And hush'd my deepest grief of all, 
 When, fill'd with tears that cannot fall, 
 
 I brim with sorrow-drowning song. 
 
 The tide flows down, the wave again 
 Is vocal in its wooded walls ; 
 My deeper anguish also falls, 
 
 And I can speak a little then." 
 
 Nothing is now left but memory . 
 
 " The path by which we twain did go, 
 
 Which led by tracts that pleased us well, 
 Thro' four sweet years arose and fell, 
 From flower to flower, from snow to snow. 
 
 And we with singing cheer'd the way ; 
 And, crown'd with all the season lent, 
 From April on to April went, 
 
 And glad at heart from May to May. 
 
 But where the path we walk'd began 
 To slant the fifth Autumnal slope, 
 As we descended, following Hope, 
 
 There sat the Shadow fear'd of man, 
 
 Who broke our fair companionship, 
 And spread his mantle, dark and cold, 
 And wrapt thee formless in the fold, 
 
 And dull'd the murmur on thy lip,
 
 Tennyson. 99 
 
 And bore thee where I could not see, 
 Nor follow, though I walk in haste, 
 And think that, somewheie in the waste, 
 
 The Shadow sits and waits for me." 
 
 So months rolled on, and Christmas came a 
 sad anniversary for many who have lost dear 
 friends. They may try the old pastimes, and the 
 old songs ; but the joy has faded out of life, and 
 now it is pain that binds heart to heart, as once it 
 was joy. But the memory of the dead seems to 
 lift them up to a higher level, and their hearts are 
 raised for a moment beyond the clouds of sorrow 
 and death, into the heaven of consolation and 
 peace : 
 
 " We paused : the winds were in the beech : 
 We heard them sweep the winter land ; 
 And in a circle hand in hand 
 Sat silent, looking each at each. 
 
 Then echo-like our voices rang ; 
 
 We sang, tho' every eye was dim, 
 
 A merry song we sang with him 
 Last year ; impetuously we sang. 
 
 We ceased : a gentler feeling crept 
 
 Upon us : surely rest is meet. 
 
 ' They rest,' we said ; ' their rest is sweet/ 
 And silence follow'd, and we wept. 
 H 2
 
 ioo Poets in the Pidpit. 
 
 Our voices took a higher range ; 
 
 Once more we sang : ' They do not die, 
 
 Nor lose their mortal sympathy, 
 Nor change to us, although they change ; 
 
 Rapt from the fickle and the frail, 
 
 With gather'd power, yet the same, 
 
 Pierces the keen seraphic flame 
 From orb to orb, from veil to veil.' " 
 
 So passes the first Christmas j and as life re- 
 sumes its usual tenour, and the shock of grief sub- 
 sides, the mind awakes to those unquiet specula- 
 tions which force themselves upon us from time to 
 time, as we contemplate the mystery of Death. 
 " Where is the spirit ? What is the spirit doing ?" 
 the old questions, which will not die, come back, 
 again and again. Perhaps his friend has ceased 
 to be ! perhaps if he exists he will be for ever out 
 of reach ! a 
 
 "Spectral doubt, which makes me cold 
 That I shall be thy mate no more. 
 Tho' following with an upward mind 
 
 The wonders that have come to thee, 
 
 Thro' all the secular to be, 
 But evermore a life behind." 
 
 So those who have gone before seem to have 
 stolen a march upon us, and perhaps we shall 
 never be able to overtake them ! Another specu-
 
 Tennyson. 101 
 
 lation then comes : perhaps the life of the soul is 
 suspended in sleep, so that when the body lies in 
 the grave the spirit also sleeps until the fulness of 
 time, when life shall come back, and love survive ! 
 Joyful anticipation ! Nothing of the bitter past 
 shall stain the long harmonious years ; only, per- 
 chance, some shadows of remembrance left, some 
 dim touch of earthly things. But this thought is in 
 its turn clouded over by the old haunting notion 
 of the Nirwana : perhaps we shall be merged in the 
 ocean of Being, all individuality lost. But no ; 
 each being has been rounded to a separate mind ; 
 his isolation grows defined, and for ever ! Eagerly 
 he gropes about, but all in vain, for a proof, a hint, 
 a suggestion, that it is so ; and his weary spirit at 
 last exhales its sorrow, its longing, and its fatigue, 
 
 in prayer: 
 
 " Be near me when my light is low, 
 
 When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick 
 
 And tingle, and the heart is sick, 
 And all the wheels of Being slow. 
 Be near me when the sensuous frame 
 
 Is rack'd with pangs that conquer trust ; 
 
 And Time, a maniac scattering dust ; 
 And Life, a Fury slinging flame. 
 Be near me when my faith is dry, 
 
 And men the flies of latter spring,
 
 IO2 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 That lay their eggs, and sting, and sing, 
 And weave their petty cells, and die. 
 
 Be near me when I fade away, 
 To point the term of human strife, 
 And on the low dark verge of life 
 
 The twilight of eternal day." 
 
 There is nothing left for the soul in its abyss of 
 sorrow, but trust ! infinite trust ! 
 
 " Behold, we know not anything ; 
 
 I can but trust that good shall fall 
 At last far off at last, to all, 
 And every winter change to spring." 
 
 But the glow of faith itself passes ; that too was 
 unstable and transitory ; and the broken spirit 
 relapses into despondency : 
 
 " I falter where I firmly trod ; 
 
 And falling, with my weight of cares, 
 Upon the world's great altar-stairs 
 That slope through darkness up to God," 
 
 he feels " the weight of loss is ever there." 
 
 It is the final note of the first period, that of 
 " Sorrow unopposed," which closes at Section LV.: 
 
 " O life ! as futile, then, as frail ! 
 
 O for thy voice to soothe and bless ! 
 What hope of answer, or redress ? 
 Behind the veil; behind the veil." 
 
 In the first period, then, we have traversed seven
 
 Tennyson. 103 
 
 more or less defined phases or moods of sorrow : 
 first, he is stunned ; second, he realizes his loss ; 
 third, he awakes to find all outward things are so 
 many endless reflections of his grief ; fourth, he 
 turns from the consolation of friends, to intellectual 
 speculation ; fifth, thence to prayer ; sixth, thence 
 to desponding confession of ignorance ; seventh, 
 relapse into hopelessness. He has throughout 
 been the sport of moods which chased each other 
 in rapid succession : he is overcome without a 
 struggle. 
 
 II. SORROW OPPOSED. In this period, from 
 LV. to LXXXIL, he struggles, and is overcome. 
 To all moods, however dismal, belong merciful re- 
 actions, and in seasons of deep sorrow we some- 
 times feel angry because we cannot be always sad : 
 we resent any lifting of the cloud, any approach 
 to levity or laughter. The mood in which recovery 
 is possible begins with a more quiet contemplation 
 an ability to face the sad aspect of lost love 
 calmly. The friend of the dead lies awake, and 
 sees in imagination the distant moonlight stealing 
 over the memorial tablet of Arthur Hallam, just as 
 it steals over the walls of his own bedchamber.
 
 iO4 Poets in the Pidpit. 
 
 And now the second Christmas is already upon 
 him, and the months have brought with them a 
 slow and silent change : he cannot but be affected 
 by the inability of the young and happy around 
 him to be ever brooding over past pain ; he is 
 shocked, but only half-shocked : 
 
 " Who show'd a token of distress ? 
 No single tear, no mark of pain ! 
 O sorrow ! then can sorrow wane ? 
 O grief ! can grief be changed to less ? " 
 
 He seeks for the note of a reconciling term 
 he finds it : 
 
 " O last regret, regret can die ! 
 
 No ; mixt with all this mystic frame, 
 Her deep relations are the same, 
 But with long use her tears are dry." 
 
 He is beginning to acquiesce in this shifting of 
 moods, when, with one of those sudden emotional 
 bursts to which sensitive spirits are liable, there 
 comes upon him the vision of what might have 
 been his friend sitting " crowned with good," 
 married to a beloved sister of the poet, himself 
 an honoured guest, the children babbling " uncle " 
 on his knee ; the happy social converse of kindred 
 spirits ; " of later genial table-talk, or deep dis-
 
 Tennyson. 105 
 
 pute and graceful jest." It was one of those 
 sudden day-dreams, that depart as swiftly, 
 leaving us the more forlorn. 
 
 " What reed was that on which I leant ? 
 Ah, backward fancy, wherefore wake 
 The old bitterness again, and break 
 The low beginnings of content ? " 
 
 Thus the four stages of the second period, in 
 which he struggles and is overcome, are also 
 marked: ist, more quiet contemplation; leading 
 to, 2nd, more normal acceptance of life, as marked 
 at Christmas-time; 3rd, followed by more resigned 
 views of death ; when, 4th, the low beginnings of 
 content are suddenly dissipated by a vision of 
 memory and anticipation, and the first recovering 
 mood is thus baffled. 
 
 III. SORROW CONQUERED. A transition pe- 
 riod may be indicated at Stanza LXXXIV. : 
 
 " This truth came borne with bier and pall 
 I felt it, when I sorrow'd most 
 'Tis better to have loved and lost, 
 Than never to have loved at all." 
 
 But he will not admit that his love is really less 
 intense :
 
 io6 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 " And so my passion hath not swerved 
 To works of weakness, but I find 
 An image comforting the mind, 
 And in my grief a strength reserved." 
 
 Sooner or later the sane voices of common day 
 make themselves heard. You have no right to 
 be prostrated in such a manner as not to rise out 
 of sorrow, misfortune, or calamity ; it may press 
 you down, but you should struggle out of it, and 
 face life again, with all its great responsibilities ; 
 you should return to life a deeper, truer, more 
 many-sided human being, than you were before. 
 By virtue of what you are, you must go back and 
 re-enter the arena of life ; the inner voices drive 
 you there, k is your destiny ; and as long as a 
 spark of vitality remains, nature reminds you of 
 the inexorable needs of a loving and responsive 
 soul : 
 
 "My heart, tho' widow'd, may not rest 
 Quite in the love of what is gone, 
 But seeks to beat in time with one 
 That warms another living breast." 
 
 So, you see, one object after another may be 
 taken away, but the capacity to love does not 
 cease. " Friend after friend departs ! Who has not
 
 Tennyson. 107 
 
 lost a friend ? " But your heart will still require 
 some object ; the heart must grind something ; if 
 you do not give it good corn to grind, it will grind 
 its very self to pieces. God has so ordered and 
 set this world, that objects of affection may, one 
 after another, be taken away, and yet the healthy 
 susceptibilities of the heart have still something 
 left to do ; they wake up from the sleep of sorrow, 
 hungry, and thirsty, and eager. If you will only 
 lift up your eyes, there are still men and women 
 willing to be loved, still interests and objects 
 worthy to be pursued. And indeed you have no 
 right to shut yourself up, when there is a whole 
 world crying out for sympathy, when help is so 
 much needed, when there are so many poor for- 
 saken ones, who would give anything for a little of 
 your kindness, and thought, and feeling, which 
 you are consuming on yourself, or on some object 
 which has been taken away from your gaze for ever. 
 So the poet and teacher speaks aloud to all 
 prostrated by sorrow, failure, disappointment, or 
 loss, of "the mighty hopes which make us men." 
 These it cannot suit him to forget, and his pulses 
 begin to beat again " for other friends that once 
 he met."
 
 io8 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 Here is struck the true note of the true heart 
 of a man or woman arising out of the depths of 
 despair, and out of the paralysis of grief, to some- 
 thing like a healthy perception of human life again. 
 And above and beyond the voices of affliction, he 
 seems to hear his beloved friend himself saying, 
 
 " Arise, and get thee forth, and seek 
 A friendship for the years to come." 
 
 From this time, having indissolubly associated 
 his friend with the change, peace seems to dawn 
 upon his perturbed spirit ; and now, instead of 
 being reflected by outward nature, he reflects it, 
 and bathes himself in the light, and drinks in 
 eagerly the refreshing and invigorating influences 
 of the happy spring : 
 
 " Wild bird, whose warble, liquid sweet, 
 Rings Eden thro' the budded quicks, 
 O tell me where the senses mix, 
 O tell me where the passions meet." 
 Or 
 
 " Sweet after showers, ambrosial air, 
 
 That rollest from the gorgeous gloom 
 Of evening over brake and bloom." 
 
 In this mood of reserved strength, with a re- 
 stored balance of perception he can go back to the 
 very scenes of his college life. He revisits Trinity
 
 Tennyson. 109 
 
 College, passes through the tall avenues, over 
 the bridge, lingers by the river, in the street, in 
 the College hall and chapel and, strange enough, 
 it is without pain, but in softened lines of happy 
 memory, that he recalls his friend's life and con- 
 verse in those haunts of undergraduate life. But 
 one cry breaks from him of passion, more than 
 of despair when he thinks how many dead, once 
 wept for, are now unmourned : 
 
 " Ah dear, but come thou back to me : 
 
 Whatever change the years have wrought, 
 I find not yet one lonely thought 
 That cries against my wish for thee." 
 
 But we have entered upon the third period, in 
 which he struggles and overcomes. The tone 
 has grown more sober, the poignant grief is pass- 
 ing away, and his sorrow is more like a pathetic 
 memory than a present pain. When the third 
 Christmas comes round, it is not like the first, 
 drowned in tears ; nor yet like the second, when 
 the inability to grieve continuously is almost met 
 with impatience ; but the bells sound the joyous 
 and triumphant note of the Christmas season. 
 Wider than any individual grief or joy is that mes- 
 sage of peace on earth and goodwill towards men.
 
 no Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 To him it is the "resurgam" of healthy sensi- 
 bility and hopefulness ; and the strain that now 
 rises is full of victory and praise : 
 
 " Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky, 
 The flying cloud, the frosty light : 
 The year is dying in the night ; 
 Ring out, wild bells, and let him die. 
 
 Ring out the old, ring in the new ; 
 
 Ring, happy bells, across the snow : 
 
 The year is going, let him go ; 
 Ring out the false, ring in the true. 
 
 Ring out the grief that saps the mind, 
 For those that here we see no more ; 
 Ring out the feud of rich and poor ; 
 
 Ring in redress to all mankind. 
 
 Ring out old shapes of foul disease ; 
 
 Ring out the narrowing lust of gold ; 
 
 Ring out the thousand wars of old; 
 Ring in the thousand years of peace. 
 
 Ring in the valiant man and free, 
 The larger heart, the kindlier hand ; 
 Ring out the darkness of the land ; 
 
 Ring in the Christ that is to be." 
 
 IV. PEACE. That jubilant melody sweet as
 
 Tennyson. 1 1 1 
 
 the angels' Peace on earth, and goodwill to men, 
 heralds us into the last period of peace. He has 
 now triumphed over sorrow. The dark past rolls 
 away like a cloud, leaving the horizon clear. The 
 bells have rung out the weary load of suffering, 
 and rung in human fellowship, sympathy, and a 
 new content : 
 
 " I will not shut me from my kind ; 
 And lest I stiffen into stone, 
 I will not eat my heart alone, 
 Nor feed with sighs a passing wind." 
 
 And of that new communion, that restored and 
 vigorous life, chastened at the outset by pain and 
 loss, we have reaped the rich harvest, as year 
 after year one noble and representative song after 
 another has rolled forth "from that clear harp in 
 divers tones," enriching, beautifying, and raising 
 the literature of our age to the highest levels of 
 imagination and thought. 
 
 The Poets of the age those who read the inner 
 life of the time, and form it are ever the measure 
 of its conduct, philosophy, and achievement ; and 
 nobly has Tennyson fulfilled his mission. 
 
 At the close of the " In Memoriam " outward
 
 1 1 2 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 nature sinks back into her appointed place, and is 
 seen for the first time in right proportion to the soul ; 
 she is no longer the slave of his sensibility, reflect- 
 ing all his moods, or a tyrant imposing her own. 
 She is no longer seen subjectively, but has be- 
 come sweetly objective. She is the garden of 
 Eden, in which he walks, which ministers to him, 
 consoles, thrills, soothes, and delights him. 
 
 And now, with an intuitive sense of artistic finish 
 and completeness such as we observe in Mendels- 
 sohn, when his opening phrase recurs at the close 
 of some lengthy movement, suggesting what has 
 gone before, and yet changing and completing it 
 in the very suggestion there comes back the 
 vision of the beloved friend ; but his form is 
 changed ; his face glows in the distant light of 
 heaven ; he looks out upon us as in a vision ; he 
 is rapt for ever now from the fickle and the frail 
 the distance is immeasurable. The friend looks 
 up, and no longer thinks of bridging over the gulph ; 
 but he sees beyond it, and his soul grows calm in 
 the softened light, as the last spiritualized vision 
 of his friend passes before him : 
 
 " Dear friend, far off, my lost desire 
 So far, so near in woe and weal ;
 
 Tennyson. 113 
 
 O loved the most when most I feel 
 There is a lower and a higher ; 
 
 Known and unknown ; human, divine ; 
 
 Sweet human hand, and lips, and eye ; 
 
 Dear heavenly friend, that canst not die, 
 Mine, mine, for ever ; ever mine ; 
 
 Strange friend past, present, and to be ; 
 
 Loved deeplier, darklier understood ; 
 
 Behold, I dream a dream of good, 
 And mingle all the world with thee." 
 
 How different is this from the former strains of 
 wild sorrow, restless doubt, brooding sadness, and 
 despair ! 
 
 It is this " strange friend," so spiritualized, who 
 leads his own spirit to find that supreme rest in 
 God with which the poem concludes. After the 
 whirlwind, and the storm, and the fire, comes the 
 still small voice. Grief, and agony, and doubt, and 
 all the miserable speculations which haunt and 
 corrode the inner life, have been swept away ; the 
 bitter and fragmentary experiences have at last 
 " orbed into a perfect whole/' The entire period 
 of probation stands out, and the human heart 
 owns the accomplished work. And thus, through 
 love possessed and lost, the soul has been lifted 
 into that heavenly sphere in which life grows 
 
 I
 
 H4 Poets in the Pidpit. 
 
 sweet and wholesome once more, and all love is 
 found again in God. 
 
 " Now fades the last long streak of snow ; 
 Now burgeons every maze of quick 
 About the flowering squares, and thick 
 By ashen roots the violets blow. 
 
 Now rings the woodland loud and long, 
 
 The distance takes a lovelier hue, 
 
 And drown'd in yonder living blue 
 The lark becomes a sightless song." 
 
 In this period of peace we get those large and 
 mellowed utterances which raise the poem above 
 all transitory or accidental circumstances, and 
 give it that peculiar glow of radiant and supernal 
 beauty : 
 
 " That which we dare invoke to bless ; 
 
 Our dearest faith ; our ghastliest doubt : 
 He, they, one, all ; within, without ; 
 The power in darkness whom we guess ; 
 
 I found him not in world or sun, 
 
 Or eagle's wing, or insect's eye ; 
 
 Nor thro' the questions men may try, 
 The petty cobwebs we have spun : 
 
 If e'er, when faith had fall'n asleep, 
 
 I heard a voice ' Believe no more,' 
 
 And heard an ever breaking shore 
 That tumbled in the Godless deep ;
 
 Tennyson. 1 1 5 
 
 A warmth within the breast would melt 
 The freezing reason's colder part, 
 And, like a man in wrath, the heart 
 
 Stood up and answer'd ' I have felt.' 
 
 No, like a child in doubt and fear : 
 But that blind clamour made me wise ; 
 Then was I as a child that cries, 
 
 But crying knows his father near ; 
 
 And what I seem beheld again 
 
 What is, and no man understands ; 
 
 And out of darkness came the hands 
 That reach thro' nature, moulding men." 
 
 And what remains of broken tendrils, unsolved 
 mysteries, unsatisfied longings, are also brought 
 together at last, and left in the Divine keeping " in 
 manus tuas, Domine ! " 
 
 " O living Will ! that shall endure 
 
 When all that seems shall suffer shock ! 
 Rise in the spiritual rock ; 
 Flow thro' our deeds and make them pure, 
 
 That we may lift from out the dust 
 
 A voice as unto Him that hears, 
 
 A cry above the conquer'd years 
 To One that with us works ; and trust, 
 
 With faith that comes of self-control, 
 The truths that never can be proved 
 Until we close with all we loved, 
 
 And all we flow from, soul in soul." 
 
 I 2
 
 V. 
 
 laobert Brotoning, 
 
 NEW YEAR'S EVE.
 
 V. 
 
 Srotomfng. 
 
 NEW YEAR'S EVE. 
 
 HIS evening's meditation does not pre- 
 tend to give an estimate of Robert 
 Browning's works. Critically, therefore, 
 it is narrowed into this : a study in Robert Browning 
 for the purposes of edification and devout thought. 
 I shall deal mainly with a poem entitled " Christ- 
 mas Eve and Easter Day," stopping short of the 
 Easter Day portion in reality a separate poem. 
 
 Like the wise man of old, the wise men of this 
 and every other age ask " Who are our true spiritual 
 teachers?" We are all looking for stars in the 
 East. From the Milky Way from the tangled 
 nebulae from the transient fires that flash and 
 pass these Eastern lights slowly but surely disen- 
 gage themselves, and orb into solitary splendour 
 as each century waxes and wanes. 
 
 The first ten years of. a man's life-work seldom 
 fixes his position, although the work then done
 
 1 20 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 sometimes does. Not all who dazzle are destined 
 to reign ; not all who reign, are at first seen to wear 
 the imperial purple. Now that the century grows 
 old, we can see who have been its teachers in re- 
 ligion, science, art, painting, poetry ; and Tennyson 
 and Browning are probably the two names which 
 will be chosen to follow the great Lake School of 
 Wordsworth ; just as Schumann and Wagner are 
 the two real representatives of German music, 
 after Beethoven. 
 
 Time decides slowly, but inexorably ; in the long 
 run, the " vox populi " is the " vox Dei ;" its judg- 
 ment is not capricious, but exact, logical, axiomatic. 
 
 How the great names that win have been at first 
 derided or ignored, is a painful and instructive com- 
 mon place. Some of us can remember the time 
 when John Henry Newman was accounted a mere 
 sectarian fanatic, with a weakness for Popery and 
 prelacy ; when Frederick Maurice was dismissed as 
 an amiable mystic with a taint of heresy ; when 
 Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mill were simply 
 not read. I can recollect the mixed rage and 
 pleasantry which greeted Mr. Ruskin's " Stones of 
 Venice " and the "Seven Lamps of Architecture" 
 the storm of ridicule which threatened to blight Pre-
 
 Robert Browning. 121 
 
 Raphaelism in art the pitying smile with which 
 one's elders greeted the rising appreciation of Tenny- 
 son, whom Bulwer, that splendid literary Philistine, 
 called "Miss Alfred." Jests about the Music of 
 the Future, and Wagner, are only just beginning to 
 sound old and out of place. And we may recall 
 how, a few years ago, the gifted Elizabeth Barrett 
 Browning, now almost forgotten, was thought a 
 greater poet than her husband just as Byron was 
 preferred to Wordsworth, and Moore to Shelley. 
 
 I. BROWNING'S CHARACTERISTICS. What 
 has given Browning his peculiar and increasing 
 hold over our age ? As a singer he has been 
 surpassed by many inferior men. I had almost 
 said he seldom sings. But he is a poet for all 
 that, and he can sing, and sing sweetly too when 
 he pleases. But he is chiefly dear to the age as 
 a feeler and a thinker ; he is also dear because 
 knowing all, and having been racked with its doubts, 
 and stretched upon the mental torture-wheels of his 
 time, he does not despair. Having sounded cynicism 
 and pessimism to their depths, he comes by a very 
 different road to the same crowning conclusion as 
 his brother poets, Tennyson and Longfellow ; and
 
 122 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 sometimes firmly, and sometimes faintly, trusts the 
 larger hope, but always in the last analysis and 
 residuum of thought trusts. Coming from such 
 a mind such a buoyant message this vexed and 
 storm-tossed age will not willingly let die. It 
 clings to Browning ; it bears with his moods ; it 
 even buys much that it cannot understand, and 
 more that it does not attempt to read ; it lays 
 "Paracelsus" aside; it confesses never to have 
 quite got through that work as unique and as 
 representative of our age as the " In Memoriam " 
 -I allude to " The Ring and the Book." But 
 Browning must be in the house. 
 
 Browning is our friend ; we take him by the hand ; 
 we feel we can trust him ; he is equally incapable 
 of lying or cajolery. We say to him, you have the 
 brain of juggler ; you have the insight and sensi- 
 bility of the poet, the soul of an artist ; you pretend 
 to look on, and analyze, and describe, sometimes 
 coldly, even cynically ; but you care not if we see 
 the honest generous face through the thin mask ; 
 for in reality you agonize over all you do ; you know 
 all and see all ; nothing eludes the vigilance of your 
 incisive intellect ; and what lies beyond its reach is 
 brought fluttering to your feet by flashes of sur-
 
 Robert Browning. 123 
 
 prizing intuition. And the faculty for which we 
 prize you most is just this, that you have an in- 
 exhaustible interest in human nature ; that you love 
 "man and woman;" that you believe in the soul and 
 in God. 
 
 It was not easy for the public to find all this out 
 at first. Browning had no Gospel to plead, no 
 theory or plan of life to announce. What he was, 
 what he could teach, came to us, probably as it 
 came to him, spontaneously and by degrees. As the 
 French say, he allowed himself to be divined. Never 
 was Stuart Mill's definition of poetry more happily 
 and vigorously illustrated than in Browning's poems: 
 " Poetry is the expression of thought coloured by 
 emotion, expressed in metre, and overheard" 
 
 It is what we overhear as he thinks out loud 
 which rivets, and wraps our senses nearer to the 
 poet's inmost soul. 
 
 Browning's obscurity, and occasional incapacity 
 to express himself simply, is often compensated by 
 a direct and astonishing vigour of expression, 
 which strikes home with the force of a sledge 
 hammer. 
 
 " Fear death ? to feel the fog in my throat, 
 The mist in my face,
 
 1 24 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 When the snows begin, and the blasts denote 
 
 I am nearing the place, 
 The power of the night, the press of the storm, 
 
 The host of the foe, 
 
 Where He stands the Arch Fear, in a visible form ? 
 Yet the strong man must go." 
 
 With characteristic boldness he faces the 
 crisis leaps across the very chasm of death, into 
 the life beyond : 
 
 " I was ever a fighter ; so one fight more, 
 
 The best and the last ! 
 I would hate that death bandaged my eyes and forbore, 
 
 And bade me creep past. 
 No ! let me taste the whole of it fair, like my peers 
 
 The heroes of old ; 
 Bear the brunt ; in a minute pay glad life's arrears 
 
 Of pain, darkness, and cold. 
 For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave ; 
 
 The black minute 's at end ; 
 And the elements' rage, the fiends' voices' rave, 
 
 Shall dwindle and blend 
 Shall change shall become, first a peace, then a joy 
 
 Then a light. * * * 
 
 I recall but one other instance in which the 
 dread passage of the soul has been described in 
 poetry ; and it is curious to contrast the terrible 
 realism of Browning, with Pope's splendid burst
 
 Robert Browning. 125 
 
 of artificial eloquence in " The Dying Christian to 
 his Soul :" 
 
 " Vital spark of heavenly flame, 
 Quit, oh quit this mortal frame ! 
 Trembling, hoping, ling'ring, flying 
 Oh the pain, the bliss, of dying ! 
 Cease, fond nature, cease thy strife, 
 And let me languish into life. 
 
 Hark ! they whisper ! Angels say, 
 * Sister spirit, come away ! ' 
 What is this absorbs me quite, 
 Steals my senses, shuts my sight, 
 Drowns my spirit, draws my breath 
 Tell me, my soul, can this be death? 
 
 The world recedes it disappears ; 
 Heaven opens on my eyes; my ears 
 
 With sounds seraphic ring ! 
 Lend, lend, your wings. I mount ! I fly ! 
 O grave, where is thy victory ? 
 
 O death, where is thy sting ? 
 
 But not only for the sake of his force, but 
 also for his subtlety, the student of Browning 
 is patient with his obscurity ; and often his very 
 failure to express simply, gives him strange power 
 to express what others could not render at all. 
 He revels in the abstruse and difficult, like a con- 
 summate executive musician, who bungles over a
 
 126 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 simple tune and glories in almost impossible diffi- 
 culties. " Caliban upon Setebos " is an example. 
 The dull gropings after the natural religion of 
 terror by a being half brute half human the 
 instinctive analysis of the world, untouched by the 
 glow of an awakened spirit in man and unil- 
 lumined by the love of God, the speculation and 
 sentiment in "Caliban upon Setebos" is, in short, 
 the whole argument needful to enforce the neces- 
 sity of a Divine sustained communication between 
 God and man. It images graphically what the life 
 of man what his feeling towards the unseen 
 would have been, had there been no inner teach- 
 ing, no development of religion, no Divine inter- 
 communion. The human nature in Caliban shuts 
 up all those elements in us which cry out for a 
 living and a loving God a God manifest in the 
 flesh. 
 
 There was never a poet at once so graphic so 
 capable of painting with a few spots of colour, and 
 yet so independent of what is graphic and external. 
 Caliban is full of an eastern glow of colour a minute 
 detail and observation of external nature, worthy of 
 a naturalist ; but the whole is nothing but a mental 
 drama, played out on the lowest level of human
 
 Robert Browning. 127 
 
 intelligence as " Luria" is a drama played out on 
 the highest. All Browning's poems are nothing but 
 " dramas of the inner life." He cares really for 
 nothing but metaphysics. Religion, philosophy, 
 science, art, help him to this ; but all save the 
 unseen motives which pass " hither and thither 
 dividing the swift mind," is framework machinery; 
 or so much paint, which might be rubbed off, 
 and still leave the contour of his work perfect. 
 His power lies wholly in atmosphere. The 
 scene is chosen for the atmosphere the atmo- 
 sphere is never chosen for the scene ; the plot is for 
 the emotion never the emotion for the plot. But 
 throughout one great moral quality emerges one 
 of which no age ever tires, of which no age ever 
 stood in such sore need as ours the passionate love 
 of truth rather than repose. " God," says Emerson, 
 "offers to every man truth and repose; between 
 these two, man as a pendulum ever oscillates." 
 Browning never. Through all its contradictory 
 windings he will know and have the very heart in 
 man and woman. He is a great unveiler ; he tears 
 off the mask, tramples the sham underfoot, 
 shows people to themselves and to the world, 
 weighs them in the balance, tries them in the
 
 128 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 crucible, sets the pure gold in his heart of hearts, 
 and flings the dross passionately to the four 
 winds of heaven. For him no rounded whole, no 
 sham consistency, at the expense of truth. Let us 
 all stand fair, and be judged with all our imperfec- 
 tions on our heads " nothing extenuate, nor set 
 down aught in malice." In Browning the un- 
 attainable is never attained the ideal is never 
 reached : there is never a perfect saint or villain 
 throughout the whole of his works. Yet is he no 
 pessimist no real cynic ; for the sense of Divine 
 perfection is also never lost ; it is the deep under- 
 tone of life, amidst its wildest discords. He is 
 passionately wedded to this world ; everything 
 about it is full of teeming interest for him ; and 
 yet the motto he has selected for death rules life 
 it is the eternal " Prospice " or " Beyond ! " 
 Thus much must suffice for " characteristics." 
 
 II. THE DISSENTING CHAPEL. I pass to 
 Browning the truth-seeker, sifter of sects and 
 ceremonies. In the singular poem called " Christ- 
 mas-Eve," we have three impersonated atmo- 
 spheres independent religion, conventional re- 
 ligion, spiritual religion ; or the power of the poem
 
 Robert Browning. 129 
 
 may be better marshalled as the Truth-Seeker be- 
 tween the religion of the sects and the spirit of Christ. 
 The situations are universal and recurrent. We, 
 too, have stood in church, and chapel, and lecture- 
 room, and looked on. We, too, have had glimpses 
 of the Christ that comprehends the churches, and 
 whom the churches cannot comprehend. 
 
 A thin dream-veil of intense drama, like a 
 heated film of human passion, is thrown over this 
 narrative of a soul in travail. Its homely and 
 familiar flashes draw us only nearer to the poet's 
 thought ; for have not our souls too been in 
 travail ? Have not we stood and listened in 
 little chapels, and sat in dismal churches, and 
 lingered in cathedral aisles, and watched the light 
 through jewelled panes, and heard the mellowed 
 organ-thunder roll ? 
 
 " Out of the little chapel I burst, 
 Into the fresh night-air again." 
 
 What brought him there : wind and rain, on 
 the verge of a lonely common ; and something 
 besides, perchance ? About all universal ex- 
 periences there is a spell, which no one quite 
 shakes off : about death, as we turn to look at a 
 funeral ; an accident in the street we crowd to 
 
 K
 
 130 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 see ; happy children we follow with wistful eyes ; 
 a regiment of soldiers, representing corporate effort 
 and heroism, all large crowds attract and fasci- 
 nate. Religious gatherings always possess this 
 potent spell. Whoever stood in a church porch 
 without peeping inside, especially if the church 
 was crowded? The "Seeker" enters " Sion 
 Chapel " a motley gathering of the poorer sort, 
 but all well schooled in the Baptist, or Calvinist, or 
 Wesleyan 'ism, and resolved to know no other : 
 
 " ' What you, the alien, you have ventured 
 To take with us, the elect, your station, 
 Who cares for none of it a Gallic ! ' 
 Thus, plain as a print, I read the glance." 
 
 The first note of the inner drama is now 
 sounded in the internal protest, 
 
 " Good folks ! 
 This way you perform the Grand Inquisitor ; 
 
 You are the men, and wisdom shall die with you ! 
 
 ***** 
 
 Still, as I say, though you've found salvation, 
 If I should choose, and now, to cry ' Shares,' 
 
 ***** 
 
 Mine's the same right with your poorest and sickliest ! " 
 
 The Seeker then in no measured terms de- 
 clares,
 
 Robert Browning. 131 
 
 " I very soon had enough of it 
 The hot smell, and the human noises, 
 
 And the lead-like pressure 
 Of the preaching-man's immense stupidity ! " 
 
 Alas ! alas ! that intelligent and not ill-disposed 
 men should ever be able to come to church, as 
 well as to chapel, and to go out thinking, if not 
 saying, much the same thing ! 
 
 " There was a lull in the rain a lull 
 In the wind too ; the moon was risen." 
 
 As he walks on, his thoughts come crowding 
 fast and thick, in diffuse meditation : 
 
 " The sermon now what a mingled weft 
 Of good and ill ; 
 
 The zeal was good, and the aspiration. 
 * * * * # 
 
 These people have really felt, no doubt, 
 
 A something the motion they style the 'call ' of them." 
 
 And then they seek for the 
 
 " Bringing about 
 
 ***** 
 
 A sort of reviving and reproducing, 
 More or less perfectly (who can tell?), 
 Of the mood itself." 
 
 But now notice that the contemplation of other 
 worship, however distasteful, forces him inward, 
 to sound his own religion. Place yourself in the 
 
 K 2
 
 132 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 current ; forsake not the assembling of yourselves 
 together ; let the tide of human instincts reach, 
 it will teach you to know yourself. Can you say 
 with the Seeker, when differing, or repelled, from 
 other forms of faith, 
 
 " I have my own church. 
 
 * * * * # 
 
 In youth I look'd to these very skies, 
 
 And probing their immensities 
 
 I found God there, His visible power 
 
 Yet felt in my heart ; amid all its sense 
 
 Of the power, an equal evidence 
 
 That His love, there too, was the nobler dower ? " 
 
 And then follows a passage, which, to my 
 mind, points to the central ground of our belief 
 that all is well that, in a life beyond, the broken 
 lights will come together, the discords find their 
 concord. 
 
 Browning has never soared higher than in this 
 new argument from analogy, that as the small 
 intelligence of man conceives the fitting and need- 
 ful and right, the large intelligence, manifested in 
 Creation, cannot fall short of man's measure, nay, 
 must realize and transcend it. It is the thought 
 expressed by Sidgwick, our latest moral philoso- 
 pher, in his profound book " Methods of Ethics "
 
 Robert Browning. 133 
 
 that our reason revolts from a world so irration- 
 ally constituted, that a course of conduct which is 
 best for the community should ultimately be found 
 a failure for the individual which moral conduct 
 would occasionally seem to be, if there be no life 
 beyond. 
 
 Listen now to the Poet Seeker's faith, as rea- 
 sonable as it is consolatory and sublime ! I wish 
 I could quote it entire. How often do we ask, 
 "Aye! but how do I know that God is good? 
 that I shall live and be satisfied by-and-by ? 
 that love which never found its earthly close 
 shall there see of the travail of its soul and be 
 satisfied ? And the answer comes : 
 
 All is God's ! 
 
 # # * * * 
 
 So, gazing up in my youth at love 
 As seen through power, ever above 
 All modes which make it manifest, 
 My soul brought all to a single test 
 That He, the Eternal First and Last, 
 Who in His power had so surpa?s'd 
 All man conceives of what is might 
 Whose wisdom, too, show'd infinite 
 Would prove as infinitely good ; 
 Would never (my soul understood), 
 With power to work all love desires,
 
 134 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 Bestow e'en less than man requires 
 That He who endlessly was teaching, 
 Above my spirit's utmost reaching, 
 What love can do in the leaf or stone, 
 Would never need that I, in turn, 
 Should point Him out defect unheeded, 
 And show that God had yet to learn 
 What the meanest human creature needed 
 Not life, to wit, for a few short years 
 
 Tracking his way through doubts and fears. 
 ***** 
 
 No ; love, which on earth, amid all the shows of it, 
 Has ever been seen the sole food of life in it 
 The love ever growing there, spite of the strife in it, 
 Shall arise made perfect, from Death's repose of it. 
 And I shall behold Thee face to face, 
 
 God, and in Thy light retrace 
 
 How in all I loved here still wast Thou ! 
 Whom pressing to, then, as I fain would now, 
 
 1 shall find as able to satiate 
 
 The love, Thy gift, as my spirit's wonder 
 
 Thou art able to quicken and sublimate 
 
 With this sky of Thine that I now walk under, 
 
 And glory in Thee for, as I gaze 
 
 Thus ! thus ! Oh, let men keep their ways 
 
 Of seeking Thee in a narrow shrine; 
 
 Be this my way ! And this is mine ! " 
 
 II. THE DIVINE APPARITION. Is he in the 
 little chapel, or out of it ? He seems to be out-
 
 Robert Browning. 135 
 
 side, on the lonely moorland, at night. But the 
 place matters not ; he is in the spirit. The dream, 
 the trance, the ecstasy is all. He looks up 
 
 "The rain and the wind ceased, and the sky 
 Received at once the full fruition 
 Of the moon's consummate apparition." 
 
 In that moment his soul, at its highest tension, is 
 very near to God. The skies bend down to him ; he 
 is aware of a power and presence, and his open 
 vision begins, his whole frame quivering with in- 
 tense excitement. 
 
 " All at once I looked up with terror : 
 
 He was there * * 
 
 He Himself, with his human hair, 
 
 On the narrow pathway, just before : 
 
 I saw the back of Him no more. 
 
 He had left the chapel then, as I. 
 
 I forgot all about the sky. 
 
 No face : only the sight 
 
 Of a sweeping garment, vast and white, 
 
 With a hem that I could recognize. 
 
 I felt no terror no surprise. 
 
 My mind filled with the cataract 
 
 At one bound of the mighty fact ! 
 
 I remember He did say, 
 
 Doubtless, that, to the world's end, 
 
 Where two or three should meet and pray 
 
 He would be in their midst their Friend. 
 
 Certainly He was there with them ! "
 
 1 36 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 The Lord Christ makes as though He would 
 pass on, but 
 
 " I hasten'd cried out, while I press'd 
 To the salvation of the Vest 
 ' But not so, Lord ! It cannot be 
 That Thou indeed art leaving me 
 Me, that have despised Thy friends 
 Did my heart make no amends ? 
 Thou art the love of God ! ' " 
 
 And suddenly, as he pours forth his wild supplica- 
 tion, his 
 
 " Body is caught up in the whirl and drift 
 Of the Vesture's amplitude, still eddying 
 On, just before." 
 
 His own heart, with true love trembling, no more 
 scorning the Lord's friends in the little chapel, is 
 accepted by the Lord and Master of both. 
 
 III. IN ST. PETER'S AT ROME. In a moment 
 the scene changes : we are at Rome ; the mighty 
 basilica of St. Peter 
 
 " Is alive. 
 
 Men in the chancel, body, and nave 
 Men on the pillar and architrave 
 Men on the statues men on the tombs ; 
 All famishing in expectation 
 Of the main-altar consummation."
 
 Robert Browning. 137 
 
 It is the Popish mass the doctrine, the super- 
 stition, of transubstantiation. And Christ enters : 
 Christ enters the Roman church as well as the 
 dissenting chapel ; and he, the Seeker, repelled by 
 Romish superstition, as he has been by Protestant 
 ignorance and vulgarity he, the Seeker, is again 
 left without : 
 
 " Yes,' I said, ' that He will go 
 
 And sit with these in turn, I know. 
 
 Their faith's heart beats, though her head swims 
 
 Too giddily to guide her limbs. 
 ***** 
 
 * Though Rome's gross robe 
 Drops off, no more to be endured, 
 Her teaching is not so obscured 
 By errors and perversities, 
 That no truth shines athwart the bier. 
 And He whose eye detects a spark, 
 Even where to man's the whole seems dark, 
 May well see flame." 
 
 In another moment he is in the great basilica, 
 and his voice swells the strain of common praise : 
 
 " I see the error ; but above 
 The scope of error, see the love ! " 
 
 As between sect and sect, church and chapel, 
 Romanist and Protestant, his lesson has been 
 learned :
 
 138 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 " I will be wise another time, 
 And not desire a wall between us 
 When next I see a church-roof cover 
 So many species of one genus, 
 All with their foreheads bearing Lover 
 Written above the earnest eyes of them. " 
 
 IV. THE GERMAN LECTURE-ROOM. Once 
 more his body is 
 
 " Caught up in the whirl and drift 
 Of the Vesture's amplitude, still eddying 
 On, just before him." 
 
 Is he not now worthy to enter everywhere ? 
 Twice in despising the intellectual narrowness and 
 bigotry of others, he has been convicted of a cold 
 and narrow heart himself. Surely now he may 
 enter everywhere. But no ; he is once more outside 
 outside a sort of temple, perhaps a college, some- 
 where in Germany at Tubingen or Gottingen. It 
 is probably Dr. Strauss, the great destructive 
 German critic, who is lecturing inside lecturing 
 with intense earnestness, no doubt, and lecturing on 
 Christ too. And Christ enters ! whilst the Truth 
 Seeker enters not, but just looks in, and sees the 
 Professor facing his rows of attentive pupils, a 
 martyr to mild enthusiasm. The discourse is de-
 
 Robert Browning. 139 
 
 structive of much of the framework of the Gospel 
 history, but it is earnest, high toned, and moral ; 
 and there is something even in that throng of atten- 
 tive students which attracts the Christ ; but the 
 Seeker on the threshold thus sums up his three 
 experiences of Dissenters, Papists, and Critic : 
 
 " This time He would not bid me enter 
 The exhausted air-bell of the critic. 
 Truth's atmosphere may growmephitic 
 
 When Papist struggles with Dissenter. 
 ***** 
 
 Each that thus sets the pure air seething 
 May poison it for healthy breathing. 
 But the Critic leaves no air to poison 
 Pumps out, with ruthless ingenuity, 
 Atom by atom, and leaves you vacuity." 
 
 It is not likely that Mr. Browning would at this 
 time of day speak of the results of German criticism 
 in these inadequate terms. We must remember 
 that this satire on Strauss was written in 1849, when 
 people in England were so terrified at the destruc- 
 tive critics abroad, that they failed to see the extent 
 to which the new research and learning was pre- 
 paring a new mould for the Christian idea. In 
 fact, we have gained enormously by all this minute 
 and honest examination of the Old and New Tes-
 
 140 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 taments. We really gather for the first time what 
 the life of Christ and His disciples must, in the main 
 situations, have been ; what the people were the 
 Romans, the Jews, the Greeks ; what Rome, and 
 Jerusalem, and the Mediterranean Isles, and the 
 fair provinces of Asia Minor, with their Greek 
 settlements, and little Jewries dotted about in every 
 important town what, in fine, the world was under 
 Tiberius Caesar and Nero. We see now how the 
 Gospels came together ; we separate between those 
 elements derived from the apostles at Jerusalem, 
 the little group of friends who clung to our 
 Lord's family in exile, and the free Pauline element, 
 which failed to mould the Christianity of the two 
 first centuries, but has dominated the remaining 
 sixteen hundred years of the Christian era. 
 
 The Truth Seeker of 1849 wou ld not see, what 
 is evident now, how that many of his difficulties of 
 belief would be solved, not by any fresh attempt 
 to swallow obsolete dogmas called distinctively 
 Christian, but by such a re-statement of Bible inspi- 
 ration, the divinity of Christ, the future life of man, 
 the Divine Presence with him here, as would make 
 these truths as tenable and self-evident in their 
 new form as they were tenable and self-evident in
 
 Robert Browning. 141 
 
 the old forms which we are still struggling to be 
 free of. And how helpful the new criticism was 
 going to be to the reconstruction of theology, Mr. 
 Browning could not possibly then see ; but we see, 
 it, and rejoice in it. Still, with a fine instinct, the 
 poet notes that Christ enters the critic's lecture- 
 room, although he is excluded. He seems then to 
 grow a little uneasy at his own strictures : 
 
 " Could my soul find aught to sing in tune with, 
 Even at this lecture, if she tried ? 
 
 And further on, remembering his mistaken scorn 
 of Sion chapel : 
 
 " Unlearned love was safe from spurning ; 
 Can't we respect your loveless learning ? " 
 
 Which he could not, for he did not really un- 
 derstand its drift. He could only sneer at the Pro- 
 fessor recommending us to go on looking up to 
 Christ, after robbing Him of His divinity. For 
 the first time the Seeker becomes something like a 
 cynic. He is now convinced of every one's imbe- 
 cility as regards religious matters, and he is will- 
 ing that everyone should call themselves Christian, 
 or anything they please, as long as they let him 
 alone with his own pet beliefs. The communion with
 
 142 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 loving souls which he was beginning to find whilst 
 keeping close to Christ, is thus abruptly broken. 
 But with the entrance in of this cynical indifference 
 with this loss of love Christ has also departed. 
 
 The calm of the night has passed the horrible 
 storm begun afresh : " Because thou art neither 
 hot nor cold, therefore I will spew thee out of My 
 mouth ! " 
 
 Indifference is, after all, the one thing which 
 separates from Christ which damns : 
 
 " The black night caught me in his mesh, 
 Whirl'd me up, and flung me prone ; 
 I look'd, and far there, ever fleeting 
 Far, far away the receding gesture, 
 And looming of the lessening Vesture, 
 Swept forward from my stupid hand, 
 While I watch'd my foolish heart expand, 
 In the lazy glow of benevolence, 
 O'er the various modes of man's belief." 
 
 Roused by the fear of losing his Divine Guide 
 
 " I caught at the flying robe unrepelPd, 
 Was lapp'd again in its folds, full fraught 
 With warmth, and wonder, and delight, 
 God's mercy being infinite ! 
 For scarce had the words escaped my tongue, 
 When, at a passionate bound, I sprung 
 Out of the wandering world of rain, 
 Into the little chapel again."
 
 Robert Browning. 143 
 
 The dream for it was a dream is over. The 
 soul had its troubled starting from a poor little 
 dissenting chapel ; it had- gone a pilgrimage 
 thence with its Lord ; it had learnt at last that 
 separation from man was separation from God 
 that they who best commune with Him can best 
 commune in love with each other. Before men's 
 frailties and bigotries, scorn is out of place, for 
 the best of us are frail and narrow compared 
 with Him ; before the religion of the heart, 
 learning and intellect stand abashed ; that is a holy 
 of holies, open to the poorest and meanest, into 
 which they enter not ; they may become its senti- 
 nels and outside ministers it can never become 
 theirs. The incense of prayer shall rise for ever and 
 ever from a thousand temples and ten thousand 
 tongues, but the essence and core of religion is 
 one and indivisible, in all ages and in all climes ; 
 it is the discovery of love, the appropriation of 
 love, the offering of love often revealed to babes, 
 and sometimes hidden from the wise and learned. 
 " He prayeth best who loveth best."
 
 VI. 
 
 mm. 
 
 THE " HIGH CHURCH " AND THE CHRISTIAN 
 YEAR.
 
 VI. 
 
 THE "HIGH CHURCH" AND THE CHRISTIAN 
 YEAR. 
 
 |N discussing Keble and " The Christian 
 Year," I shall not merely read a few 
 extracts and make a few comments, 
 but I shall try to give you a clear view, if only in 
 outline, of the great High Church movement, in 
 its first, as well as in that second development in 
 the midst of which we are now living. 
 
 There is nothing so improving to the mind as 
 to hold together the great religious movements of 
 each age, in their right connexion. They are 
 none of them isolated phenomena, the eccentrici- 
 ties of priests or people. They have their origin, 
 rise, progress, and decay. You can never do 
 them, or the men that lead them, justice until you 
 understand that. You must note how one move- 
 ment of thought, one set of men, one class of 
 books, come from certain states, tendencies, and 
 necessities of the age. And therefore it is in- 
 
 L 2
 
 148 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 structive and desirable to trace how the High 
 Church, the Low Church, and the Broad Church 
 movements came about. I shall leave the Broad 
 Church movement alone to-night, and proceed to 
 trace Ritualism to its source. 
 
 I. THE EVANGELICAL MOVEMENT. - - The 
 old Evangelical movement in the early part of 
 the present century was still living on the impulse 
 of Wesley, in the persons of Newton, Romaine, and 
 Dr. Haweis, rector of Aldwinckle, first chaplain to 
 the Countess of Huntingdon, and her executor. 
 
 But the real life of religion had run, or was 
 daily being successfully forced by the old dry- 
 church party, into dissenting channels. Robert 
 Hall, Jay of Bath, and others, had passed away, 
 leaving imitators, such as McNeile of Liverpool, 
 Melville, and Close, who expressed powerfully 
 enough the expiring force of the movement intel- 
 lectually, and Edward Irving, who seemed, previous 
 to his fanatical outburst, destined to re-clothe its 
 threadbare theology. 
 
 The strength of the old Evangelical movement 
 was the depth of its personal religion ; and the weak- 
 ness of it was its anarchy, its religious lawlessness,
 
 Keble. 149 
 
 its want of culture, and its narrow fanaticism. But 
 what the Evangelical, or Low Church movement, 
 did for England, was to restore the spiritual element 
 to the life of the everyday world, just as their suc- 
 cessors of the High Church restored the spiritual 
 element to the services of the church ; but the 
 Low Church did its work by trampling upon 
 forms and ceremonies the High Church by exalt- 
 ing them, as we shall presently see. Still the 
 Evangelicals made men look within ; they roused 
 the conscience ; they preached the terrors of the 
 Lord, the doctrine of conversion and sweet inward 
 peace in Jesus. They stood for the conscious 
 communion between the soul and God, indepen- 
 dent of, though not unassisted by, sacraments, but 
 hardly independent of rousing pulpit eloquence. 
 Their activity and earnestness became a flame in 
 Whitfield, and an organization in Wesley. And 
 the vitality of the system, like that of so many 
 other strong constitutions, has long outlived its 
 intellect, and even its common sense. 
 
 In 1839, on the centenary of Methodism, a sum 
 of 2i6,ooo/. was collected for the objects of the 
 society; in 1851 there were 428 circuits, with
 
 1 50 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 between 13,000 and 14,000 local preachers, about 
 920 itinerant preachers ; and now there are con- 
 siderably more than 6580 chapels. Well, all this 
 energy ought to have been taken up by the church ; 
 and if our bishops and clergy had known what 
 they were about with the people when those 
 persons came to stand up and teach, the maternal 
 church should haye managed to find room 'within 
 her for this mass of devotional enthusiasts, instead 
 of slamming the door in their faces. It is a 
 scandal, and a reflection upon Church of England 
 policy and administration, that my grandfather, 
 Dr. Haweis, holding Evangelical opinions, should 
 have died an English rector, whilst a few years 
 later the Lady Huntingdon sect, professing opinions 
 identical with his, should have been thrust out of 
 the Church of England. The church thus lost 
 Joseph Sortain, of Brighton, one of the most re- 
 fined and eloquent preachers of his day. And I 
 make bold to say, standing in a Church of England 
 pulpit, and being myself a minister of the Established 
 Church, that if it had not been for the religious 
 life expressed now in various forms of dissent, and 
 expressed at the beginning of this century in the 
 shape of the burning Evangelical movement, there
 
 Keble. 1 5 1 
 
 would not have been much religion left in this 
 country. 
 
 II. THE HIGH CHURCH MOVEMENT. For 
 the High Church movement we must go back at 
 least to the year 1830 ; and before we can hope to 
 understand the intellectual or religious aspect of 
 the movement, we must realize the political atmo- 
 sphere of France and England at this time. 
 
 In 1830 the Revolution broke out in Paris: it 
 was the cumulative rebound from the iron despot- 
 ism of Napoleon. Miserable as it was, it was still 
 the gasping of new-born freedom, so soon to be 
 stifled by the dulness of Louis Philippe and the 
 crimes of Louis Napoleon. In the midst of mili- 
 tary conscription and social slavery the people 
 sought the air of freedom in literature, in art, in 
 politics, and broke out wherever they could into 
 lawlessness and anarchy. 
 
 That impulse reached our own shores, but with 
 a certain spent force. Still it set up a profound 
 agitation and political turmoil between the years 
 1 838 and 1847. I R 1 828 the repeal of the Test and 
 Corporation Acts opened Parliament to dissenters ; 
 in 1829 came "Catholic emancipation;" in
 
 152 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 1831 Lord John Russell's famous Reform Bill was 
 fought for and won ; old institutions were daily 
 threatened ; the prelates felt their position in 
 the Lords insecure ; the abolition of church-rates 
 was vehemently demanded, by people who thought 
 that the National Church of England had sunk so 
 low that it had better be swept away altogether ; 
 the separation of church and state was openly 
 advocated by eloquent writers ; and party feeling 
 ran so high that several of the Irish clergy were 
 assassinated in 1834, and ten Irish bishoprics were 
 abolished. 
 
 What did all this mean ? It meant that in a stirring 
 irritable age the Church of England had lost power 
 with the people. She had lost it mainly by ban- 
 ishing a rash and, it must be said, irritable and 
 somewhat lawless section of the Evangelicals, who 
 were at the close of the last century the life-blood 
 of religion ; while those who remained in the church 
 were allowed to do so because they had lost the 
 early glow, and the inconvenient fervour and piety, 
 which characterized the church of Wesley, Ro- 
 maine, and Haweis of Aldwinckle. 
 
 About this time (1830) there came up to Oxford
 
 Keble. 153 
 
 University a small band of earnest men, deeply 
 evangelical in piety, who mourned over the fact that 
 evangelical religion had sunk so low and had assumed 
 without the pale of the National Church forms so 
 lawless and extravagant. These men sighed for 
 discipline ; they sought to revive church order. 
 And what were their names ? John Keble ; John 
 Henry Newman, now living, and in his 8oth year 
 (1880) ; then Pusey, now Dr. Pusey, in his 8oth 
 year ; Manning, now Cardinal Manning, in his 68th 
 year ; Faber, afterwards Father Faber, the author of 
 the beautiful hymn " The Pilgrims of the Night," 
 &c. ; then Mr. Froude ; and Mr. Gladstone, the 
 future premier of England ; then Palmer, Neale, 
 Percival, and William Gresley, who was for some 
 years identified with the services at St. Paul's, 
 Brighton, whom I had the privilege of knowing, 
 and under whom I had the privilege of sitting in 
 my boyhood. 
 
 All these men presented to their fellow-students 
 the aspect of Evangelicals, but added to the 
 characteristic of personal piety, a passionate 
 desire and resolution to restore the church to 
 pristine order and discipline. At this time there 
 was no idea that the movement, if such it could
 
 154 Poets in the Piilpit. 
 
 be called, savoured of Rome or Popery. These 
 men were deeply convinced that if the Church 
 of England were to be revived they must 
 take their stand on reverence for the clegry and 
 devotion to the Prayer Book, with a determination 
 to make the utmost, if not the best, possible use of 
 it. But indeed there was much to mend in the 
 current church services, which many of us are old 
 enough to remember. What a dismal affair that 
 " old style " was ! the parson in one box and the 
 clerk in another, the parson nodding when the 
 clerk was awake, and the clerk nodding when the 
 parson was awake, and the congregation never 
 awake at all, but dotted about in their high pews 
 dozing through the ceremony, while half-a-dozen 
 professional ladies and gentlemen in a gallery sang 
 or did not sing, as it pleased them, but lolled about, 
 fanning themselves, yawning or whispering, and 
 generally showing the greatest contempt for the 
 whole proceedings. 
 
 A peep in imagination only into one of those 
 dry church establishments is quite enough to make 
 us understand the reason why disestablishment and 
 the abolition of church-rates were threatened. At 
 first a simple statement of common aims and
 
 Keble. 155 
 
 objects was agreed upon by the young under- 
 graduates, who met constantly in each other's 
 rooms at Oxford. It was thus worded : 
 
 "OBJECTS OF THE ASSOCIATION. 
 
 " (i) To maintain pure and inviolate the 
 doctrines, the services, and the discipline of the 
 church ; that is, to withstand all changes which 
 involve denial or suppression of doctrine, a depar- 
 ture from primitive practice in religious offices or 
 innovation upon the apostolical prerogatives, order, 
 and communion of bishops, priests, and deacons. 
 
 " (2) To afford churchmen an opportunity of 
 exchanging their sentiments, and co-operating to- 
 gether on a large scale." 
 
 This they all signed. The suppression of the ten 
 Irish bishoprics called forth Keble's famous sermon 
 on the Great Apostasy ; and the Association pro- 
 cured the signatures of 7000 clergymen to a docu- 
 ment of a comparatively mild and general charac- 
 ter, addressed to the Archbishop of Canterbury, 
 and expressing devotion to " the apostolical order 
 and doctrine of the church," attachment to the 
 " venerable liturgy," " devotion to the orthodox and 
 primitive faith," and a desire " to promote the
 
 156 Poets in the Pulpit* 
 
 purity, efficiency, and unity of the church." This 
 seemed at first innocent enough. 
 
 In 1834 no l ess tnan 23,000 of the laity signed 
 a document in a similar sense, deprecating any 
 separation between church and state, and regret- 
 ing the latitudinarianism abroad ; for another spirit 
 was abroad, the infant, though Herculean, throes of 
 the Broad Church. Isaac Taylor had dissected the 
 roots of religious feeling in the " Natural History 
 of Enthusiasm ; " Arnold, afterwards Master of 
 Rugby, had advocated a church broad enough to 
 contain dissenters of almost every grade ; whilst 
 Maurice, afterwards Professor of Moral Philosophy 
 at Cambridge, who in his later years honoured me 
 with his friendship and counsel, had already, in the 
 " Kingdom of Christ," laid the spiritual founda- 
 tion of the Church of the Future, in his vivid per- 
 ception and proclamation of the universal Father- 
 hood of God. 
 
 All this, which seemed to the rising school of 
 earnest devotees of authority and the venerable 
 past, most loose and dangerous doctrine, was, 
 along with the internal apathy of the Establish- 
 ment, duly denounced by the " Association," lay 
 and clerical. These protests seemed to meet with
 
 Keble. 157 
 
 general public approval no one was committed to 
 action, and England, startled for a moment at the 
 notion of the church's overthrow, accepted what 
 was in effect the note of revolution as the sign of re- 
 turning peace and security. But the fact is we are 
 not a revolutionary people ; and if we have our 
 periods of agitation and reform, we are rather 
 frightened afterwards for fear we should have gone 
 too fast and too far. We see this every day in 
 politics, and the consequence is we invariably have 
 a Conservative reaction after a little move forwards. 
 In proof of it, witness the late career of that great 
 statesman, that eloquent political orator, Mr. Glad- 
 stone. Having risen to the highest pitch of popu- 
 larity having wielded an almost despotic power for 
 a few years he was suddenly driven from office 
 by a strong Conservative reaction, and the country 
 installed a Conservative statesman at the helm, and 
 sent Lord Beaconsfield to Berlin in 1878. 
 
 Following the agitation of 1830, the Evangelical 
 protest signed by 7000 clergymen, and the manifesto 
 signed by 23,000 of the laity, were both warmly re- 
 ceived as a general conservative expression of 
 feeling. The old, familiar, all-potent watchwords, 
 Church and State, seemed for a moment to be as
 
 158 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 powerful to conjure with as ever. The British 
 Constitution must be upheld ! Good ; but is this 
 what the Oxford movement really meant ? Not a 
 bit of it. What did the Newman, Pusey, Manning, 
 and Gladstone of the period really mean ? They 
 were quite straightforward, unsuspicious themselves 
 of the inexorable logic of tendency. They meant to 
 restore the church of the first three centuries. 
 Where must they go for information, but to the 
 Church of Rome Rome the mother of churches ? 
 Held she not the keys of all the creeds ? the tra- 
 ditions of the elders ? the ecclesiastical oracles ? 
 So first they learnt what had been done and taught 
 in the first three centuries ; they mastered the theo- 
 logy of the fathers, then of the schoolmen, and there 
 they found a good deal which was not done or 
 taught in the primitive church, but as it seemed 
 good and edifying, and generally rousing, they 
 worked it up into their reformed church system, 
 finding the externals of mediaeval worship and the 
 internals of ascetic discipline both attractive and 
 fruitful. 
 
 This " growth " on the primitive church was 
 covered and accounted for by Newman's Theory 
 of Development, from which it appeared that many
 
 Keble. 1 59 
 
 things not originally known were the legitimate 
 tendencies of a growing Church. So were slid in 
 a taste for purgatory and the confessional, worship 
 of saints, and prayers for the dead, and under the 
 formal doctrine of apostolical succession, a great 
 deal of sympathy with the supremacy of the Pope 
 as the real head on earth of Christendom. 
 
 As regards the Protestant tendencies of the 
 Prayer Book, and the signature of the formularies 
 generally, these were smoothed down by the 
 teaching in Tract 90 (Newman), which held it 
 lawful to sign in a non-natural sense when the 
 natural sense was inconvenient a happy privilege, 
 which all parties in the church continued to stretch 
 to the utmost, until it broke under the strain, and 
 resulted in the relaxed conditions imposed on the 
 clergy of the Church of England. 
 
 Up to the appearance of Tract 90, and indeed 
 for some time after, there seems to have been no 
 intention to aid the cause of Romanism in England. 
 Mr. Palmer, a leading member of the Oxford move- 
 ment, says, " There was no dishonesty on our part, 
 no wish to promote Romanism, no disloyalty to 
 the Church of England. I might refer (as a proof
 
 160 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 that the Oxford movement did not mean Rome) 
 to the works of Hook, Gresley, Gladstone, 
 Manning, and very many others ; " and later he 
 quotes Pusey against Rome, and dwells with 
 special complacency upon Mr. Newman, as one of 
 those who had said the hardest things against 
 Rome and Romish tendencies. But at that very 
 moment the strongest souls were being borne most 
 swiftly into the bosom of the great mother of 
 churches. 
 
 In 1845 Newman, who had created the Tract- 
 arian theory, forsook it, and went over to Rome. 
 ' In 1851 Manning followed his example ; and Pusey 
 was freely accused of staying in the English 
 Church in order to make converts for Rome. But 
 to his honour it must be admitted, that a long and 
 faithful life has proved that it was an illogical 
 head, and not a false heart, that prevented Dr. 
 Pusey from seeing the conclusion to his premises. 
 Newman saw that bad was the best that could be 
 said for the Tractarians, and Monsignor Capel has 
 had to explain the same thing to Canon Liddon. 
 Indeed nothing is more unedifying and surprising 
 to the outside public than the ease with which
 
 Keble* 1 6 1 
 
 Roman theologians can disperse the foundations 
 of the Tractarian movement, whenever it pleases 
 some over-zealous ritualist to reconstruct the 
 famous card castle, first built, and then deliberately 
 destroyed, by their greatest champion, and certainly 
 their only thinker. 
 
 But I have a little anticipated the course of 
 events. The Tractarian movement made little 
 progress until its friendship for the Pope and its 
 hatred of the English Reformation were understood. 
 This at length rallied party-feeling on both sides ; 
 and the signal for revolution, the red flag of 
 the movement, was Vestments ! As long as High 
 Church meant only Tracts, it seemed to be with- 
 out hold over the public imagination ; but with the 
 introduction of vestments all England fell into a 
 blaze ! 
 
 Before the full fury of the No Popery ! cry had 
 arisen, Newman was safely over the border ; but he 
 left the country perfectly distracted behind him. 
 In Ritualism we have, at once the great glory and 
 the great blot of the system, according to that side 
 of the medal which happens to be turned upper- 
 most. The blot is, that the ceremonies are intended 
 
 M
 
 1 62 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 to enforce doctrines and practices generally re- 
 pudiated by England at the Reformation ; but its 
 glory is the glory of revived reverence, decency, 
 and attractiveness of the church services. 
 
 The movement had the genius to appropriate to 
 itself the things which appeal to the eye and ear ; 
 it consecrated once more the senses to God. 
 
 Before we come to Keble as a part of the High 
 Church movement, see well, for your instruction 
 to-night, what are the weak places of that great 
 religious revival, and mark also what must be its 
 enduring strength. The weak places of High 
 Churchism are, ist, indifference to truth ; for it is so 
 passionately devoted to forms and ceremonies that 
 it regards with comparative indifference the facts 
 of history, and the application of common criticism 
 and common sense. It still maintains, in almost 
 all its baldness, the theory of verbal inspiration, or 
 at least the theory of Bible infallibility. Read 
 Christopher Wordsworth's (the present Bishop of 
 Lincoln) Notes to the Four Gospels. It still 
 maintains the almost inspired nature of the Prayer 
 Book, although we all know how parts of that for- 
 mulary have been wrangled over ; and how some
 
 Keble. 163 
 
 parts of it were left, not because they were good 
 and wholesome, but because one faction or the 
 other happened to win. Every scholar knows what 
 a mixed bit of work the Prayer Book is ; and yet 
 the Ritualist seems to regard the Romanist por- 
 tions of the book as inspired almost as the Bible. 
 
 Keble finds the greatest comfort in simply go- 
 ing through the church prayers, and says we 
 should hear in each prayer the voice of God 
 himself, that and the voice of God's Church being 
 the same thing. Even here we may admit that 
 it is true to- a certain extent of many prayers that 
 they are inspired by the purest devotion ; but even 
 this is not to be affirmed of every utterance of the 
 Prayer Book, and I call the assertion that it is so, 
 simply indifference to truth. 
 
 2ndly, We have baptismal regeneration, transub- 
 stantiation, and similar doctrines. Over each of 
 these things you can dispute, but not one of them 
 will bear the clear light of reason. 
 
 Tran substantiation or that doctrine which does 
 service for it with the Ritualists was seen to be 
 untrue, and England will never take kindly to it 
 again. But now as ever, men will not live in the 
 spirit ; they will have these mystical things to con- 
 
 M 2
 
 164 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 jure with among the people. The clerical assump- 
 tion of these supernatural powers is another in- 
 stance of indifference to truth, and indifference to 
 truth is weakness not strength. 
 
 But the clear virtues of the High Church move- 
 ment are these : it is a visible and symbolic witness 
 of Divine order upon earth ; the perception as 
 against the anarchy of dissent, and the conceit of 
 individualism that God is a God of order; the 
 correction of the vagaries and caprice of the private 
 conscience, by a fixed, if traditional, system of 
 worship and praise ; the conviction that there 
 must be a voice in the church, an orderly hierarchy, 
 a settled administration, a fixed form of service ; 
 that unless these things are, confusion and out- 
 lawry must result. 
 
 And every one of us is benefited by such teaching 
 as this. We have all derived a more settled notion 
 of how we ought to conduct religious services if 
 we wish to infuse life into the Prayer Book. If we 
 wish to know what the Prayer Book means, we 
 must learn to see in it an attempt at least to 
 witness for the visible rule of Christ upon earth. 
 
 Then note, further, the patient and exhaustive
 
 Keble. 165 
 
 way in which the High Church party has appro- 
 priated, and revived in the hearts of the people, the 
 teachings of Christ's life, by calling attention to 
 the seasons of the Christian year. How do you 
 suppose that forty years ago I could have ventured 
 to have a choral service like this, without being 
 called a rank Puseyite ? Why, forty years ago, and 
 less, clergymen who dressed their choirs in white 
 vestments were called Romanists, and hissed and 
 pelted in the public streets. If they had anything 
 but plain ivy at Christmas about the church, they 
 were called Puseyites ; and if they decorated their 
 churches at Easter they would have the school 
 teachers, the churchwardens, and all the influen- 
 tial " old women " of the parish, down upon them. 
 All this went on within my memory. Hear John 
 Henry Newman's account of this matter, together 
 with a crowning tribute to John Keble and the 
 " Christian Year," which will form a fit prelude to 
 our review of it : 
 
 "Much certainly came of the ' Christian Year;' 
 it was the most soothing, tranquillizing, subduing 
 work of the day : if poems can be found to enliven 
 in dejection, and to comfort in anxiety ; to cool 
 the over-sanguine, to refresh the weary, and to
 
 1 66 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 awe the worldly ; to instil resignation into the im- 
 patient, and calmness into the fearful and agitated 
 they are these. 
 
 " Tale tuum carmen nobis, divine poeta, 
 Quale sopor fessis in graraine ; quale per gestum 
 Dulcis aquse saliente sitim restinguere rivo." 
 
 Or like the Shepherd's Pipe in the Oriental Vision, 
 of which we are told, that ' the sound was exceed- 
 ingly sweet, and wrought into a variety of tunes 
 that were inexpressibly melodious, and altogether 
 different from anything I had ever heard. They 
 put me in mind of those heavenly airs which are 
 played to the departing souls of good men upon 
 their first arrival in Paradise, to wear out the im- 
 pressions of the last agonies, and to qualify them 
 for the pleasures of that place. I drew near with 
 the reverence which is due to a superior nature, 
 and as my heart was entirely subdued by the cap- 
 tivating strains I had heard, I fell down at his 
 feet and wept.' 
 
 " Such was the gift of the author of the ' Chris- 
 tian Year;' and he used it in attaching the minds 
 of the rising generation to the church of his pre- 
 decessors, Ken and Herbert. He did that for the
 
 Keble. 167 
 
 Church of England which none but a poet could 
 do ; he made it poetical. It is sometimes asked 
 whether poets are not more commonly found ex- 
 ternal to the church than among her children ; 
 and it would not surprise us to find the question 
 answered in the affirmative. Poetry is the refuge 
 of those who have not the Catholic Church to 
 flee to, and repose upon ; for the church herself is 
 the most sacred ar\d august of poets. Poetry, 
 as Mr. Keble lays it down in his University lec- 
 tures on the subject, is a method of relieving the 
 over-burdened mind. It is a channel through 
 which emotion finds expression, and that a safe 
 regulated expression. Now what is the Catholic 
 Church, viewed in her human aspect, but a dis- 
 cipline of the affections and passions ? What are 
 her ordinances and practices, but the regulated 
 expression of keen, or deep, or turbid feeling, and 
 thus a ' cleansing/ as Aristotle would word it, of 
 the sick soul ? She is the poet of her children ; 
 full of music to soothe the sad, and control the 
 wayward ; wonderful in story for the imagination 
 of the romantic ; rich in symbol and imagery, so 
 that gentle and delicate feelings, which will not 
 bear words, may in silence intimate their presence,
 
 1 68 Poets in the Pidpit. 
 
 or commune with themselves. Her very being is 
 poetry ; every psalm, every petition, every collect, 
 every versicle, the cross, the mitre, the thurible, 
 is a fulfilment of some dream of childhood, or 
 aspiration of youth. Such poets as are born 
 under her shadow, she takes into her service ; she 
 sets them to write hymns, or to compose chants, 
 to embellish shrines, or to determine ceremonies, 
 or to marshal processions ; nay, she can even 
 make schoolmen of them, as she made of 
 St. Thomas, till logic becomes poetical. Now 
 the author of the ' Christian Year ' found the 
 Anglican system all but destitute of this Divine 
 element, which is an essential property of Catholi- 
 cism ; a ritual dashed upon the ground, trodden 
 on, and broken piecemeal ; prayers clipped, pieced, 
 torn, shuffled about at pleasure, until the meaning 
 of the composition perished, and offices which had 
 been poetry were no longer even good prose ; 
 antiphons, hymns, benedictions, invocations, 
 shovelled away ; Scripture lessons turned into 
 chapters ; heaviness, feebleness, unwieldiness, 
 where the Catholic rites had had the lightness and 
 airiness of a spirit ; vestments chucked off, lights 
 quenched, jewels stolen, the pomp and circum-
 
 169 
 
 stances of worship annihilated ; a dreariness 
 which could be felt, and which seemed the token 
 of an incipient Socinianism, forcing itself upon the 
 eye, the ear, the nostrils, of the worshipper, as 
 smell of dust and damp, not of incense ; a sound 
 of ministers preaching Catholic prayers, and parish 
 clerks droning out Catholic canticles ; the royal 
 arms for the crucifix ; ugly huge boxes of wood, 
 sacred to preachers, frowning upon the congrega- 
 tion in the place of the mysterious altar ; and the 
 long cathedral aisles unused, railed off like the 
 tombs (as they were) of what had been, and was 
 not ; and for orthodoxy, a frigid, inelastic, incon- 
 sistent, dull, helpless, dogmatic, which could give 
 no just account of -itself, yet was intolerant of all 
 teaching which contained a doctrine more, or a 
 doctrine less, and resented every attempt to give 
 it a meaning : such was the religion of which this 
 gifted author was, not the judge and denouncer (a 
 deep spirit of reverence hindered it), but the reno- 
 vator, so far as it has been renovated. Clear as was 
 his perception of the degeneracy of his times, he 
 attributed nothing of it to his church, over which 
 he threw the poetry of his own mind, and the 
 memory of better days.
 
 1 70 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 " His happy magic made the Anglican Church 
 seem what Catholicism was and is. The esta- 
 blished system found to its surprise, that it had 
 been all its life talking, not prose, but poetry. 
 
 ' Miraturque novas frondes, et non sua poma.' 
 " Beneficed clergymen used to go to rest as usual 
 on Christmas-eve, and leave to ringers, or some- 
 times to carollers, the observance which was 
 paid, not without creature comforts, to the sacred 
 night ; but now they suddenly found themselves, 
 to their great surprise, to be ' wakeful shepherds ;' 
 and ' still as the day came round/ ' in music 
 and in light,' the new-born Saviour ' dawned 
 upon their prayer.' Anglican bishops had not 
 only lost the habit of blessing, but had sometimes 
 been startled and vexed when asked to do so ; 
 but now they were told of their 'gracious arm 
 stretched out to bless ;' moreover, what they had 
 never dreamed when they were gazetted or did 
 homage, they were taught that each of them was 
 ' an apostle true, a crowned and robed seer.' The 
 parish church had been shut up, except for vestry 
 meetings and occasional services, all days of the 
 year but Sundays, and one or two other sacred 
 days ; but church-goers were now assured that
 
 Keble. 171 
 
 ' martyrs and saints ' dawned on their way ; that 
 the Absolution in the Common Prayer Book was 
 ' the golden key each morn and eve ; ' and in- 
 formed, moreover, at a time, too, when the real 
 presence was all but utterly forgotten or denied, 
 of ' the dear feast of Jesus dying, upon that altar 
 ever lying, while angels prostrate fall.' They 
 learned, besides, that what their pastors had spoken 
 of, and churchwardens had used at vestry meet- 
 ings, as a mere table, was ' the dread altar ;' and 
 that ' holy lamps were blazing ; perfumed embers 
 quivering bright,' while ' stoled priests minister 
 at them ; while the floor was by knees of sinners 
 worn.' 
 
 " Such doctrines, coming from one who had such 
 claims on his readers from the weight of his name, 
 the depth of his devotional and ethical tone, and the 
 special gift of consolation, of which his poems 
 themselves were the evidence, wrought a great 
 work in the Establishment. The Catholic Church 
 speaks for itself ; the Anglican needs external 
 assistance : his poems became a sort of comment 
 upon its formularies and ordinances, and almost 
 elevated them into the dignity of a religious system. 
 It kindled hearts towards his church ; it gave a
 
 172 Poets in the P^tlp^t. 
 
 something for the gentle and forlorn to cling to ; 
 and it raised up advocates for it among those 
 who otherwise, if God and their good angel had 
 suffered it, might have wandered away into some 
 sort of philosophy, and acknowledged no church 
 at all. Such was the influence of Keble's 
 ' Christian Year.' " ' 
 
 Can we not then turn to our High Church brethren 
 and claim some common ground ? Can we not 
 say, It is owing to you that the love of piety has 
 spread again within the church ; and we, who do not 
 agree with your doctrines, and think you overstate 
 this and understate that, still desire to take the 
 best things you can give us, and to thank you 
 for them, and not pretend that we have discovered 
 them ourselves. It is true we cannot, like you, 
 denounce the Reformation as something little less 
 than a national disaster. We cannot, like you, long 
 to sit once more at the feet of our dear father the 
 Pope. Because we see how, century after century, 
 the church has blundered, we cannot, like you, 
 always accept its dictation, as defined by your 
 favourite pastors, as inspired still less as in- 
 1 Essays, Grit, and Hist., vol. ii. p. 441.
 
 Keble. 1 73 
 
 fallible. But we can join you in your deep rever- 
 ence for holy things and places in your desire to 
 revivify what is good in the Prayer Book ; we can 
 bear with you when you accuse us of ignorance, or 
 indifference to a theology which, after all, I for one 
 was brought up in, and which no thoughtful and 
 candid person should ignore or reject without exa- 
 mination ; and we follow you, though not in every 
 detail, in your general sense of order and discipline, 
 without surrendering the invisible witness of God 
 in the converted hearts, which, after all, was the 
 gift of your great Low Church predecessors in the 
 Church of England. 
 
 This, then, is some account of the good work of 
 the Oxford school : without losing the personal 
 piety and devotion of the Evangelicals, they have 
 greater love for law and order, and they have 
 added to this the glory of practical Christlike 
 activity amongst the poor. They have worked 
 nobly according to their lights in the highways 
 and hedges, in the bye-ways and alleys, of our land ; 
 their schools, their sisterhoods, their parochial 
 agencies, present often admirable examples, fit for 
 general imitation wherever a parish has to be
 
 1 74 Poets in the Piilpit. 
 
 organized ; and if the zeal of God's house some- 
 times eats up the High Church priest, no one can 
 say that he neglects, in season and out of season, 
 to feed Christ's lambs with the best food he has 
 got. Low Church! Broad Church ! can you say as 
 much ? 
 
 Now Keble, according to Newman, was the 
 poet of the movement ; he showed that it was 
 beautiful as well as holy \ he shed the enthusiasm 
 of a pure and poetic soul over the rigid ceremonial, 
 and flooded the austerity of the Christian seasons 
 with the sacred glow of immeasurable love and 
 pathos. And this is why he has laid hold of 
 English hearts and homes ; and the proof of it is 
 that you can go to any railway bookstall in the 
 land, and buy the "Christian Year" for a shilling. 
 
 It is out of such a copy, bought thus, that 
 I read to-night. I say that this is the greatest 
 proof of Keble's wide popularity ; and this he 
 has achieved, not by dwelling exclusively on those 
 points which divide heart from heart, and inflame 
 earnest minds to bitter differences, but by exalting 
 in the Oxford movement what is universally beau- 
 tiful and true the order, the devotion, the imagina- 
 tion, and steady enthusiasm. He has kindled the
 
 Keble. 175 
 
 Prayer Book into life again ; he has clothed again 
 with the heat of piety, and with the blossoms of 
 poetry, the sacred seasons of the Christian year !. 
 
 III. KEBLE'S POETRY. Now mark one sign 
 of a poet's influence, in the number of his words 
 and phrases which have worked themselves into 
 the heart of contemporary language. With how 
 many of his words are we familiar ! This, no doubt, 
 is partly because his works have been adopted as 
 popular hymns ; but they have been so adopted 
 because they are so popular. 
 
 " There is a book, who runs may read, 
 
 Which heavenly truth imparts ; 
 
 And all the lore its scholars need, 
 
 Pure eyes and Christian hearts. 
 
 The works of God, above, below, 
 
 Within us and around, 
 Are pages in that book, to show 
 
 How God Himself is found." 
 
 And the reason why sentences like these work 
 themselves into the heart of the people, is that 
 they contain some universal truth, that comes 
 home to all. And what is the truth in these 
 lines ? It is the great doctrine of natural religion 
 the perception that God and mind live and love
 
 1 76 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 throughout the visible universe. And such a truth, 
 ever evanescent yet ever recurrent amongst men, 
 finds here a devotional expression congenial to 
 the age. Was it ever more needed ? 
 Again, 
 
 " 'Twas but a little drop of sin 
 
 We saw this morning enter in, 
 And lo ! at eventide the world was drowned." 
 
 That holds you for the same reason. It proclaims 
 the infinite importance of the infinitely little a 
 truth of science as well as of morals ; a truth ever 
 neglected, ever self-asserting the neglect of little 
 things, the significance of small beginnings. 
 People say " It is nought, it is nought ;" but it is 
 the 
 
 " Little pitted speck in garner'd fruit, 
 That, rotting inward, slowly moulders all" 
 
 It is 
 
 " The little rift within the lute, 
 That by-and-by will make the music mute ; " 
 
 the plague-spot, before the plague ; the cloud 
 like a man's hand, before the hurricane ; the little 
 cough, which heralds in the rapid consumption ; 
 the drop of rain, before the deluge. 
 
 And who amongst us has not neglected the in-
 
 Keble. 177 
 
 sidious approach of sin ? Who has not neglected 
 the little things, which, increased, presently 
 threaten the ruin both of mind and body ? 
 Take another example : 
 
 " Not even the tenderest heart, and next our own, 
 Knows half the reasons why we smile or sigh." 
 
 Yes! think of the deep solitude of the spirit! Is it 
 not true that your best friend knows very little 
 about you? Is it not true that you have an in- 
 stinctive habit of concealing the innermost things? 
 You cannot give them up. The people who live 
 with you know little or nothing about you in those 
 silent unexplored soul regions ; as Emerson has 
 it, " An unnavigable ocean washes between all 
 souls." 
 
 No doubt we yield different sides of ourselves 
 to different persons, and indeed, at different times 
 we act and speak very differently in our confi- 
 dences with the same person. I cannot yield to 
 you that which you cannot command. I cannot 
 hold back from you that which you, and perhaps 
 you alone, have power to draw from me ; but the 
 most you, or any one, will ever get of that 
 sacred private thing, my personality, is but a part 
 a broken light. So 
 
 N
 
 178 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 " Not even the tenderest heart, and next our own, 
 Knows half the reasons why we smile or sigh." 
 
 Perhaps Keble is better known to you in the 
 adapted hymns, or long fragments of his poems, 
 sung in church. In adapting his poems to hymn 
 purposes, we sometimes omit some of those strik- 
 ing passages which are less appropriate for sing- 
 ing than reading ; yet in some of these strains 
 Keble seems to have a special glow of inspiration 
 resting upon him, half imaginative, half devotional ; 
 and thus we often find a choice gem that precedes 
 what is sung, and which is never printed in our 
 hymn books. That was one reason why the poet 
 himself objected to his hymns being sung. He 
 knew that the singable parts were generally 
 imbedded in a portion which was not singable, 
 and he objected to seeing a connected work cut 
 up for hymn book needs. But the world has its 
 own instincts, and deals rather roughly with 
 authors' thoughts and feelings about their own 
 works. The people are the best judges, after all, 
 of what they want, and they will take it if they can 
 get it. 
 
 It is interesting to know that Keble objected to 
 have his things sung ; but that is no reason why
 
 Keble. 1 79 
 
 we should not sing them. Here, then, in one and 
 the same hymn is a specimen of what is sung 
 and of what is not sung. 
 
 ( Unsung?) 
 
 " Tis gone, that bright and orbed blaze : 
 Fast fading from our wistful gaze, 
 Yon mantling cloud has hid from sight 
 The last faint pulse of quivering light. 
 
 In darkness and in weariness 
 The traveller on his way must press, 
 No gleam to watch on tree or tower, 
 Whiling away the lonesome hour." 
 
 The singing begins here with the following 
 almost unexampled burst of eloquent fervour : 
 
 " Sun of my soul ! Thou Saviour dear! 
 It is not night when Thou art near. 
 Oh may no earthborn cloud arise 
 To hide Thee from Thy servant's eyes." 
 
 I know no hymn beginning with a grander 
 strain of thoughtful, imaginative contemplation 
 and rising so suddenly to such a climax of ecstasy, 
 as though the Sun of Righteousness itself had 
 suddenly burst upon the darkened spirit, and 
 scattered the gloom of night. 
 
 Nor is the Morning Hymn, which is introduced 
 
 N 2
 
 1 80 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 by a similarly unsingable passage, less dear and 
 less familiar to us all. Indeed, in his own words 
 
 " As for some dear familiar strain 
 Untired we ask, and ask again ; 
 Ever in its melodious store 
 Finding a spell, unheard before." 
 
 Even so, as the oft-repeated words fall upon our 
 willing ears, and warm our hearts : 
 
 " New every morning is the love 
 Our wakening and uprising prove, 
 Through sleep and darkness safely brought, 
 Restored to life, and power, and thought. 
 
 If on our daily course our mind 
 Be set to hallow all we find, 
 New treasures still, of countless price, 
 God will provide for sacrifice. 
 
 Old friends, old scenes, will lovelier be 
 As more of heaven in each we see : 
 Some softening gleam of love and prayer 
 Shall dawn on every cross and care. 
 
 We need not bid, for cloister'd cell, 
 Our neighbour and our work farewell, 
 Nor strive to wind ourselves too high 
 For sinful man beneath the sky :
 
 Keble. 181 
 
 The trivial round, the common task, 
 Would furnish all we ought to ask ; 
 Room to deny ourselves ; a road 
 To bring us, daily, nearer God. 
 
 Seek we no more ; content with these, 
 Let present rapture, comfort, ease, 
 As heaven shall bid them, come and go: 
 The secret this of rest below. 
 
 Only, O Lord, in Thy dear love 
 Fit us for perfect rest above ; 
 And help us, this and every day, 
 To live more nearly as we pray." 
 
 We find in Keble the most piercing glimpses 
 into the interior life, reminding us of the ecstasy 
 or meditation of some old saint, dreaming in the 
 cloister, or beside the crucifix in the retired cell ; 
 it is Paul with the thorn in the flesh ; it is Cyprian 
 awaiting martyrdom ; it is Perpetua, or Felicite, 
 or St. Catherine, wrapt in quiet contemplation in 
 the midst of torment, reposing in the everlasting 
 arms. 
 
 " Oh Lord my God, do Thou Thy holy will 
 
 I will be still ; 
 I will not stir, lest I forsake thine arm, 
 
 And break the charm 
 
 Which lulls me, clinging to my Father's breast, 
 In perfect rest.
 
 1 82 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 Wild Fancy, peace ! thou must not me beguile 
 
 With thy false smile ; 
 I know thy flatteries, and thy cheating ways. 
 
 Be silent, Praise ! 
 Blind guide with siren voice, and blinding all 
 
 That hear thy call. 
 
 Come, Self-Devotion ! high and pure 
 Thoughts that in thankfulness endure, 
 Though dearest hopes are faithless found, 
 And dearest hearts are bursting round. 
 Come, Resignation ! spirit meek, 
 And let me kiss thy placid cheek." 
 
 We find also, as we might expect, peculiar 
 fragments on the association with holy places. 
 Very much of the life of the High Church move- 
 ment depended on such association on saying 
 your prayers at particular places and at particular 
 times, or on confessing to particular priests. It is 
 a thing too much neglected by Christian people 
 this power of locality, person, time, and place. 
 Keble says somewhere, If you cannot go to church, 
 make a church in your house ; let there be some 
 little room or corner, where you may go for the 
 associations of prayer, and see if you will not pray 
 better when you pray regularly in the same place. 
 This feeling of association is raised to its highest 
 power in poems where the poet transports himself to
 
 Keble. 183 
 
 the very spot in the garden of Gethsemane where 
 the Lord saw the angel, and prayed that if it were 
 possible the cup might pass from Him. 
 
 " There is a spot within this sacred dale 
 That felt Thee kneeling, touched Thy prostrate brow. 
 One angel knows it : O might prayer avail 
 To win the knowledge, sure each holy vow 
 Less quickly from the unstable soul would fade, 
 Offer'd where Christ in agony was laid." 
 
 There is also a passage where he deals with 
 Moses, bringing the universal feeling of religion 
 out of the remote heart of antiquity, and making 
 it glow with the historical association. It is not 
 Moses the lawgiver, but the shepherd ; and I do 
 think that Keble when he wrote this hymn must 
 have seen that picture of Signorelli's, on the wall 
 of the Sistine Chapel, at Rome, where Moses, the 
 shepherd of Jethro's flocks, is seen kneeling apart 
 in the wilderness, in prayer, with his face upturned 
 as if he saw a vision. He is far away from the 
 sheep, and utterly absorbed ; it is the face of one 
 who sees God. 
 
 " Far seen across the sandy wild, 
 There like a solitary child 
 
 He thoughtless roam'd, and free ;
 
 1 84 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 One towering thorn was wrapp'd in flame, 
 Bright without blaze it went and came ; 
 Who would not turn to see ? 
 
 Along the mountain ledges green 
 The scatter'd sheep at will may glean 
 
 The desert's spicey stores ; 
 The while with undivided heart 
 The shepherd talks to God apart, 
 
 And whilst he talks adores" 
 
 The italics are ours. 
 
 I might dwell at length upon the various beau- 
 ties of Keble's style his flowing music, his per- 
 fect lines, such as his apostrophe to Christ on His 
 desertion by Peter, 
 
 " Thou thrice denied, yet thrice beloved, 
 Watch by Thine own forgiven friend." 
 
 Or the beautiful description of those who, like 
 Paul, would fain depart, and yet are willing to 
 bide their time 
 
 " Waiting their summons to the sky, 
 Content to live, but not afraid to die." 
 
 Or that tender passage the reflection of his own 
 experience of human love, as we learn from his 
 biography where the human passion is pressed 
 into the service of the heavenly love. Take, as 
 an illustration,
 
 Keble. 185 
 
 " Who ever saw the earliest rose 
 
 First open her sweet breast ? 
 Or, when the summer sun goes down, 
 The first soft star in evening's crown 
 Light up her gleaming crest ? 
 
 Fondly we seek the dawning bloom 
 
 On features wan and fair, 
 The gazing eye no change can trace ; 
 But look away a little space. 
 
 Then turn, and, lo ! 'tis there. 
 
 But there's a sweeter flower than e'er 
 
 Blush'd on the rosy spray 
 A brighter star, a richer bloom 
 Than e'er did western heaven illume 
 
 At close of summer day. 
 
 'Tis Love, the last best gift of heaven ; 
 
 Love, gentle, holy, pure ; 
 But, tenderer than a dove's soft eye, 
 The searching sun, the open sky, 
 
 She never could endure. 
 
 Even human Love will shrink from sight 
 
 Here in the coarse rude earth ; 
 How then should rash intruding glance 
 Break in upon her sacred trance 
 
 Who boasts a heavenly birth ? 
 
 So still and secret is her growth. 
 
 Ever the truest heart : 
 Where deepest strikes her kindly root 
 For hope or joy, for flower or fruit, 
 
 Least knows the happy part.
 
 1 86 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 God only, and good angels, look 
 
 Behind the blissful screen 
 As when, triumphant o'er His woes, 
 The Son of God by moonlight rose, 
 
 By all but Heaven unseen." 
 
 Or again, in such pure poetical passages as this, 
 where the light grace of Moore is mingled with 
 the more pensive delicacy and earnestness of 
 Bryant : 
 
 " Since all that is not Heaven must fade, 
 Light be the hand of Ruin laid 
 
 Upon the home I love : 
 With lulling spell let soft Decay 
 Steal on, and spare the giant sway, 
 The crash of tower and grove. 
 
 Far opening down some woodland deep 
 In their own quiet glade should sleep 
 
 The relics dear to thought, 
 And wild-flower wreaths from side to side 
 Their waving tracery hang, to hide 
 
 What ruthless Time has wrought." 
 
 I consider that there are about three poems, 
 taken as wholes, in which Keble rises in different 
 ways to his full height. I cite them as examples 
 without a weak line and without a poor thought 
 conceived at high pressure, and executed without 
 a flaw or blemish. A man of the best quality will
 
 Keble. 187 
 
 do this two or three times in his life. Keble has 
 done it in " St. John," " Balaam," and " Christ's 
 Agony on the Cross." I will give first the 
 11 St. John :" 
 
 " ' Lord, and what shall this man do ? ' 
 
 Ask'st thou, Christian, for thy friend ? 
 
 If his love for Christ be true, 
 
 Christ hath told thee of his end : 
 
 This is he whom God approves, 
 
 This is he whom Jesus loves. 
 
 Ask not of him more than this, 
 
 Leave it in his Saviour's breast, 
 
 Whether, early call'd to bliss, 
 
 He in youth shall find his rest ; 
 
 Or armed in his station wait 
 
 Till his Lord be at the gate : 
 
 Whether in his lonely course 
 
 (Lonely, not forlorn) he stay, 
 Or with Love's supporting force 
 
 Cheat the toil and cheer the way : 
 Leave it all in His high hand 
 Who doth hearts as streams command. 
 
 Gales from heaven, if so He will, 
 
 Sweeter melodies can wake 
 On the lonely mountain rill 
 
 Than the meeting waters make. 
 Who hath the Father and the Son, 
 May be left, but not alone.
 
 1 88 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 Sick or healthful, slave or free, 
 
 Wealthy, or despised and poor 
 
 "What is that to him or thee, 
 
 So his love to Christ endure ? 
 
 When the shore is won at last, 
 
 Who will count the billows past ? 
 
 Only, since our souls will shrink 
 
 At the touch of natural grief, 
 When our earthly loved ones sink, 
 
 Lend us, Lord, Thy sure relief; 
 Patient hearts, their pain to see, 
 And Thy ^race, to follow Thee." 
 
 I will next produce " Balaam ;" but remember 
 that, whenever you read a poem of this kind, at 
 once devotional, historical, and imaginative, you 
 must have the whole of the subject in your memory 
 and in your mind's eye. Keble always supposes 
 that you know your Bible ; and in reading this 
 following poem of "Balaam" you must have the 
 whole of the history before you, and then the poem 
 will be like the music to that incomparable drama 
 then you will find it perfect throughout, full, but 
 not surcharged with ideas ; ingenious, yet clear, 
 pressing every incident into its service. Before I 
 read the poem, let the view of Balaam's dealings 
 with Balak pass before you. 
 
 First, the summons sent by the king to Balaam,
 
 Keble. 189 
 
 when he invited him to curse the people of Israel ; 
 then Balaam's eagerness to go ; God's veto, " Thou 
 shalt not go down ;" then Balaam's attempt to 
 extort an unwilling consent from God, lusting in 
 his soul after the gold and the silver of Balak ; 
 then remember how at last his prayer is granted 
 in wrath, as God often seems to grant our im- 
 petuous and peevish petitions in wrath when they 
 are not good for us ; then remember the angel in 
 the narrow path of the vineyard, with a drawn 
 sword, and the refusal of the ass to go on, and 
 Balaam's rage ; then his arrival, the meeting and 
 colloquy between Balak and Balaam Balaam 
 feeling himself powerless to please Balak, reluc- 
 tantly true to his prophetic mission, refusing to 
 commit himself to cursing the people of God, 
 declaring " what God puts in my mouth, that 
 only will I speak," and yet all the time longing 
 to curse ; then the successive bursts of prophecy, 
 finishing with the vision of the Messiah " I shall 
 see Him, but not now ; I shall behold Him, but 
 not nigh. There shall come a star out of Jacob, 
 and a sceptre shall arise out of Israel, and shall 
 smite the corners of Moab, and destroy all the 
 children of Sheth."
 
 1 90 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 With this history already moving before your 
 eyes like so many pictures, come we to the poem : 
 
 " O for a sculptor's hand ! 
 
 That thou might'st take thy stand, 
 Thy wild hair floating on the eastern breeze, 
 
 Thy tranced yet open gaze 
 
 Fix'd on the desert haze, 
 As one who deep in heaven some airy pageant sees ! 
 
 In outline dim and vast 
 
 Their fearful shadows cast, 
 The giant forms of Empires on their way 
 
 To ruin : one by one 
 
 They tower, and they are gone : 
 Yet in the Prophet's soul the dreams of avarice stay. 
 
 No sun or star so bright 
 
 In all the world of light 
 That they should draw to heaven his downward eye : 
 
 He hears th' Almighty's word, 
 
 He sees the angel's sword, 
 Yet low upon the earth his heart and treasure lie. 
 ***** 
 
 We in the tents abide 
 
 Which he at distance eyed 
 Like goodly cedars by the waters spread, 
 
 While seven red altar-fires 
 
 Rose up in wavy spires 
 Where on the mount he watch'd his sorceries dark and dread. 
 
 He watch'd till morning's ray 
 On lake and meadow lay, 
 And willow-shaded streams, that silent sweep
 
 Keble. 1 9 1 
 
 Around the banner'd lines, 
 Where by their several signs 
 The desert-wearied tribes in sight of Canaan sleep. 
 
 He watch'd, till knowledge came 
 
 Upon his soul like flame 
 Not of those magic fires at random caught ; 
 
 But true Prophetic light 
 
 Flash'd o'er him, high and bright 
 Flash'd once, and died away, and left his darken'd thought. 
 
 And can he choose but fear, 
 
 Who feels his God so near 
 That, when he fain would curse, his powerless tongue, 
 
 In blessing only moves? 
 
 Alas ! the world he loves 
 Too close around his heart her tangling veil hath flung. 
 
 Sceptre and Star divine, 
 
 Who in Thine inmost shrine 
 Hast made us worshippers, O claim Thine own ; 
 
 More than Thy seers we know 
 
 O teach our love to grow 
 Up to Thy heavenly light, and reap what Thou hast sown." 
 
 Here is one concluding poem, in which I think 
 Keble rises to even a higher level of continuous 
 inspiration. We have before us the spectacle of 
 Christ upon the Cross : He is offered the anodyne 
 of myrrh, and refuses to drink, preferring to suffer 
 the extreme agonies of the cross. I suppose the
 
 1 92 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 words are put into the mouth of some disciple, 
 who is eagerly longing that the Lord should be 
 spared some pain : 
 
 " ' Fill high the bowl, and spice it well, and pour 
 The dews oblivious : for the Cross is sharp, 
 The Cross is sharp, and He 
 Is tenderer than a lamb. 
 
 ' He wept by Lazarus' grave how will He bear 
 This bed of anguish ? and His pale weak form 
 Is worn with many a watch 
 Of sorrow and unrest. 
 
 ' His sweat last night was as great drops of blood ; 
 And the sad burthen press'd Him so to earth, 
 The very torturers paused 
 To help Him on His way. 
 
 ' Fill high the bowl, benumb His aching sense 
 With medicined sleep.' O awful in Thy woe ! 
 The parching thirst of death 
 Is on Thee, and Thou triest 
 
 The slumb'rous potion bland and wilt not drink : 
 Not sullen, nor in scorn, like haughty man 
 
 With suicidal hand 
 
 Putting his solace by : 
 
 But as at first Thine all-pervading look 
 Saw from Thy Father's bosom to th' abyss, 
 
 Measuring in calm presage 
 
 The infinite descent ;
 
 193 
 
 So to the end, though now of mortal pangs 
 Made heir, and emptied of thy glory awhile, 
 
 With unaverted eye 
 
 Thou meetest all the storm. 
 
 Thou wilt feel all, that Thou may'st pity all ; 
 And rather would'st Thou wrestle with strong pain 
 
 Than overcloud Thy soul, 
 
 So clear in agony, 
 
 Or lose one glimpse of heaven before the time. 
 O, most entire and perfect sacrifice, 
 
 Renew'd in every pulse 
 
 That on the tedious cross 
 
 Told the long hours of death, as, one by one, 
 The life-strings of that tender heart gave way. 
 
 E'en sinners, taught by Thee, 
 
 Look sorrow in the face, 
 
 And bid her freely welcome, unbeguiled 
 By false kind solaces and spells of earth ; 
 
 And yet not all unsoothed; 
 
 For when was joy so dear 
 
 As the deep calm that breathed ' Father forgive,' 
 Or, ' Be with me in Paradise to-day ? ' 
 
 And though the strife be sore, 
 
 Yet in his parting breath 
 
 Love masters agony ; the soul that seem'd 
 Forsaken, feels her present God again, 
 
 And in her Father's arms 
 
 Contented dies away.
 
 VII. 
 
 6eorge 
 
 SELECTED POEMS. 
 
 O 2
 
 VII. 
 
 George ffieitert, 
 
 SELECTED POEMS. 
 
 [E could scarcely have found a greater 
 contrast than that presented by George 
 Herbert and Keble, yet it is one which, 
 while it separates, yet draws these men toge- 
 ther. The one is the typical churchman of the 
 Elizabethan, the other of the Victorian age. But 
 Keble is without Herbert's humour, and Herbert is 
 without Keble's emotion. The one is the austere 
 Puritan, the other glows with Roman Catholic 
 fervour. Each embodies with fervid piety the 
 influence which happened at the time to be passing 
 over the Church of England. 
 
 With George Herbert we come upon the great 
 age when the English language became substan- 
 tially what it now is. Our language possessed 
 then a certain directness of expression, which we 
 are in some danger of losing. German, and French, 
 and Italian have since grown common in England,
 
 198 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 and consequently many words of foreign extraction 
 have been introduced into the English language ; 
 and although this has doubtless enriched our 
 tongue, yet it has been thought that we are in 
 danger of thereby losing something of our native 
 force and directness of expression. 
 
 In the old days men neither wrote nor spoke 
 so much as they do now, but they wrote and 
 spoke very much to the purpose ; hence there is 
 a wonderful and condensed force and vigour in 
 the language of Shakespeare, Milton, and George 
 Herbert ; and the translators of our Bible, the 
 framers of our Liturgy, shared these gifts. For this 
 reason I do not wish to see a new translation, or 
 a new Prayer Book, because the old ones belong 
 to the classic age of English literature. 
 
 Between Shakespeare (1564) and Milton (1608), 
 as between two suns of surpassing brilliancy, lie a 
 host of minor poets stars of lesser magnitude 
 but not for that reason to be overlooked. 
 
 Indeed the Elizabethan age is best read by the 
 light of the Elizabethan poets, and an age so com- 
 plex needs all the light that can be thrown upon 
 it. Perhaps at no time since England had become 
 a nation was there such a strange and sudden 
 fusion of old and new ideas.
 
 George Herbert. 199 
 
 Through the printing-press books got to be 
 numerous beyond all precedent, and the middle- 
 age giant of popular ignorance lay sick unto 
 death. 
 
 Through the discovery of the Bible to the million, 
 the phantom of Roman Catholic superstition had 
 been, if not laid, at all events considerably dwarfed. 
 
 Through the revival of art and literature in Italy, 
 English taste had been reached, and quickened 
 into new life. Music, painting, architecture, and 
 classical study were national pursuits. 
 
 Piratical enterprise brought to light new aspects 
 of life in Africa and America, whilst commercial 
 enterprise opened up new avenues of wealth. The 
 English navy established fora time our supremacy 
 by sea, whilst the fortunate issue of internal war 
 and intrigue ended in the union of Scotland and 
 England under one crown. 
 
 That such changes could go on without materially 
 affecting the government of the country, was 
 hardly to be expected. Popular religion and popular 
 education invariably precede a cry for popular 
 government. But between the two great struggles 
 in England there came a pause. Elizabeth's suc- 
 cessor, James I. of England and VI. of Scotland, 
 occupied that short space of time between the
 
 2OO Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 great religious and the great political revolutions. 
 The Reformation of Henry VIII. was passed ; the 
 Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell had not yet arrived. 
 It would be an interesting study to trace the above- 
 mentioned various and exciting influences as they 
 appear reflected in that great burst of song which 
 marks what we call the Elizabethan period. With 
 a kind of feverish activity the poets of the time 
 seemed to embrace everything in heaven and 
 earth. 
 
 Shakespeare reigns supreme in the kingdom of 
 human nature ; he is followed by a host of drama- 
 tists. Spenser discourses sweetly in the language 
 of mythology and symbolism, standing alone in the 
 profusion of his imagery, the melody of his verse, 
 and the incomparable vigour and lightness of his 
 fancy. After him we have poets treating on every 
 secular subject, and reflecting every phase of thought 
 and feeling, as in Phineas and Giles Fletcher, 
 extending down to simple geography, as in the 
 case of Michael Drayton. Then there are poets 
 half religious, half secular, such as Donne ; witty, 
 sentimental, pious, by turns, neat in epigrams, 
 eloquent in epitaphs. Yet not even Donne pre- 
 sents such a strange mixture as good Sir John
 
 George Herbert. 201 
 
 Davies, whose two best known works are a poem 
 on " Dancing," and another on the " Immortality 
 of the Soul." 
 
 The purely religious spirit is never in any age 
 long in the background, and in the midst of 
 these conflicting elements it kept steadily to the 
 front ; the new wine of the Reformation entered 
 into everything ; every educated person knew the 
 points in dispute had strong religious opinions ; 
 most read their Bibles with avidity ; and specula- 
 tions on doctrine, often at the expense of practice, 
 were unusually rife. Religious truth and the reli- 
 gious life were subjects of universal interest, and 
 it would have been strange indeed if they had 
 not found their poets. The best, the wisest, the 
 quaintest, the most holy of them all, was George 
 Herbert. 
 
 Partly a consequence of, partly a protest against, 
 a theology-loving age, he was constantly calling 
 men back from subtleties to saintliness, from doc- 
 trinal theology to practical religion ; but as the 
 mind and method of the man will best be seen in 
 his life and works, we present the reader with a 
 few details of the one, and a few notes and extracts 
 from the other.
 
 2O2 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 I. LIFE OF GEORGE HERBERT. George was 
 the fifth son of Richard Herbert, a descendant of 
 the famous William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, 
 who lived in the reign of Edward IV. He was 
 born on the 3rd of April, 1593, in Montgomery 
 Castle, near the town of that name. The castle 
 belonged to his family, but passed out of their 
 hands during the Great Rebellion, and was laid 
 level with the dust a few years afterwards. 
 
 His mother, Magdalen, who also came of a dis- 
 tinguished family the Newports was one of the 
 most accomplished women of the age. She num- 
 bered amongst her intimate friends Sir Henry 
 Wotton and Dr. Donne ; and the latter ingenious 
 divine has left us many records of her piety, in- 
 tellect, and beauty. He writes and there can be 
 no doubt of whom 
 
 " No spring nor summer beauty has such grace 
 As I have seen in an autumnal face. 
 In all her words, to every hearer fit, 
 You may at revels or at council sit." 
 
 This admirable woman exercised an extraordi- 
 nary influence over all her children ; and as she 
 was left a widow when little George was only four 
 years old, she had to use her discretion in mould-
 
 George Herbert. 203 
 
 ing one of the gentlest, but at the same time one 
 of the keenest and most original, minds of that 
 time. George passed, at the age of twelve, to 
 Westminster School, where he attracted the atten- 
 tion of his masters by his precocious wit and ex- 
 traordinary facility for the classics ; he also won 
 the hearts of his schoolfellows by his warm and 
 generous nature, and his sweet and genial manners. 
 At fifteen, having gained a King's Scholarship, he 
 was elected for Trinity College, Cambridge, and 
 settled there about 1608. His mother, who had 
 followed his brother to college, and taken up her 
 abode near the town, does not seem to have been 
 so anxious about George. She had, however, 
 warned him that " our souls do insensibly take in 
 vice by the example or conversation with wicked 
 company, and that the very knowledge of wicked- 
 ness was as tinder to inflame and kindle sin, and 
 keep it burning." And George in his turn soon 
 proved that her counsels were not bestowed in 
 vain. In his first year at Cambridge he writes to 
 her his indignation at the many love poems that 
 were daily writ and consecrated to Venus, be- 
 wailing that so few were writ that looked towards 
 God and heaven ; and concludes with the follow-
 
 2O4 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 ing memorable words : " For my own part, my 
 meaning, dear mother, is in these sonnets (en- 
 closed) to declare my resolution to be that my 
 poor abilities in poetry shall be all and ever 
 consecrated to God's glory." 
 
 At this time he had no intention of entering the 
 church ; yet thus early and thus half-unconsciously 
 was the key-note of his future greatness struck. 
 He graduated in 1611, was made Fellow of his 
 college in 1615, and became Public Orator in 1619. 
 
 And now it must be said that at this time George 
 Herbert was fond of fine clothes, particular in his 
 associates, proud of his family, distant though not 
 uncourteous to his inferiors, and was thought to 
 have the finest manners of any in the University. 
 He so ably discharged the elegant functions of 
 Orator, which consisted chiefly in making suitable 
 Latin speeches in the presence of the University 
 whenever degrees were conferred or great people 
 had to be eulogized, that he attracted before long 
 the attention of James I., himself a scholar and 
 writer of some pretensions. The two found each 
 other's society so congenial, that Mr. Herbert 
 began to desert University life for the Court, and 
 indeed was constantly in attendance on the King.
 
 George Herbert. 205 
 
 Sir Francis Bacon, " the great secretary of nature 
 and all learning," courted his acquaintance ; and 
 good Bishop Andrews so admired him, that he 
 carried about him a letter in Greek from Herbert 
 to the last day of his life. And amongst other 
 powerful friends we may here mention the Duke 
 of Richmond and the Marquis of Hamilton. 
 
 Visions of earthly glory now rose before him. 
 He found the University disagreed with him. 
 Politics seemed a larger sphere, more suited to 
 his taste and capacities ; he had a ready wit and 
 a subtle mind, and looked forward to occupy- 
 ing some high position in the State ; but " God 
 disposes." The glittering prospect opened but to 
 close. Suddenly all his most powerful friends 
 seemed to die or be taken away from him. The 
 Duke of Richmond, and then the Marquis of 
 Hamilton, and shortly afterwards his great patron, 
 the king, were stricken down by his side ; and he 
 found himself in a changed Court, with a king 
 that knew him not, and alien faces around him. 
 
 Whether about this time he grew tired of 
 worldly vanities, saw the hollowness of earthly 
 ambitjons, or could not stoop to become one of a 
 crowd of new and obsequious courtiers, it is not
 
 206 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 easy to say ; but most probably his deeply religious 
 nature, which had been partially swamped by the 
 pleasures and ambitions of Court life, now arose 
 in its might, and clamoured for that supremacy 
 which it speedily acquired, and which it so firmly 
 retained to the close. He retired into the country, 
 gave up, apparently not without a struggle, the 
 prospects of a political career, and was for some 
 time much unsettled and disturbed in his mind. 
 He desired above all things to be useful : 
 
 " Now I am here, what wilt Thou do with me 
 
 None of my books will show ; 
 I read and sigh I wish I were a tree, 
 For then sure I should grow." 
 
 But he discovered that his genius was above all 
 religious, and that no sphere which did not bring 
 him into constant contact with spiritual things 
 would really meet the requirements of his soul. 
 He must serve man, but he must serve God, and 
 what tastes he had must be pressed into their 
 service, not paraded for their own sakes. All 
 attempts to rest in them were vain : " other lords 
 may have had dominion over him," but their time 
 was now passed. 
 
 He who had looked forward to being made
 
 George Herbert. 207 
 
 Secretary of State was now only ambitious to take 
 holy orders ; and to a Court friend, who rebuked 
 him for desiring an occupation so far below his 
 birth and great talents, he made the following 
 beautiful reply : " It hath been formerly judged 
 that the domestic servants of the King of Heaven 
 should be of the noblest families on earth ; and 
 though the iniquity of late times hath made 
 clergymen meanly valued, and the sacred name of 
 priest contemptible, yet I will labour to make it 
 honourable by consecrating all my learning and 
 all my poor abilities to advance the glory of that 
 God that gave them. And I will labour to be 
 like my Saviour, by making humility lovely in the 
 eyes of all men, and by following the merciful and 
 meek example of my dear Jesus." 
 
 Thus chastened in spirit, he entered upon the 
 small incumbency of Layton Ecclesia, in the dio- 
 cese of Lincoln, in 1626. 
 
 He found the church nearly in ruins, and with 
 characteristic energy resolved to rebuild it. He 
 was not rich, and could only look about him for 
 richer friends to help him. His mother's counsel 
 was for once disregarded. " George," she said, 
 " it is not for your weak body and empty purse to
 
 208 Poets in the Pulpit 
 
 undertake to build churches." But Herbert 
 answered with all respect, that he had made 
 a vow to God to rebuild the church ; and with the 
 assistance of his liberal friends, the Duke of Len- 
 nox, Sir Henry Herbert, Mr. Nicholas Farrer, and 
 some few others, he was able to perform the 
 task. 
 
 Isaak Walton tells us that he made the reading- 
 desk and pulpit both the same height, "because/' 
 said he, " prayer and preaching, being equally use- 
 ful, should agree like brethren, and have an equal 
 honour and estimation." In 1629, and in the thirty- 
 fourth year of his age, he was seized with a sharp 
 quotidian ague. His sufferings were at times in- 
 tense, and he would often cry out, " Lord, abate my 
 great affliction or increase my patience ;" and find- 
 ing the doctor's remedies of little use, he began to 
 cure himself by nearly total abstinence from every- 
 thing except a little salt meat. Being now re- 
 duced to great weakness, his friends vied with 
 each other in providing him with change of air 
 and every comfort. Lord Danvers loved him so 
 dearly that he had rooms set apart at Dauntsey 
 Hall, Wiltshire, and there Mr. Herbert enjoyed 
 perfect rest, moderate study, and much delightful
 
 George Herbert. 209 
 
 social intercourse. Here he fell in with a near 
 relation of the Earl's, one Mr. Danvers, who coun- 
 selled him to marry, and indeed offered him every 
 facility, for he himself had nine daughters, and 
 openly declared that he would like no one better 
 than Mr. Herbert for a son-in-law. 
 
 Jane appears to have been the favourite ; and 
 hearing so much of Mr. Herbert, she grew to love 
 him, when her father suddenly died, and the 
 family circle was thrown into confusion. But 
 they who had hitherto seen little of each other, 
 and had been lovers in theory and after quite a 
 Platonic fashion, were now to grow into a more 
 dear and intimate relationship. In a very little 
 time Jane became the wife of George Herbert, 
 whose health and spirits seemed greatly to revive, 
 and not long afterwards he was presented to his 
 last living, Bemerton, in Wiltshire, and prepared 
 to take priest's orders. 
 
 He had now but three years more to live, and he 
 entered upon this last brief period with as much 
 solemn preparation and earnest prayer as if he had 
 known that the night was coming in which no 
 man could work. 
 
 P
 
 2io Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 At his induction, according to custom he was 
 shut into Bemerton Church to toll the bell. His 
 friends waited for him at the church door. The 
 bell had long ceased, but still Herbert did not 
 appear. His friends grew anxious, and knocked 
 and knocked again without success. At last his 
 dear friend Mr. Woodnot stepped round, and 
 peeped in at the chancel window, and there he saw 
 Mr. Herbert lying on the altar-steps, not insensible, 
 but absorbed in deep devotion. It was then and 
 there that he made certain rules for the discipline 
 and management of his future life, and many of 
 them may be found in " The Country Parson," 
 under the headings, " The Parson's Knowledge," 
 "The Parson on Sundays," "The Parson Arguing," 
 "The Parson with his Churchwardens," "The 
 Parson in his Mirth," &c. 
 
 On the same night it was noticed that he was 
 unusually light-hearted and serene, and conversing 
 freely with Mr. Woodnot, he said, " I now look 
 back upon my aspiring thoughts, and think my- 
 self more happy than if I had attained what then 
 I so thirsted for." He was often heard to say 
 that he knew the ways of learning ; knew what 
 nature does willingly, and what when it is forced
 
 George Herbert. 211 
 
 by fire ; knew the ways of honour, and when glory 
 inclines the soul to noble expressions ; knew the 
 Court ; knew the ways of pleasure ; and upon what 
 terms he declined all these for the service of his 
 Master, Jesus Christ : and he rejoices 
 
 " That through these labyrinths not my grovelling wit, 
 
 But Thy silk twist, let down from heaven to me, 
 Did both conduct and teach me how by it 
 To climb to Thee." 
 
 Mr. Herbert now devoted himself to repair the 
 church and parsonage-house, and both he and his 
 wife were indefatigable in relieving the necessities 
 of their poor. 
 
 But the service of God and the cure of souls 
 were ever first in his thoughts. Twice a day the 
 family met in a little chapel close to the par- 
 sonage, and the parishioners soon learned to drop 
 in from the fields when they heard the little bell, 
 and joined Mr. Herbert in some of the church 
 prayers. 
 
 His love of the Reformed Prayer Book was 
 unbounded, and the whole of his preaching 
 turned upon explaining its various parts, and 
 trying to make that a reasonable and living ser- 
 vice which might otherwise degenerate into a 
 
 P 2
 
 212 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 dry and formal one. But Herbert felt the prayers 
 himself, and he made his people feel their power. 
 He read them slowly and impressively, pausing 
 occasionally to allow the people to collect their 
 thoughts, and offer up the prayers for them- 
 selves. 
 
 On Sunday morning he preached, and on Sun- 
 day afternoon after the Second Lesson he cate- 
 chized and instructed from the pulpit ; " and," says 
 his quaint biographer, I saak Walton perhaps as a 
 sly comment upon certain " learned and painful " 
 ministers " he never exceeded his half-hour, and 
 was always so happy as to have an obedient and 
 full congregation." 
 
 Mr. Herbert's favourite recreation was music, 
 and he often walked to and from Salisbury to 
 attend the meetings of his musical society. On 
 these walks he met friends and parishioners, and 
 never failed to indulge them with profitable advice 
 and elevated counsel. Meeting one day a minister 
 who complained of the lax morals of the laity, 
 Mr. Herbert told him plainly that the remedy was 
 for the clergy to live blameless lives. " This," he 
 continued, " would be a cure for the wickedness 
 and growing atheism of our age. And, my dear
 
 George Herbert. 2 1 3 
 
 brother, till this is done by us, and done in earnest, 
 let no man expect a reformation of the manners of 
 the laity." He was of all men most helpful he 
 knew how to provide clothing for the poor, food 
 for the hungry he could lend a hand at the 
 plough, and put his back to an overloaded cart, 
 and never was known to turn his face from any 
 poor man. His conversation was lively and full of 
 wit ; and though his own life was blameless, his 
 large knowledge of secular society made him 
 familiar with the sins of all classes, and in his 
 treatment of difficult cases he combined happily 
 the wisdom of the serpent with the innocence of 
 the dove. The quaintest and most homely allu- 
 sions crept into his sermons, and pointed much of 
 his religious poetry ; and he had the singular 
 merit of being plain and personal without vul- 
 garity, gentle without feebleness, and pious 
 without hypocrisy. 
 
 Thus loving and beloved, " wearing the white 
 flower of blameless" life, he drew to his close. 
 His constitution, naturally delicate, seemed never 
 to have recovered from the effects of the remedies 
 he'used during his severe illness. 
 
 His wife noticed with alarm his thinness and
 
 214 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 the growing pallor of his thoughtful face. He 
 read prayers with the greatest difficulty. It was 
 plain that consumption was making sure and 
 rapid strides ; and when implored to desist from 
 a work which he could no longer really perform, 
 he was fain to say, " I will not be wilful, for 
 though my spirit be willing, yet I find my flesh is 
 weak." 
 
 One month before his death came Mr. Duncan, 
 a clergyman, from a dear friend, to see him, and 
 bear back tidings of his condition. 
 
 " Sir," said Herbert, " I perceive from your habit 
 that you are a priest, and I desire you to pray 
 with me." 
 
 " What prayers ? " asked Mr. Duncan. 
 
 " Oh, sir, the prayers of my mother the Church 
 of England no others are equal to them ; but I 
 beg of you pray only the Litany, for I am weak 
 and faint." 
 
 " His discourse," says the same Duncan, "was 
 so pious, and his motion so genteel and meek, 
 that after almost forty years, yet they remain fresh 
 in my memory." 
 
 On hearing of his approaching death, Mr.
 
 George Herbert. 215 
 
 Woodnot, the same that had surprised him praying 
 in the chancel, hurried to his bedside ; but so 
 great was Mr. Herbert's calm, that sorrow and 
 sighing seemed to flee away from his presence, 
 and his words sounded not so much like those 
 of a dying man, as fragments of heavenly melody 
 chanted on this side the grave ; as he lay faint, 
 but filled with divine meditations, he would say, 
 " I now look back upon the pleasures of my life 
 past, and see the content I have taken in beauty, 
 in wit, in pleasant conversation, and all these are 
 now past by me like a dream, or as a shadow that 
 returns not. And my hope is that I shall shortly 
 leave this valley of tears, and be free from all 
 fever and pain, and, which is better, free from sin, 
 and this being past I shall dwell in the New 
 Jerusalem ; and this is my content, that I am 
 going daily towards it, and that I shall live the less 
 time for having lived this and the day past." 
 And a little before his death he observed to Mr. 
 Woodnot, " My dear friend, I am sorry I have no- 
 thing to present to my merciful God, but sin and 
 misery ; but the first is pardoned, and a few hours 
 will now put a period to the latter, for I shall 
 suddenly go hence and be no more seen."
 
 2 i6 Poets in tlie Pulpit. 
 
 Soon after, he swooned away ; but recovering 
 himself, he said to those about his bed, " I have 
 passed a conflict with my last enemy, and have 
 overcome him by the merits of my Master, Jesus." 
 
 He then desired his will to be brought, and 
 making Mr. Woodnot his executor, commended 
 unto him his wife and nieces. Then, growing very 
 faint, he was heard to say, "I am now ready to 
 die ; Lord, forsake me not now my strength 
 faileth ; Lord, Lord, now receive my soul ; " and 
 so passed away. 
 
 George Herbert died in his thirty-ninth year, 
 and was buried on the 3rd of March, 1632, at 
 Bemerton. His wife survived him many years, 
 and afterwards became the wife of Sir Robert 
 Cook, of Highnam, by whom she had her first and 
 only child, a girl. She died in 1663, and is buried 
 at Highnam. 
 
 II. GEORGE HERBERT'S POETRY. George 
 Herbert was a most eloquent scholar, and wrote 
 a great deal of excellent Latin poetry, but he 
 has won the love of all religious hearts by " The 
 Temple," a collection of poems published after 
 his death, and bearing upon public worship, 
 private devotion, and practical religion.
 
 George Herbert. 217 
 
 As a poet, Herbert had many imitators, but no 
 rivals. Tricks of his style and tempers of his 
 mind have been caught with success ; but the in- 
 comparable mixture of pathos, sublimity, piety, 
 subtlety, quaintness, and common sense, remains 
 unimitated and inimitable. The constant object 
 he had in view was to use poetry for man's good 
 and God's glory, as much as other writers abused 
 it to man's harm and God's dispraise. As another 
 holy man thought it ill that the devil should have 
 all the good tunes, so Herbert would not let him 
 have all the good poems. There is a queer 
 worldly-wise tone about him sometimes, as who 
 should say, " I know your manners, my worldly 
 friends, and I adopt your dialect to catch you." 
 He may write outside" Love songs;" but the love 
 is Divine, not human. He possessed the faculty 
 of expressing Divine truth in an odd way, and the 
 power of pressing everything, however trivial, into 
 the service of Heaven. " The birds that drink 
 and straight lift up their heads," teach us to taste 
 of joy, but look to heavenly things " the winds 
 and waters here below do flee and flow," like the 
 tem-pestuous times that " amaze poor mortals " 
 the flowers of earth tell of the Paradise of God
 
 218 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 the lark's voice becomes a reprover of man, 
 the bees are called on to sting him to industry, 
 and by a ladder of sunbeams he is bid climb up 
 to heaven. 
 
 At times, such is the happy confusion of his 
 imagery that heaven and earth seemed inter- 
 changeable terms both paid him wages, and he 
 could often hear 
 
 " Church bells beyond the stars." 
 
 We are all by turns taken into his confidence. 
 His soul is often laid bare in its inmost recesses, 
 his struggles are not withheld, his triumphs are 
 not concealed, and he constantly calls us to share 
 in his own sublime hopes and imperishable con- 
 solations. Meanwhile, nothing at times can be 
 more quaint and homely than his language ; we 
 think he must have spoken just so. He meets us 
 by the way, and begins thinking out loud. 
 
 Now he is in the garden, now in the tool-house, 
 now by the wayside, now packing up to go away ; 
 anything supplies him with an illustration : 
 
 " The most of me to heaven is fled, 
 My thoughts and joys are all pack'd up and gone." 
 
 He has noticed the use of a gimlet, and says
 
 George Herbert. 219 
 
 " No scrue, no piercer can 
 
 Into a piece of timber work and winde, 
 As God's afflictions into man." 
 
 A cupboard with a key in it, unlocked, has caught 
 his eye 
 
 " Joy, I did lock thee up ; but some bad man 
 Did let thee out again." 
 
 He has noticed wares put out for sale on some 
 shop counter, and tells us that in God's great 
 mart of the world there are " afflictions sorted 
 anguish of all sizes," 
 
 No doubt his poetry attracted many readers of 
 that day by poetical conceits now out of date, but 
 then fashionable. Thus, we have a poem called 
 " Heaven" 
 
 " O who will show me those delights on high ? 
 
 Echo I ! 
 Thou, Echo, thou art mortal, all men know. 
 
 Echo No!" 
 
 And in another, about Christ, we have 
 
 " To my broken heart He was / ease you ; 
 And to my whole \sjesu" 
 
 And probably the following elegant fancy would 
 nofr be tolerated in these days. Speaking of the 
 Apostles as lights in the world, he says
 
 220 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 " The sunne, which once did shine alone, 
 
 Hung down his head and wished for night, 
 When he beheld twelve sunnes for one 
 Going about the world and giving light." 
 
 But if at times he was fanciful, he was more 
 often directly practical, and gives us to know our 
 business as probably no other poet before or after 
 has ever done. 
 
 When the church bell rings, we are told to hurry 
 off and get in before service begins. 
 
 "Oh, be drest; . 
 
 Stay not for the other pin ; why, thou hast lost 
 A joy for it worth worlds." 
 
 And to all spendthrifts he gives counsel : 
 
 " By no means run in debt ; take thine own measure ; 
 Who cannot live on twenty pounds a year, cannot on forty." 
 
 We have dwelt upon these minor points because 
 his great merits are known to every one. The 
 pathos of " Sacrifice," with its recurring refrain, 
 "Was ever grief like Mine ?" has perhaps never 
 been surpassed. The tender grace of " Vertue," 
 better known as " Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so 
 bright," is familiar to all. The little poem of 
 " The Call," short, condensed, and perfect, is less 
 widely known :
 
 George Herbert. 221 
 
 " Come, my Way, my Truth, my Life ; 
 
 Such a Way as gives us breath, 
 Such a Truth as ends all strife, 
 Such a Life as killeth death. 
 
 Come, my Light, my Feast, my Strength ; 
 
 Such a Light as shows us feast, 
 Such a Feast as mends in length, 
 
 Such a Strength as makes his guest 
 
 Come, my Joy, my Love, my Heart ; 
 
 Such a Joy as none can move, 
 Such a Love as none can part, 
 
 Such a Heart as joyes in love." 
 
 Among other poems to be read for ever, we 
 may mention " The Quip," " Businesse," " Love 
 Unknown," and " Discipline." We cite these, not 
 to exclude any, but as being beautiful where all 
 are fair. 
 
 Like every true poet, in one way George Herbert 
 belongs to no age, and in another he is the most 
 perfect reflection of his own. We are sometimes 
 reminded of the archaic forms and quaint fun of 
 Chaucer ; at others the rich melody and majestic 
 dignity of Milton seems anticipated ; whilst again, 
 there are passages which so exactly hit the ana- 
 lytical temper of our own deeply self-conscious age, 
 that it is hard to believe that the author of the " In
 
 222 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 Memoriam " has not been directly or indirectly 
 indebted to them. 
 
 From what has been said it is evident that 
 George Herbert was a man of great force and in- 
 dividuality ; and this is indeed why his poems have 
 retained their popularity. Condensed into that 
 little book, the "Works of George Herbert," are 
 poems which touch upon every part of the Church 
 Service. Here also, human life is passed in brief 
 but graphic review; whilst the duties of a clergy- 
 man, as Herbert conceived them, are succinctly 
 laid down. Into this small book is really epitomized 
 the life-work of a great man. Here is power which 
 might have ruled a kingdom. Indeed in the judg- 
 ment of those who knew him, this quaint poet 
 would have risen high in the State, and aspired 
 to the greatest worldly distinction ; but had he done 
 this he would never perhaps have reached so many 
 hearts, or have done so much good to succeeding 
 generations. 
 
 I will now summarize certain features or charac- 
 teristics of George Herbert. Perhaps the first 
 which strikes the reader is his profound attach-
 
 George Herbert. 223 
 
 ment to the English Church, and his profound 
 belief in the Book of Common Prayer. The 
 reason was simply this. Both were, to him and 
 his age, new sensations. To us, they are as 
 well-worn and familiar institutions. The church 
 is old, and the Prayer Book, however rehabilitated 
 with high church fervour, is worn. But imagine 
 the feelings of an ardent churchman in those days 
 towards the Bible in the English tongue, and the 
 National Church of England, newly freed from 
 Romish fetters, lifeless forms, and oppressive 
 taxes. 
 
 Suddenly, the Latin mumblings of priests often 
 unintelligible to themselves, mostly inaudible to 
 the people cease ; the prayers of the church are 
 put into English, and the Bible is restored to the 
 people in the vulgar tongue ; thousands read for 
 the first time its wondrous narratives ; the clergy 
 encourage and assist in the perusal ; once more 
 the church gives literature and education to the 
 new world, as the Roman Catholic Church gave 
 it to the old world which had passed away for 
 ever ; the sermons become living, instead of dry, 
 formal, and scholastic ; the public offices of 
 religion are transformed, and tawdry decoration
 
 224 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 makes way for glowing faith, the sense yielding to 
 the spirit. And the three forces which were seen 
 and felt to be actually producing these blessed 
 effects were, the Church, the Bible, and the Prayer 
 Book. 
 
 All this you must realize before you can under- 
 stand the kind of enthusiasm, devoted attachment, 
 and unlimited faith, which George Herbert, in 
 common with the reformers, bishops, and clergy 
 of the Church of England, professed for that 
 admirable religious institution. 
 
 The Reformed Church, with its Reformed Prayer 
 Book, and open Bible : armed with these, George 
 Herbert seems to have felt he could go anywhere, 
 and do anything. The most hardened sinner, the 
 most open infidel, might easily be converted, if he 
 could be enticed into the church, where he could 
 not fail to be fascinated by its admirable services, 
 
 Indeed, I would to God we had this same 
 spirit, which Keble has done much to revive in 
 our day with his " Christian Year." I would that 
 we could pour life once more into the formu- 
 laries, so that they might reach the hearts of 
 the people. And if we take George Herbert's 
 hints we shall be able to do something towards
 
 George Herbert. 225 
 
 this, for he worked from the spirit within to the 
 letter without, and found fervour in the Prayer Book 
 because he brought devotion in his heart. Yet was 
 George Herbert the last man to be under bondage 
 to forms ; he understood their right function ; " be- 
 cause they are the earthen vessel which contains 
 the living treasure, therefore should they be made 
 the fit receptacle of it." 
 
 Hear him, then, on the Prayer Book : his deep 
 faith is calm and sober, and in it we indeed miss 
 the high temperature, and religious passion of 
 Keble ; but on the other hand he is very direct and 
 straightforward, and free alike from dryness and 
 exaggeration. 
 
 THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER. 
 
 " What, prayer by the book ? and common ? 
 
 Yes. Why not ? 
 The spirit of grace 
 And supplication 
 
 Is not left free alone 
 For time and place ; 
 
 But manner too. To read, or speak by rote, 
 Is all alike to him that prays 
 With 's heart that with his mouth he says 
 
 They that in private by themselves alone 
 
 Do pray, may take 
 What liberty they please 
 
 Q
 
 226 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 In choosing of the ways 
 
 Wherein to make 
 
 Their souls' most intimate affections known 
 To Him that sees in secret, when 
 They are most conceal'd from other men. 
 
 But he that unto others leads the way 
 
 In public prayer, 
 Should choose to do it so 
 As all that hear may know 
 
 They need not fear 
 
 To tune their hearts unto his tongue, and say 
 Amen ; nor doubt they were betray'd 
 To blaspheme when they should have pray'd. 
 
 Devotion will add life unto the letter. 
 
 And why should not 
 That which authority 
 Prescribes esteemed be 
 
 Advantage got ? 
 
 If the prayer be good, the commoner the better. 
 Prayer in the church's words, as well 
 As sense, of all prayers bears the bell." 
 
 And when he comes to the pulpit he is still more 
 homely ; indeed I think we .hear in the voice of 
 George Herbert almost the last of our great Re- 
 formation preachers and humourists of the pulpit. 
 The strange and forcible language of Ridley and 
 Latimer was no doubt a great reaction from the 
 wretched homilies and Latin discourses ; and in
 
 George Herbert. 227 
 
 truth, homeliness is a gift which the pulpit is 
 constantly losing, and as constantly compelled 
 to recover if souls are to be won. Indeed so 
 parched up have congregations been with the dry- 
 ness and formality of preaching, that some have 
 openly declared that anything which is likely to 
 do a man good, is good enough for the pulpit. 
 You, my friends, who may sometimes criticize the 
 fulness and freedom of pulpit speech, would be 
 astonished were you to read some of the sermons 
 of Ridley and Latimer : you would think them ex- 
 ( fernery coarse; and sometimes they were so flatly 
 humorous that the people were quite unable to 
 keep their countenances while those good men 
 preached. We need not disguise the fact. Some 
 of the greatest preachers have also been the 
 great humorists. Indeed Carlyle, the saddest 
 of living moralists and lay preachers, is also the 
 greatest living humorist. It is also observable 
 that the most noted Italian and French preachers 
 of our own century have been habitually obliged 
 to restrain the spontaneous ebullitions of feeling, 
 which their forcible contrasts and living thrusts 
 have called forth. And I can well believe that 
 George Herbert was such an one, and that if he 
 
 Q 2
 
 228 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 could sometimes bring home a truth by a vigorous 
 simile and more vigorous contrast, he would not 
 hesitate to make a man feel the absurdity of his be- 
 haviour, where he might have failed to convince him 
 of its sin. Some men may be shamed into the 
 performance of that which the moral sense alone 
 is too feebly developed to enforce ; so that when 
 George Herbert treats of the pulpit in this poem, 
 you will see how quaint he is, how unscrupulous in 
 his use of surprises, and in the swift scene-shifting 
 of speech : 
 
 " 'Tis dinner-time ; and now I look 
 For a full meal. God send me a good cook ; 
 
 This is the dresser-board, and here 
 I wait in expectation of good cheer. 
 
 I'm sure the Master of the house 
 Enough to entertain his guests allows ; 
 And not enough of some one sort alone, 
 But choice of what best fitteth every one. 
 
 God grant me taste and stomach good : 
 My feeding will diversify my food. 
 
 'Tis a good appetite to eat, 
 And good digestion, that makes good meat. 
 
 The best food in itself will be, 
 Not fed on well, poison, not food, to me. 
 Let him that speaks look to his words ; my ear 
 Must careful be, both what and how I hear.
 
 George Herbert. 229 
 
 Like an invited guest I will 
 Be bold, but mannerly withal, sit still 
 
 And see what the Master of the feast 
 Will carve unto me, and account that best 
 
 Which He doth choose for me, not I 
 Myself desire ; yea, though I should espy 
 Some fault in the dressing, in the dishing, or 
 The placing, yet I will not it abhor. 
 
 So that the meat be wholesome, though 
 The sauce shall not be toothsome, I'll not go 
 
 Empty away, and starve my soul, 
 To feed my foolish fancy ; but control 
 
 My appetite to dainty things, 
 Which oft instead of strength diseases brings : 
 But, if my pulpit-hopes shall all prove vain, 
 I'll back into the reading pew again." 
 
 And in another place, on dull preaching : " Do 
 not grudge to pick out treasures from an earthen 
 pot. The worst speak something good : if all 
 want sense, God takes a text and preaches 
 patience." 
 
 Of pithy aphorisms there is indeed no end : 
 
 " A verse may find him who a sermon flies." 
 Or on drinking too much, 
 
 "It is most just to throw that on the ground ; 
 Which would throw me there if I kept the round."
 
 230 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 Or upon getting into debt, 
 
 " By no means run in debt ; take thine own measure ; 
 Who cannot live on twenty pounds a year, cannot on forty." 
 
 Of course, you will remember that 2o/. a year 
 in those days was not what 2O/. is now, but repre- 
 sented a much larger sum. Or on gambling, 
 
 " Play not for gain, but sport. 
 Who plays for more than he can lose with pleasure 
 Breaks his heart, perhaps his wife's too, 
 And whom she bore." 
 
 The poem on money, called " Avarice," is a 
 more sustained flight, but scarcely less pungent 
 than these shorter utterances : 
 
 " Money, thou bane of bliss, and source of woe, 
 
 Whence comest thou, that thou art so fresh and fine ? 
 I know thy parentage is base and low : 
 
 Man found thee, poor and dirty, in a mine. 
 
 Surely thou didst so little contribute 
 
 To this great kingdom which thou now hast got, 
 
 That he was fain, when thou wast destitute, 
 To dig thee out of thy dark cave and grot. 
 
 Then forcing thee, by fire he made thee bright ; 
 
 Nay, thou hast got the face of man ; for we 
 Have with our stamp and seal transferr'd our right : 
 
 Thou art the man, and man but dross to thee. 
 
 Man calleth thee his wealth, who made thee rich ; 
 And while he digs out thee, falls in the ditch."
 
 George Herbert. 2 3 1 
 
 Now the " conceits " or, what we may call the 
 affectations of George Herbert, belong to his 
 period, and there are some very strange ones, 
 with which we are not perhaps wholly in sympathy 
 in these days ; as for instance, when he writes a 
 poem on the " Altar," and prints it in lines intended 
 to represented the shape of an altar ; or again, two 
 verses called " Angels' Wings," printed in lines 
 intended to represent wings. There are other 
 verbal juggleries, which are not much in the taste 
 of to-day, especially when applied to religious 
 subjects; as where in a poem before alluded to 
 he says that the name of Jesus is so dear to him, 
 and that one day he broke the frame containing 
 the letters of that sacred name, and was at first 
 in despair to see all the letters J, E, S, U, fall 
 on the ground. Then he picked them up and 
 began to arrange them first I, or J, then i, e, s, u, 
 one after another in order, and was transported to 
 find his new consolation in the discovery that, 
 so treated, they made " I ease you " Jesu ! 
 
 There is another poem, which I will now cite, 
 which abounds with what I must call the affecta- 
 tions of the age, showing the way in which literary 
 men of Elizabeth's time played with their thoughts.
 
 232 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 The poem is called " Paradise." It is con- 
 structed in this way ; you take a word for the end 
 of the first line, then the next line ends with the 
 same word minus one letter, and the third line 
 with the same word minus two letters, and so on. 
 For instance, he begins with " grow " for the last 
 word of the first line, and then follow " row," and 
 "owe." Then come " start," "tart," and "art." 
 Then the word " charm," which is followed by 
 "harm" and "arm," and so on. Still this little 
 poem, though hampered by this affected form, is 
 so exquisite that unless attention were called to 
 its quaint construction you would hardly notice 
 it. Indeed " Paradise " is the perfection of poetic 
 
 neatness : 
 
 " I bless Thee, Lord, because I grow 
 Among Thy trees, which in a row 
 To Thee both fruit and order ow. 
 
 What open force, or hidden charm, 
 Can blast my fruit, or bring me harm 
 While the enclosure is Thine arm ? 
 
 Inclose me still, for fear I start ; 
 Be to me rather sharp and tart, 
 Than let me want thy hand and art. 
 
 When thou dost greater judgments spare, 
 And with thy knife but prune and pare, 
 E'en fruitful trees more fruitful are.
 
 George Herbert. 233 
 
 Such sharpness shows the sweetest friend : 
 Such cuttings rather heal than rend : 
 And such beginnings touch their end." 
 
 George Herbert's treatment of Death is peculiar. 
 How different is the grim vision from Longfellow's 
 Angel of Refuge bearing the tender blossom away 
 to the fields of light above ! very different too 
 from Tennyson's veiled Nemesis, severing friend 
 from friend ; or from Keble's avenging Minister of 
 Sin. George Herbert's Death is a sort of gaunt 
 spectre, such as meets us in Holbein's " Dance of 
 Death;" it is the once popular skull and cross-bones 
 conception grotesque, and somewhat ridiculous. 
 Death occurs to George Herbert as a creature 
 to be despised, to be flouted, to be trampled under 
 foot, or to be held up to scorn. It is the voice of 
 St. Paul, with a difference : " O Death, where is 
 thy sting ? O Grave, where is thy victory ? " He 
 looks into the grinning skull, and derides the 
 miserable symbol of our perishable part, as if that 
 could affront him with its vain terrors ! 
 
 I notice that in the Elizabethan era the age 
 in which England was but half emancipated from 
 Rome and its symbols this was the prevailing tone 
 of thought about Death. Not only was murder
 
 234 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 extremely popular on the stage, as might well be 
 the case in an age accustomed to the wholesale 
 massacre of religious persecution, and the public 
 spectacle of torture ; but the religious symbols of 
 death, the accompaniments of Golgotha, were 
 largely worn as ornaments, were treated and handled 
 familiarly. Skulls were produced on the stage ; 
 ladies wore cross-bones in gold, and ivory, and silver; 
 and the watches of gallants were made in the shape 
 of skulls. Was it a semi-religious instinct, con- 
 serving at any cost the images which met the eye 
 of the Catholic devotee on every altar, and at the 
 foot of every crucifix ? Or was it the wanton and 
 irreverent treatment of objects which but lately 
 had been associated with the highest religious 
 rites rites now repudiated as Popish, and mocked 
 at in the fervour of the reformed faith ? Perhaps 
 both instincts mingled, and help to explain the 
 fascination and wide popularity of the ignoble 
 grotesque Death, together with the semi-ridicule 
 apparent alike in Germany's great painter, Holbein, 
 and in England's great poe.t, George Herbert. 
 But how pungent and easily triumphant is the 
 Christian's short dialogue with the skeleton ! 
 
 " Chr. Alas, poor Death ! where is thy glory ? 
 
 Where is thy famous force, thy ancient sting ?
 
 George Herbert. 235 
 
 Dea. Alas, poor mortal, void of story ! 
 
 Go spell and read how I have kill'd thy King. 
 
 Chr. Poor Death ! and who was hurt thereby ? 
 
 Thy curse being laid on Him who makest thee accurst. 
 
 Dea, Let losers talk ; yet, thou shall die : 
 These arms shall crush thee. 
 
 Chr. Spare not ; do thy worst. 
 
 I shall be one day better than before : 
 Thou so much worse, that thou shall be no more." 
 
 More sweet and solemn, but not less charac- 
 teristic, is the following : 
 
 " Death, thou wast once an uncouth hideous thing, 
 Nothing bul bones, 
 The sad effecl of sadder groans : 
 Thy moulh was open but thou couldst not sing. 
 
 But since our Saviour's death did put some blood 
 
 Into thy face, 
 
 Thou art grown fair and full of grace, 
 Much in request, much sought for as a good. 
 
 For we do now behold thee gay and glad, 
 
 As at dooms' day, 
 
 When souls shall wear their new array, 
 And all thy bones wilh beauly shall be clad. 
 
 Therefore we can go die asleep, and trust 
 
 Half that we have 
 
 Unto an honest faithful grave 
 Making our pillows either down or dust."
 
 236 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 I said that George Herbert seldom kindled into 
 anything like poetic passion or fervour, but his 
 verse is sometimes radiant with a certain chastened 
 lustre, all the more effective because so brief, so 
 condensed. 
 
 Here the short bursts of verse come fresh from 
 the penitent heart, like the broken sobs of a child, 
 as in " Discipline :" 
 
 " Throw away Thy rod, 
 Throw away Thy wrath 
 
 my God ; 
 Take the gentle path. 
 
 For my heart's desire 
 Unto Thine is bent : 
 
 1 aspire 
 To a full consent. 
 
 Not a word or look 
 I affect to own ; 
 
 But by book, 
 And Thy book alone. 
 
 Though I fail, I weep : 
 Though I halt in pace, 
 
 Yet I creep 
 To the throne of grace. 
 
 Then let wrath remove ; 
 Love will do the deed : 
 
 For with love 
 Stony hearts will bleed.
 
 George Herbert. 237 
 
 Love is swift of foot ; 
 Love's a man of war, 
 
 And can shoot, 
 And can hit from far. 
 
 Who can 'scape his bow ? 
 That which wrought on Thee, 
 
 Brought Thee low. 
 Needs must work on me; 
 
 Throw away Thy rod : 
 Though man frailties hath, 
 
 Thou art God ; 
 Throw away Thy wrath." 
 
 We have another form of devotional passion in 
 the low, subdued, and poetic melancholy, rising 
 at the close into a burst of Divine joy, in the little 
 poem called " Virtue :" 
 
 " Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright ; 
 The bridal of the earth and sky : 
 The dew shall weep thy fall to-night, 
 For thou must die. 
 
 Sweet rose, whose hue angry and brave 
 Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye, 
 Thy root is ever in its grave, 
 
 And thou must die. 
 
 Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses, 
 A box where sweets compacted lie, 
 My music shows ye have your closes, 
 And all must die.
 
 238 Poets in the Pidpit. 
 
 Only a sweet and virtuous soul, 
 Like season'd timber, never gives ; 
 But though the whole world turn to coal, 
 Then chiefly lives." 
 
 We cannot more fitly close our meditations on 
 George Herbert, than by listening to a poem 
 on the highest level of emotion ever reached by 
 Herbert. It is almost of the nature of ejaculatory 
 prayer, and represents that central principle of 
 spiritual life which ever proclaims the silent, un- 
 uttered, and unutterable thoughts to be beyond all 
 words ; and the speaker feeling this, yet feeling 
 also impelled to utterance, his prayer comes forth, 
 short and broken, like the confession of the 
 publican who went up into the temple to pray. 
 Begun in words, it has to be completed in 
 silence ; the Spirit has to make intercession ; all 
 we can do is to offer up the longing, loving, 
 trusting heart in prostrate adoration. Indeed 
 it is, as George Herbert calls it, " A True Hymn :" 
 
 " My joy, my life, my crown ! 
 
 My heart was meaning all the day 
 
 Somewhat it fain would say : 
 And still it runneth, muttering, up and down, 
 With only this, ' My joy, my life, my crown ! '
 
 George Herbert. 239 
 
 Yet slight not these few words ; 
 
 If truly said, they may take part 
 
 Among the best in art. 
 The fineness which a hymn or psalm affords, 
 Is when the soul unto the lines accords. 
 
 He who craves all the mind, 
 
 And all the soul, and strength, and time, 
 
 If the words only rhyme 
 Justly complains, that somewhat is behind 
 To make his verse, or write a hymn in kind. 
 
 Whereas if the heart be moved, 
 
 Although the verse be somewhat scant, 
 
 God doth supply the want : 
 As when the heart says (sighing to be approved) 
 ' O, could I love!' and stops ; God writeth, ' Loved.'"
 
 VIII. 
 
 DIVERSE POEMS. 
 
 R
 
 VIII. 
 
 DIVERSE POEMS. 
 
 |T is difficult within a short compass 
 to give anything but a brief bird's- 
 eye view of a writer so diffuse and 
 elaborate as Wordsworth. His popularity has 
 steadily waxed, whilst that of contemporary poets 
 who thought themselves far his superiors, has 
 waned ; and although often voted dull by many 
 who purchase his works without reading them, 
 his poems have been treasured by thousands 
 who have read them, without always being able 
 to buy them. Wordsworth has taken this strong 
 hold of our age, because he is deeply repre- 
 sentative of the inextinguishable spirituality of 
 the nineteenth century. We may smile at a good 
 deal which, to use his own words about another 
 writer, " is neither interesting in itself, nor can 
 lead to anything which is interesting," " Lines 
 composed after reading the Newspaper," or " To 
 
 R 2
 
 244 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 the Spade of a Friend," or " To his own Portrait ;" 
 but there are other lines which have passed into 
 the language, and have the true ring : 
 
 " The light that never was on sea or land." 
 " The child is father to the man." 
 
 " A creature not too bright or good 
 For human nature's daily food." 
 
 " We murder, to dissect ! " 
 
 And perhaps few people are aware that Mr. 
 Matthew Arnold's now celebrated " Stream of 
 Tendency," is from Wordsworth. 
 
 For an elaborate analysis of Wordsworth's mind 
 and its progress, I may refer the reader to such 
 careful studies as Mr. Stopford Brookes's " Words- 
 worth," in " Theology in the English Poets." 
 To these excellent essays I am indebted to-night 
 for many fruitful and beautiful thoughts, and I 
 have also been assisted in the selection of some 
 passages. Our thoughts now may be ranged 
 conveniently under four heads : Wordsworth's 
 relation to Nature, to Man, and Politics, and to 
 Universal Religion. 
 
 I. NATURE AND MAN. Nature in her sublime
 
 Wordsworth. 245 
 
 aspects inspired those immortal descriptions of 
 scenery which have never been surpassed : 
 
 " The immeasurable height 
 Of woods decaying, never to be decay'd; 
 The stationary blast of waterfalls ; 
 And in the narrow rent, at every turn 
 Winds thwarting winds, bewilder'd and forlorn." 
 
 But the infinitely little was equally dear to him, 
 and is recorded with the same care, and force, 
 and beauty. Indeed nothing escaped him. The 
 familiar robin, the daisy loved of Chaucer, the 
 green linnet, the skylark, and small celandine, the 
 soft nest of the wren, all is registered in that 
 detailed photography of words. And sometimes 
 he almost becomes a part of what he sees. Take 
 this glimpse as of the quiet levels of the Thames 
 in summer: 
 
 " The calm 
 
 And dead still water lay upon my mind, 
 Even with a weight of pleasure ; and the sky, 
 Never before so beautiful, sank down 
 Into my heart, and held me like a dream." 
 
 In such perfect gems as "The Daffodils " we 
 have the same tendency to become one with out- 
 ward nature which belongs to the first stage in 
 the poetic growth :
 
 246 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 " I wander'd lonely as a cloud 
 
 That floats on high o'er vales and hills, 
 When all at once I saw a cloud, 
 A host, of golden daffodils 
 Beside the lake, beneath the trees, 
 Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. 
 
 Continuous as the stars that shine 
 
 And twinkle on the Milky Way, 
 They stretch'd in never-ending line 
 
 Along the margin of a bay ; 
 Ten thousand saw I at a glance, 
 Tossing their heads in sprightly dance. 
 
 The waves beside them danced, but they 
 Outdid the sparkling waves in glee : 
 
 A poet could not but be gay 
 In such a jocund company. 
 
 I gazed, and gazed, but little thought 
 
 What wealth the show to me had brought. 
 
 For oft when on my couch I lie, 
 
 In vacant or in pensive mood, 
 They flash upon that inward eye 
 
 Which is the bliss of solitude, 
 And then my heart with pleasure fills, 
 And dances with the daffodils." 
 
 In the next stage we find, not the poet reflect- 
 ing nature, but nature reflecting the poet. The 
 inanimate has become alive ; it has a soul that 
 meets the poet's soul, and catches his moods :
 
 Wordsworth . 247 
 
 " The gentleness of heav'n is on the sea : 
 Listen ! the mighty being is awake, 
 And doth, with his eternal motion, make 
 A sound like thunder everlastingly." 
 
 This is redeemed from pantheism by hearing in 
 all the very voice of God. Thewhole creation brings 
 him 
 
 " Authentic tidings of invisible things ;" 
 
 and with the poet-priest you stand 
 
 " Pious beyond the intention of your thought, 
 Devout above the meaning of your will" 
 
 Yet how deaf does man at times become, to 
 this divine ministry of nature ! how easily and 
 selfishly absorbed in pleasure and business ! how 
 insensible to the low sweet monitor ! how blind to 
 the supernatural beauty ! 
 
 " The world is too much with us ; late and soon, 
 Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers. 
 Little we see in nature that is ours ; 
 We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon ! " 
 
 That world, which he alternately dreads and 
 courts, which at once draws and repels him, was 
 soon to absorb Wordsworth's eager nature the 
 world of men and women. Man and Politics were
 
 248 Posts in the Piilpit. 
 
 to leave as indelible a mark upon his soul as 
 the mountain solitudes, or the activities of ocean, 
 forest, or Alpine cataract ; the stir of college life 
 fascinated him with its complex variety of human 
 nature; then, too, the great men of antiquity, the 
 scholars, and philosophers, and poets, of more 
 modern times, gave him a deeper insight into the 
 dignity of the human mind, and the subtleties 
 of the human heart. He went back to London, 
 forgetting for a time his mountain solitudes, and 
 began to watch with intense interest 
 
 " The endless stream of men and many things, 
 Quick dance of colours, of light, and form, 
 Theatre and burial-place of passions." 
 
 But this interest in crowded centres was a 
 mood which in Wordsworth never lasted long, 
 and was constantly relieved by exquisite pauses 
 "of poetic sensibility, of which the matchless " Son- 
 net on Westminster Bridge/' is a fine specimen : 
 " Earth has not anything to show more fair ! 
 Dull would he be of soul who could pass by 
 A sight so touching in its majesty. 
 This city now doth like a garment wear 
 The beauty of the morning : silent, bare, 
 
 Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples, lie 
 Open unto the fields and to the sky, 
 All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
 
 Wordsworth. 249 
 
 Never did sun more beautifully steep 
 
 In his first splendour valley, rock, or hill ; 
 
 Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep 
 The river glideth at his own sweet will ! 
 
 Dear God ! the very houses seem asleep : 
 And all that mighty heart is lying still ! " 
 
 At length, oppressed with the life of the noisy 
 city, its heart-rending spectacles of poverty, its 
 harsh and intolerable contrasts of squalor and 
 wealth, its abrupt transitions from innocence to 
 vice, Wordsworth fled to the country again, and 
 there once more he revelled in 
 
 " The vision of the hills 
 
 Those hallow'd and pure motions of the sense, 
 That quiet independence of the heart," 
 
 which came to him, 
 
 " In the still spirit shed from evening air." 
 
 Here he gladly turned from the despondency 
 bred in him by the contemplation of men in the 
 crowded centres of life, to the pure and simple 
 lives of little children. The famous " We are 
 Seven," need hardly be quoted ; to the same class 
 belongs the following exquisite address "To a 
 Young Girl : "
 
 250 Poets in the P^dp^t. 
 
 " Dear child, dear girl, that, walkest with me here, 
 If thou appear untouch'd with solemn thought 
 Thy nature is not therefore less divine ; 
 Though liest in Abraham's bosom all the year, 
 And worship's! at the Temple's inner shrine, 
 God being with thee when we know it not." 
 
 The poet sometimes forgot the popular theo- 
 logy of his day, which taught that every one was 
 a child of sin, and that each one ought to have a 
 consciousness of it. Many a theologian, perhaps 
 not quite so close a student of nature as Words- 
 worth, has been scandalized by that simple ad- 
 dress to one of his daughters, in which he alludes 
 to her " sinless progress " through a world 
 
 " By sorrow darken'd and by care disturb'd ;" 
 and then compares her to the moon, 
 
 " Fair are ye both, and both are free from sin." 
 
 But the study of man is henceforth never to be 
 wholly cast aside ; the human drama, though too 
 oppressive for prolonged contemplation in cities, 
 is still a recurrent theme the mzse en scene 
 only is shifted. Wordsworth becomes the poet 
 of the poor, and on wayside hills in lonely hamlets, 
 he pens, in lines of quiet force and truth, many 
 annals of a quiet life. Now it is the shepherd and
 
 Wordsworth . 251 
 
 the last of the flock, or the forsaken beggar girl ; 
 the criminal swinging in chains ; the poor bed- 
 ridden old woman ; the waggoner with his team ; 
 the idiot boy ; the gipsies at their camp-fire. To 
 this class belongs that example of perfect simplicity, 
 brevity, and pathos, quite unequalled of its kind ; 
 
 " She dwelt among the untrodden ways 
 
 Beside the springs of Dove, 
 A maid whom there were few to praise, 
 
 And very few to love ; 
 A violet by a mossy stone 
 
 Half hidden from the eye ! 
 Fair as a star, when only one 
 
 Is shining in the sky. 
 She lived unknown, and few could know 
 
 When Lucy ceased to be ; 
 But she is in her grave, and oh 1 
 
 The difference to me 1 
 
 II. POLITICS. But poet of the hill and hamlet 
 as he was, it is impossible to separate Wordsworth 
 from politics, or his politics from his poetry. As 
 his religious and social views find their expression 
 and development in those long, and, to many, 
 wearisome works, the " Prelude" and the " Ex- 
 cursion," so do his political views find illustration 
 chiefly in his shorter poems and sonnets.
 
 252 Poets in the P^^lpit. 
 
 The rise of the French Revolution was full of 
 promise and hope. The brotherhood of man the 
 destruction of tyranny the creation of an ideal 
 society, these were then the universal ideas " in 
 the air." 
 
 No movement was ever more trusted by good 
 men than the agitation begun under the clever, 
 but questionable, auspices of such social reformers 
 as Voltaire, Rousseau, and the Encyclopaedists. 
 
 Wordsworth held on to the Revolution up to 
 1793, when he was staggered by the Reign of 
 Terror, the excesses of Robespierre, and the 
 murder of Louis XVI. 
 
 Still he was horrified at England's declaration 
 of war, and steadily resisted the Napoleonic craze 
 which followed, and from the entire dominion of 
 which half a century has barely sufficed to set 
 France and Europe free. 
 
 He calls it 
 
 " An accursed thing to gaze 
 On prosperous tyrants with a dazzled eye ;" 
 
 and lashes mercilessly the statesmen ,who were as 
 eager in 1802 to acknowledge the Divine right of 
 Napoleon I., as were the statesmen in 1847 to 
 accept Napoleon III. :
 
 Wordsworth. 253 
 
 " Lords, lawyers, statesmen, 
 Post forward all * * 
 
 * to bend the knee 
 In France before the new-born majesty. 
 Tis ever thus. Ye men of prostrate mind, 
 A seemly reverence may be paid to power ; 
 But truth and loyal virtue, never sown 
 In haste, now springing with a transient shower, 
 When truth, when sense, when liberty were flown." 
 
 And this is the appeal to England : 
 
 " What hardship had it been to wait an hour ? 
 Shame on you, feeble heads to slavery prone." 
 
 The doctrine of accomplished facts had not 
 then become so entire a part of European politics, 
 as the suppression of Poland, the unification 
 of Germany and Italy, and the successful in- 
 dependence of America, have since made it. 
 
 The war-craze which, from time to time seizes 
 hold of generations which have had no practical 
 experience of its horrors, is firmly and consistently 
 denounced, and the higher elements of national 
 greatness indicated : 
 
 " 'Tis not in battles that from youth we train 
 The governors who must be wise and good." 
 
 The real greatness of a nation lies in the
 
 254 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 observance of moral law, and the time-honoured 
 precepts of the ancient prophets, 
 
 " Patience, temperance, 
 
 Honour that knows the path and will not swerve, 
 And piety towards God." 
 
 The true glory of man must ever spring from 
 " plain living and high thinking." 
 
 But Wordsworth was at heart a thorough 
 Englishman, and could rise on occasion into a fine, 
 patriotic fervour, as, for example, in the sonnets 
 on the battle of Waterloo, beginning 
 
 " Intrepid sons of Albion ! " 
 
 The Revolution failed ; and with that failure a 
 sort of despair of the great world's commonwealth 
 seemed to seize upon most of the better spirits. 
 The reform of France was wrecked by the 
 personal ambition of Napoleon ; the excesses of 
 the Revolution disgraced the name of liberty ; the 
 dream of a golden age ended in the Reign of 
 Terror and the tyranny of Robespierre ; and the 
 guilty time only gave way to the despotism of an 
 unscrupulous soldier, and a war policy which 
 decimated France and drowned Europe in blood. 
 
 Still, undismayed by the French fiasco^ Words-
 
 Wordsworth 255 
 
 worth remained to the end of his life the champion 
 of oppressed nationalities. Switzerland, Spain, and 
 Italy engaged his sympathies in turn ; and no one 
 can read his series of sonnets, dedicated to national 
 independence and liberty, without feeling that he 
 was more than a patriot a true citizen of the 
 world, and an apostle of humanity. 
 
 But there was a political sense in which it may 
 be said that Wordsworth never got over the dis- 
 appointment of the French Revolution. As old 
 age drew on, he retired more and more from the 
 position of an advanced thinker, and grew strangely 
 illiberal : so true was it that the French Revolu- 
 tion retarded for half a century the great cause 
 of reform in this country the correction of social 
 abuses, and the ascendancy of representative 
 government generally. Every beneficial change 
 was at once denounced as revolution ; and the 
 bloody days in Paris were for years pointed to by 
 the timid fingers of political cowardice. 
 
 And Wordsworth shared this unwise and un- 
 worthy feeling. He opposed the Bill for admitting 
 Nonconformists, as dangerous to monarchy and 
 social order; he advocated the removal of civil 
 disabilities, but denounced Catholic emancipation ;
 
 256 Poets in the Pitlpit. 
 
 and in 1832 declared that the British Constitution 
 would be destroyed by the Reform Bill. 
 
 He was sixty-two years old ; he had lost his 
 hopefulness : he had seen one revolution abroad, 
 and he had not courage to face what he believed 
 would end in another one at home. Still he 
 retained, down to the last, a lively sympathy with 
 Italy in her oppressed and pillaged condition, 
 and prophesied for her an independence which 
 we have only late in the nineteenth century seen 
 realized. 
 
 But looking at Wordsworth's noblest work, 
 nothing can dim the value of his contributions to 
 the cause of universal religion. He had indeed 
 lost his faith in the all-sufficiency of political 
 theories to save society, but he had not lost his 
 faith in human nature. In the darkest hour of the 
 Revolution he could see, in the breakdown of old 
 tyrannies, the overthrow of God's enemies ; in 
 the vilest depths of human depravity he found 
 gleams of nobility and the protest of virtue 
 faithful unto death. 
 
 " Thus moderated, thus composed, I found 
 Once more in man an object of delight, 
 Of pure imagination, and of love."
 
 Wordsworth. 257 
 
 III. UNIVERSAL RELIGION. The theology of 
 Wordsworth in so far as he had any is neither 
 better nor worse than the theology of his time. 
 It was best when he forgot all about it. The 
 ecclesiastical sonnets show all the sectarian 
 bitterness of his age, and more than the bitterness 
 of ours, against Roman Catholics, together with 
 his admiration of Protestantism a watchword so 
 anxiously repudiated by an influential section of 
 the Established Church of to-day, as equally dis- 
 graceful and historically inaccurate. 
 , With these questions we are not now greatly 
 concerned ; but the real secret of the eager 
 Wordsworth revival is to be sought for in neither 
 his politics nor his theology. In an age of mate- 
 rialism, when specialities in science continue to 
 score triumph after triumph, there seems to lie in 
 Wordsworth's intense, masterful, and many-sided 
 spirituality, a sort of irresistible fascination, as if 
 the mind found in him the recovery of its lost 
 balance, and escaped from matter the thing which 
 can be weighed and measured to bathe itself in 
 spirit the thing which cannot be weighed and 
 measured, and yet that which gives its only value 
 and interest, some have said its very existence, 
 
 S
 
 258 Poets in the Pidpit. 
 
 to all that is weighed and measured. Demonstrate 
 as you will " murder to dissect " you cannot 
 convince the world for any length of time, or with 
 permanent success, that we are but cunningly- 
 devised mechanisms, irresponsible automata, and 
 that, being such, our little life is "rounded by a 
 sleep ;" whilst others hope and argue that we are 
 " spirits," and that there is an underlying, undying 
 soul of all things in the universe which is self- 
 conscious, and hath communion with man, Words- 
 worth the poet, the seer, J elt it. 
 
 He felt it in the soul of nature like a " central 
 peace subsisting at the heart of endless agitation." 
 He felt it stirring in the depths of man's nature 
 
 " A pleasure, quiet and profound, 
 Of permanent and universal sway, 
 And permanent belief." 
 
 He felt it in the interlaced and interpenetrating 
 influence of the great Oversold : 
 
 " That Being that is in the clouds and air, 
 That is in the green leaves among the groves, 
 Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
 And the round ocean and the evening air. 
 Wisdom and Spirit of the Universe, 
 Thou Soul that art the eternity of thought, 
 And givest form to images, a breath,
 
 Wordsworth . 259 
 
 And everlasting motion ; not in vain, 
 By day or starlight, thus from my first dawn 
 Of childhood, didst thou intertwine for me 
 The passions which build up a human soul." 
 
 This is the Spirit that impels all thinking things, 
 all objects of all thought, and rolls through iill 
 things. 
 
 It is in such strains that Wordsworth becomes 
 the singer and teacher of our own restless, excited, 
 and materialistic age ; and taking up, in its endur- 
 ing power and popularity, his " Ode on the Immor- 
 tality of the Soul," we may well substitute for the 
 "recollections of early childhood" the "dis- 
 coveries of modern science," and exclaim, without 
 in the least depreciating their immense importance 
 and practical value 
 
 " Not for these I raise 
 
 The song of thanks and praise ; 
 But for those obstinate questionings 
 Of sense and outward things, 
 Fallings from us, vanishings, 
 Blank misgivings of a creature 
 Moving about in worlds not realized, 
 High instincts before which our mortal nature 
 Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised ; 
 But for those first affections, 
 Those shadowy recollections, 
 Which, be they what they may, 
 S 2
 
 260 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 Are yet the fountain-light of all our day, 
 Are yet a master-light of all our seeing ; 
 Uphold us cherish and have power to make 
 Our noisy years seem moments in the being 
 Of the eternal silence : truths that wake 
 
 To perish never : 
 Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour, 
 
 Nor man, nor boy, 
 Nor all that is at enmity with joy, 
 Can utterly abolish or destroy ! 
 
 Hence, in a season of calm weather, 
 
 Though inland far we be, 
 Our souls have sight of that immortal sea 
 
 Which brought us hither ; 
 Can in a moment travel thither, 
 And see the children sport upon the shore, 
 And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.
 
 IX. 
 
 GLEANINGS.
 
 IX. 
 
 GLEANINGS. 
 
 [HE "Golden Treasury," is a collection 
 of lyrics, which ought to be in every- 
 one's house choice lyrics of the last 
 400 years, ranging from about 1500 down to 
 1850, but not including the works of any living 
 poet. In my reference and treatment I am 
 to-night limited by certain considerations. In 
 the first place, I do not treat of anything in 
 the pulpit which is not more or less of an 
 " edifying " character ; it must have something 
 to point a moral, as well as to adorn a tale ; 
 it should rouse our aspirations, broaden our views, 
 enrich our experiences of human life or prompt 
 hopeful and ennobling action ; and of course a 
 great deal of lyrical poetry in every age is not of 
 this description. 
 
 Then the word "lyrical" limits us. "Lyric" means 
 a short song, such as might be thrown off by a
 
 264 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 minstrel striking his lyre to some brief but passion- 
 ate mood of thought and feeling: and the number of 
 such short songs in the English language is limited. 
 And then we are guided again by a certain standard 
 of perfection. In the "Golden Treasury" only the 
 most choice and beautiful specimens of each kind 
 find a place. These requirements that the poems 
 should be lyrical, that they should be perfect, and 
 that they should possess either directly or in- 
 directly an edifying tendency greatly restrict our 
 field of choice. There is another consideration 
 which applies to the present exposition, viz., that 
 a great deal of the deeper spiritual poetry of the 
 nineteenth century, in the " Golden Treasury," 
 will not come under our notice at all in this lec- 
 ture, because it is discussed in the other lectures ; 
 as, for instance, the moral and religious aspects 
 of Tennyson, Longfellow, Keble, and Wordsworth ; 
 and remember, that in leaving out Wordsworth's 
 name from the Golden Treasury, we leave out 
 that of the most voluminous spiritual singer of the 
 nineteenth century. 
 
 I. 1500-1600. In following the order of this 
 book, I gather from the first selection of poems,
 
 The Golden Treasury. 265 
 
 between 1500 and 1600, two, and but two, of 
 Shakespeare's, and both very brief. 
 
 Now, there is a peculiarity about Shakespeare's 
 poetry which I have dealt with elsewhere (" Shake- 
 speare and the Stage "). He is full of verve, and 
 spiritual sympathy with human nature, although 
 his teaching does not lie peculiarly in a spiritual 
 form, either in the way of doctrine or practice- 
 least of all is he a dogmatist. His force lies in 
 the fact that he takes deep and comprehensive 
 views of human life, and feels how many-sided it 
 is, and is resolved to leave no side of it uncan- 
 vassed, no depths unsounded ; whether it be the 
 force of sorrow, of disappointment, of joy, or hope, 
 or despair, he deals with it thoroughly, he im- 
 merses himself in its element ; and that is why 
 after the study of Shakespeare, although no doc- 
 trine has been directly taught, no moral drawn, 
 we rise up with a certain deepened sense of the 
 value and mystery of life, and the possibilities of 
 the soul. This is, indeed, not like pulpit teaching ; 
 would that pulpit teaching were more like it. But it 
 is effective and spiritual teaching, because it dissi- 
 pates the natural frivolity of the human mind, and 
 leads us to feel how fearfully and wonderfully we
 
 266 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 are made. We are surprised into higher moods, 
 we are filled with a sense of our own undeveloped 
 capacities ; we begin to move with larger strides, 
 and breathe a more invigorating air. 
 
 The first fragment I lay before you, then, is a 
 short poem called "Winter." In it Shakespeare 
 seems to stand outside himself; and some of the 
 most effective teaching in poetry or prose is where 
 a man stands thus outside, and treats of himself as 
 though he were somebody else. He thus passes in 
 contemplative review different sides of his nature. 
 In " Winter," Shakespeare takes a firm hold of 
 those common experiences which come to us all 
 sooner or later the love of life, the sense of its 
 transience, the mournful feeling of the gliding 
 years, and how little use we have made of them, 
 and yet how we have loved them, how we weep 
 for them, how hard it is to part from youth, and 
 from health, and from pleasure to lose sensibility, 
 but not the longing for it to feel our capacities 
 for enjoyment stiffening, the avenues of the senses 
 closing. It is the inexorable flow of the shining 
 river of life, out of the darkness into the sunny 
 world, and towards the dim ocean beyond. Ah !
 
 77ie Golden Treasury. 267 
 
 how fain would we stay that swift, inexorable 
 torrent ; but we cannot ; we can only stand on 
 the brink of the rolling tide, and utter the natural 
 plaint of the human spirit over life, clinging fondly 
 to it, and more fondly, as it is passing so sadly 
 and certainly away. Although these are not exactly 
 religious views, yet they are sobering views, which 
 indirectly suggest much that is profoundly moral 
 and religious. 
 
 " That time of year thou may'st in me behold 
 When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang 
 Upon those boughs which shake against the cold 
 Bare ruiu'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. 
 
 In me thou seest the twilight of such day 
 As after sunset fadeih in the west, 
 A\ hich by and by black night doth take away, 
 Death's second self, that seals up all in rest. 
 
 In me thou seest the glowing of such fire 
 That on the ashes of his youth doth lie 
 As the deathbed whereon it must expire, 
 Consumed with that which it was nourish'd by. 
 
 This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong 
 To love that we'l which thou must leave ere long." 
 
 No great soul succumbs to final melancholy ; 
 and the hopefulness of Shakespeare is one of 
 the chief elements of his enduring power, the
 
 268 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 buoyancy and saneness of the man which enables 
 him, whilst bowing to the mystery of pain and loss, 
 and thrilling to every sorrow, still to make the 
 best of all human comfort, and get the most out 
 of all human love. He rates at its highest value 
 every gleam of friendship and affection. He is 
 filled with ecstasy at the memory of joys which 
 are not near him when he writes, but which 
 soothe him out of the distance. Is there not a 
 spirit, seizing upon and refreshing our spirit, in 
 such an experience as comes forth glowing in 
 the sweet poem which he calls (< Consolation," 
 where the man is extremely dejected, owing to 
 a variety of causes, and suddenly remembers the 
 glory which love sheds over life, and rises out of 
 the winter of his discontent into the buoyancy of 
 spring-time, remembering that although much 
 has been taken away from him, there still re- 
 mains one true heart in the world, and as long 
 as there is one heart which beats in time with his, 
 why should he despond ? 
 
 What a lesson is this for many of us ! You who 
 have true friends you who have living ones, who 
 may not, perhaps, be near you now what a glow 
 should kindle up within you, when you think that
 
 The Golden Treasury. 269 
 
 God strews your path with these, the flowers of 
 affection ! They will fade, no doubt, but they are 
 not faded yet ; you still have them here for your 
 solace and dear remembrance : 
 
 " When to the sessions of sweet silent thought 
 I summon up remembrance of things past, 
 I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought, 
 And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste. 
 
 Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow, 
 For precious friends hid in death's dateless night, 
 And weep afresh love's long-since-cancell'd woe, 
 And moan the expense of many a vanish'd sight. 
 
 Then can I grieve at grievances foregone, 
 And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er 
 The sad account of fore- bemoaned moan, 
 Which I new pay as if not paid before ? 
 
 But if, the while, I think on thee, dear friend, 
 All losses are restored, and sorrows end." 
 
 II. 1600-1700. You will not be surprised if, 
 in passing from the fifteenth to the sixteenth 
 century, I open first at Milton, and take from him 
 the key-note of that great period. 
 
 Milton went up to college at the time of the 
 accession of Charles I. He lived through all 
 that critical period, witnessed the Protectorate of 
 Oliver Cromwell, witnessed the Restoration, and
 
 2 7O Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 he reflects in himself the close of one and the 
 dawn of another great literary, social, and 
 political epoch. He lived in the after-glow of 
 Shakespeare's age ; and although he might have 
 seen Shakespeare in his very early youth, yet he 
 escaped the affectations and conceits of the 
 Elizabethan period, while retaining all its power 
 and imagination. He was a Puritan of the 
 Puritans, and yet no fanatic in his Puritanism. 
 He was a Republican of the Republicans, and yet 
 no lover of revolutions, and no bloodthirsty sup- 
 porter of anarchy. He lived just before the 
 period when the form of English poetry became 
 stiff, accurate, and precise, but as cold as it was 
 polished, in the works of Dryden and Pope. 
 Milton caught a foretaste of that technical finish, 
 without which no poetry is now acceptable as a 
 work of art. But he never was soiled by a taint 
 of the foul ribaldry and licentiousness which dis- 
 graced the poets of the Restoration. 
 
 He thus retained the finest human elements of 
 the Elizabethan age, and united to them the art 
 and refinement of an age the full development of 
 which he did not live to see. 
 
 The distinguishing quality of Milton is his
 
 The Golden Treasury. 271 
 
 breadth. Breadth is that indescribable impres- 
 sion produced in art by curves that form parts of 
 very large circles ; in music the same feeling is 
 realized in listening to certain majestic phrases 
 of Handel, Beethoven, and Wagner. Milton is 
 solemn and grandiose, never dull, dreary, or 
 pedantic ; his poetry is always lit up, not only 
 with an imaginative glow, but with an incompar- 
 able roll of glorious music, like the sound of the 
 full organ in some cathedral aisle. If I read you 
 a few lines expressive of the state of the world at 
 the time of Christ's advent, when the great glory 
 of the advent is represented as casting a morning 
 radiance, like the rising sun, over the nations, 
 how firm is the strain ! how stately and rhythmical 
 the cadences ! 
 
 " No war, or battle's sound, 
 Was heard the world around : 
 The idle spear and shield were high up hung ; 
 The hooke'd chariot stood 
 Unstain'd with hostile blood ; 
 The trumpet spake not to the arme'd throng ; 
 And kings sat still, with awful eye, 
 As if they surely knew their sovran Lord was by. 
 
 But peaceful was the night 
 Wherein the Prince of Light
 
 272 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 His reign of peace upon the earth began : 
 
 The winds, with wonder whist, 
 
 Smoothly the waters kist, 
 
 Whispering new joys to the wild ocean 
 
 Who now hath quite forgot to rave, 
 
 While birds of calm sit brooding on the charme'd wave." 
 
 It may seem unnatural even to speak of Milton 
 apart from the " Paradise Lost," but all fragments 
 from that great work are excluded to-night 
 because I am referring only to poems contained 
 in a book of songs and lyrics. Yet does the 
 " Paradise Lost " sound the key-note of his genius. 
 
 Milton was emphatically a religious poet. There 
 breathes throughout his work an undertone of deep 
 piety, which assumes a touching and personal 
 solemnity when it comes to be associated with 
 the great affliction of his life. He who so well 
 described " flowers of all hue " and " trembling 
 leaves," the " orient sun " and " the five wander- 
 ing fires," was himself blind ! 
 
 In the " Samson Agonistes " we have a won- 
 derful and sympathetic record of his own state 
 the blind physical hero speaks for the blind in- 
 tellectual giant ; and another giant of emotional 
 expression, Handel, has set to music the thoughts 
 of his brother in the sister art.
 
 The Golden Treasury. 273 
 
 But as drama we must exclude the famous 
 passage beginning : 
 
 " O dark, dark, dark amid the blaze of noon, 
 Irrevocably dark total eclipse." 
 
 I select another passage, of more quiet and 
 devotional beauty, if not of more enduring 
 power : 
 
 " When I consider how my light is spent 
 Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide, 
 And that one talent which is death to hide 
 Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent 
 
 To serve therewith my Maker, and present 
 My true account, lest He, returning, chide 
 Doth God exact day-labour, light denied ? 
 I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent 
 
 That murmur, soon replies : God doth not need 
 Either man's work, or His own gifts : who best 
 Bear His mild yoke, they serve Him best His state 
 Is kingly ; thousands at His bidding speed, 
 And post o'er land and ocean without rest : 
 They also serve who only stand and wait" 
 
 In these days of technical finish our smallest 
 poets are expected to achieve a polish not always 
 reached in Elizabethan times by the greatest 
 masters. Yet it would be hard to find in poetry, 
 ancient or modern, a higher grace and finish, 
 
 T
 
 274 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 combined with extreme sweetness and simplicity, 
 than in Milton's " Lycidas." The note of elegiac 
 pain is first sounded, then comes the plaintive 
 narration, which is rounded off and played upon 
 by the tender brooding of the mind, until it rises 
 out of its own melancholy into a semi-mythic, 
 semi-religious triumph. Lycidas is a poem in 
 memory of a friend drowned in the Irish Channel, 
 and it takes the classical form congenial to the 
 age when it is put into the mouth of a shepherd 
 amenting the loss of his friend. I take a portion 
 of it: 
 
 " Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more 
 Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere, 
 I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude, 
 And with forced fingers rude 
 Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year. 
 Bitter constraint, and sad occasion dear 
 Compels me to disturb your season due : 
 For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime, 
 Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer : 
 Who would not sing for Lycidas ? He knew 
 Himself to sing, and build the lofty rhyme. 
 He must not float upon his watery bier 
 Unwept, and welter to the parching wind 
 Without the meed of some melodious tear." 
 
 Then follows the mourning for Lycidas by
 
 The Golden Treasury. 275 
 
 various voices of nature personified ; and finally 
 the closing note of hope and consolation is struck : 
 the memories of the sweet friend must not close 
 in sorrow. 
 
 " ' Weep no more, woeful shepherds, weep no more j 
 For Lycidas, your sorrow, is not dead, 
 Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor : 
 So sinks the day-star in the ocean-bed, 
 And yet anon repairs his drooping head, 
 And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled ore 
 Flames in the forehead of the morning sky. 
 So Lycidas sank low, but mounted high 
 Through the dear might of Him that walk'd the waves, 
 Where, other groves and other streams along, 
 With nectar pure his oozy locks he laves, 
 And bears the unexpressive nuptial song 
 To the blest kingdoms meek of joy and love. 
 There entertain him all the saints above 
 In solemn troops, and sweet societies, 
 That sing, and singing, in their glory move, 
 And wipe the tears for ever from his eyes. 
 Now, Lycidas the shepherds weep no more ; 
 Henceforth thou art the Genius of the shore 
 In thy large recompense, and shall be good 
 To all that wander in that perilous flood.' 
 
 Thus sang the uncouth swain to the oaks and rills, 
 While the still morn went out with sandals gray ; 
 He touch'd the tender stops of various quills, 
 With eager thought warbling his Doric lay : 
 T 2
 
 2 76 Poets in the Piilpit. 
 
 And now the sun had stretch'd out all the hills, 
 And now was dropt into the western bay : 
 At last he rose, and twitch'd his mantle blue : 
 To-morrow to fresh woods, and pastures new." 
 
 " Lycidas " is also remarkable for the number 
 of lines which, in so short a poem, have worked 
 themselves into our common stock of phrases and 
 quotations. " The hungry sheep look up, and are 
 not fed " which is so commonly applied to poor, 
 thin preaching. People assemble devoutly hungry, 
 desiring nothing so much as to imbibe something 
 good and nourishing; they look up to the shepherd, 
 who gives them little or nothing to eat after all. 
 You may have had this experience : the sermon 
 was most unfortunate, it did you no good ; " the 
 hungry sheep look up, and are not fed." And yet it 
 may not have been altogether the shepherd's fault. 
 There is something in the hearer; and what has 
 done you no good may have done good to some 
 one else ; still Milton's text is a useful one for the 
 preacher, at all events, to engrave upon his heart. 
 And no wonder that such lines as these have 
 become familiar as they are immortal : The day- 
 star 
 
 " Flames in the forehead of the morning sky ;"
 
 The Golden Treasury. 277 
 
 the solemn troops 
 
 " That sing, and singing, in their glory move ;" 
 and 
 
 " While the still morn went out with sandals gray;" 
 
 and the much-quoted and misquoted line (for 
 " fields " is constantly substituted for " woods") 
 
 " To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new ;" 
 
 and lastly, 
 
 " That two-handed engine at the door 
 Stands ready to smite once, but smite no more." 
 
 I take but one more poem from that century, 
 and, strange to say, it is one of Herrick's, a man 
 who wrote a great deal of frivolous poetry, but who 
 was touched, for all that, with the true spirit of 
 poetry, and in this sweet little song " To Daffodils" 
 has shown how a man whose head was, alas ! too 
 often steeped in the fumes of wine, and who entered 
 freely into the licentious enjoyments of that 
 licentious age, was still capable of pure, fresh 
 feelings, when he talks of beautiful things in 
 nature which soothe the heart, and sometimes win 
 the senses from gross or selfish indulgences. A 
 little poem like the " Daffodils " falls upon the
 
 278 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 earth-worn spirit like spring rain upon the parched 
 and dusty ground j Wordsworth is not more pure. 
 
 " Fair Daffodils, we weep to see 
 
 You haste away so soon : 
 As yet the early rising sun 
 Has not attain'd his noon. 
 
 Stay, stay, 
 Until the hasting day 
 
 Has run 
 
 But to the even-song ; 
 And, having pray'd together, we 
 Will go with you along. 
 
 We have short time to stay as you ; 
 
 We have as short a spring ; 
 As quick a growth to meet decay 
 
 As you, or any thing. 
 We die 
 
 As your hours do, and dry 
 Away, 
 
 Like to the Summer's rain ; 
 Or, as the pearls of morning's dew, 
 
 Ne'er to be found again." 
 
 III. 1700-1800. When we pass into the 
 century 1 700 to 1 800, we come to the age ot very 
 great poetical finish, but very little poetical power. 
 Still there were poets who produced some exquisite 
 lines, and Gray was one of these. He wrote very
 
 The Golden Treasury. 279 
 
 little, but he never wrote anything that was not 
 supremely excellent of its kind ; and that kind of 
 correctly-balanced, calm, and yet elegiac ex- 
 cellence, culminates in a poem which is familiar 
 to every one, and which begins, 
 
 " The curfew tolls the knell of parting day." 
 I need hardly quote it, but it certainly is note- 
 worthy how each line of this poem possesses 
 remarkable excellence individually, and doubtless 
 that is why it is so popular. There is always good 
 reason for a popularity which lasts, and that of 
 Gray's " Elegy " is of the most enduring kind. We 
 should perhaps love it better, if we had not had to 
 learn it at school. The number of its lines which 
 have passed into the language, the beauty of those 
 lines, their singular capacity for wear and tear, 
 without being worn out or torn to tatters, stamp 
 them as of the first quality of thought and ex- 
 pression. 
 
 " Each in his narrow cell for ever laid, 
 The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep." 
 
 We seldom pass a churchyard, and read the 
 rude or quaint inscriptions of the village mason, 
 without these lines rising in our memory, if not to 
 our lips. Or
 
 2 So Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 " Let not Ambition mock their useful toil, 
 Their homely joys, and destiny obscure ; 
 Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile 
 The short and simple annals of the poor." 
 
 Or 
 
 " Can storied urn or animated bust 
 Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath ? 
 Can Honour's voice provoke the silent dust, 
 Or Flattery soothe the dull, cold ear of Death ? " 
 
 How often, when recognizing singular merit in 
 obscure places, have we thought of 
 
 " Some village Hampden, that with dauntless breast 
 The little tyrant of his fields withstood, 
 Some mute, inglorious Milton, here may rest, 
 Some Cromwell, guiltless of his country's blood." 
 
 I have only time to revive the accustomed ring 
 of such other lines as 
 
 " Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife." 
 " They kept the noiseless tenour of their way." 
 " Nor cast one longing, lingering look behind." 
 " E'en in our ashes live their wonted fires." 
 
 I may quote entire the shorter epitaph which 
 stands at the close of the " Elegy :" 
 
 " Here rests his head upon the lap of Earth, 
 A Youth, to Fortune and to Fame unknown ;
 
 The Golden Treasury. 281 
 
 Fair Science frown'd not on his humble birth, 
 And Melancholy mark'd him for her own. 
 
 Large was his bounty, and his soul sincere ; 
 
 Heaven did a recompense as largely send : 
 
 He gave to misery all he had, a tear, 
 
 He gain'd from heaven, 'twas all he wish'd, a friend. 
 
 No farther seek his merits to disclose, 
 Or draw his frailties from their dread abode 
 (There they alike in trembling hope repose), 
 The bosom of his Father and his God," 
 
 I close this period, which is stamped with a 
 love of elegy, with two poems first one of the 
 saddest and sweetest songs of parting, by Lady 
 
 Nairn : 
 
 "I'm wearing awa', Jean, 
 Like snaw when it's thaw, Jean, 
 I'm wearing awa' 
 
 To the land o' the leal. 
 
 There's nae sorrow there, Jean, 
 There's neither cauld nor care, Jean ; 
 The day is aye fair 
 
 In the land o' the leal. 
 
 Ye were aye leal and true, Jean ; 
 Your task's ended noo, Jean, 
 And I'll welcome you 
 
 To the land o' the leal. 
 
 Our bonnie bairn's there, Jean, 
 She was baith guid and fair, Jean
 
 282 Poets in the Pztlpit. 
 
 O, we grudged her right sair 
 To the land o' the leal ! 
 
 Then dry that tearfu' e'e, Jean, 
 My soul langs to be free, Jean, 
 And angels wait on me 
 
 To the land o' the leal. 
 
 Now fare ye weel, my ain Jean ; 
 This warld's care is vain, Jean ; 
 We'll meet and aye be fain 
 In the land o' the leal." 
 
 And then a poem by Anna Laetitia Barbauld, 
 perhaps the gentlest, soberest poem on death 
 ever written, with just a quaint touch of George 
 Herbert about it : 
 
 " Life ! I know not what thou art, 
 But know that thou and I must part ; 
 And when, or how, or where, we met, 
 I own to me's a secret yet. 
 
 Life ! we've been long together, 
 Through pleasant and through cloudy weather ; 
 'Tis hard to part when friends are dear 
 Perhaps 'twill cost a sigh, a tear ; 
 
 Then steal away; give little warning; 
 
 Choose thine own time ; 
 Say not Good Night, but in some brighter clime 
 
 Bid me Good Morning." 
 
 IV. 1800-1850. Passing to the last series of
 
 The Golden Treasiiry. 283 
 
 poems, between 1800 and 1850, we seem to come 
 to quite a different atmosphere into the mid cur- 
 rent of the nineteenth century. There is something 
 of the feverish haste and restlessness about the 
 poems which are characteristic of our age. The 
 steady old business ways, occupations, manners 
 even the steady old dissipations, are all broken up ; 
 a change has come in with the new modes of loco- 
 motion, the new activity of the press, the new and 
 prodigious developments of commerce and in- 
 dustry. The iron tyranny of Napoleon treads close 
 on the bloody heels of the Revolution ; and the 
 ferment of Romanticism following the downfall of 
 that tyranny, created an atmosphere of thought 
 in which all genius fructified vigorously. Men 
 began to live at high pressure thought, talked, 
 and worked faster, as though conscious that the 
 springs of life might be quickly dried up in the 
 fierce heat surrounding them, and that there were 
 only a few hours of daylight left. The poet, the 
 scholar, is oppressed with the thought that he 
 may die without completing his life work. This is 
 the case with Keats, who owned quite a first-class 
 poetic faculty, yet never lived to develope his 
 gift. He was fully conscious of this himself. In
 
 284 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 the " Terror of Death " we notice a feeling of 
 uneasy haste that horror of going down to the 
 grave with his work undone, which has oppressed 
 many a noble soul. Alas ! in him it was pro- 
 phetic, for it was true ; he never lived to complete 
 his work : 
 
 " When I have fears that I may cease to be 
 Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain 
 Before high-piled books, in charact'ry, 
 Hold like rich garners the full-ripen'd grain ; 
 
 When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face, 
 Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, 
 And think that I may never live to trace 
 Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance ; 
 
 And when I feel, fair Creature of an hour ! 
 That I shall never look upon thee more, 
 Never have relish in the fairy power 
 Of unreflecting love then on the shore 
 
 Of the wide world I stand alone, and think 
 Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink." 
 
 Charles Lamb gives us another phase of this 
 nineteenth century feeling its morbid introspec- 
 tion, its intense, recluse-like sensitiveness in the 
 midst of crowds ; the settled melancholy of him 
 who sees his friends one by one drop off, and his 
 path grow lonely as he himself nears the grave.
 
 The Golden Treasury. 285 
 
 Yet all here is characteristic of the bustle and hurry 
 of a life teeming with human interests, faces, 
 occupations, from which in this stimulating age 
 few can escape ; all is spoken in the midst of a 
 crowd. Lamb's is not exactly the verse of a 
 regular poet ; it is not rhyme, but a sort of rhythmic 
 prose, bearing no mark of the file, yet finished in 
 form, with a certain flow and integrity of deep 
 feeling as though the man's under-current of 
 emotion had beer, too intense to range itself into 
 regular periods of rhyme, but flowed out with a 
 kind of suppressed and temperate sadness, which 
 is inexpressibly touching : 
 
 " THE OLD FAMILIAR FACES. 
 
 I have had playmates, I have had companions 
 
 In my days of childhood, in my joyful school-days 
 
 All, all are gone, the old familiar faces. 
 
 I have been laughing, I have been carousing, 
 Drinking late, sitting late, with my bosom cronies 
 All, all are gone, the old familiar faces. 
 
 I loved a Love once, fairest among women : 
 Closed are her doors on me, I must not see her 
 All, all are gone, the old familiar faces. 
 
 I have a friend, a kinder friend has no man : 
 Like an ingrate, I left my friend abruptly- 
 Left him, to muse on the old familiar faces.
 
 286 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 Ghost-like I paced round the haunts of my childhood; 
 Earth seem'd a desert I was bound to traverse 
 Seeking to find the old familiar faces. 
 
 Friend of my bosom, thou more than a brother, 
 Why wert not thou born in my father's dwelling 
 So might we talk of the old familiar faces ? 
 
 How some they have died, and some they have left me, 
 And some are taken from me ; all are departed 
 All, all are gone, the old familiar faces." 
 
 I cannot close without giving you something 
 from Shelley that soul of flame, and wind, and 
 perfume, which seems to resume in itself the 
 wildest yet finest elements of the nineteenth cen- 
 tury restlessness, passion, and poetic insight. He 
 has been often the butt of religious scorn and 
 censure ; and indeed, he revolted from the conven- 
 tional views of religion which were offered him as 
 the substance of things hoped for, as well as the 
 evidence of things not seen. He fled thence to 
 bathe himself in a wild natural religion of nature, 
 which to his spirit may no doubt have become 
 somewhat vague and pantheistic. He believed 
 not in the God whom he found worshipped, or at 
 all events preached, in churches and chapels ; not 
 because he would not fain have worshipped a 
 God, but because his glowing and sensitive spirit
 
 The Golden Treasury. 287 
 
 recoiled from the contradictory and grotesque 
 Deity of the popular theology whilst the narrow 
 subjective ethics of Wesley held sway over the 
 personal religion of the land. Such ancient 
 vintages had lost their flavour for Percy Bysshe 
 Shelley, too prophetic of the new thoughts and 
 impulses of our century, only the first score years 
 of which he was destined to see. The shep- 
 herds could not feed him ; he fled alone into the 
 wilderness, and found communion with woods, and 
 fountains, and song-birds, and all the wild beauties 
 of sea, vale, and mountain, in sunnier climes than 
 ours. His soul seemed to take each influence, 
 and become one with it in turn now living and 
 exulting in the wild crash of the tempest, and now 
 bathed in the stillness of the summer noon. The 
 earth, and sky, and sea, yielded up their secrets 
 to Shelley, and he gave them multitudinous voices, 
 and their voices are still ringing in our ears we 
 love them. He touched the threshold of a period 
 he was not permitted to enter. Were he alive now 
 we should take to our heart of hearts that flash- 
 ing soul that sweet wild bird, so full of passion 
 and ecstasy " cor cordium." 
 
 A close mystic sympathy with the Divine soul
 
 288 Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 in nature has never been so intensely realized and 
 rendered as in some of those great bursts of poetic 
 eloquence in which Shelley pours out his soul in 
 a kind of child-like adoration of the outward and 
 visible universe : 
 
 " O wild West wind, thou breath of Autumn's being, 
 Thou from whose unseen presence the leaves dead 
 Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing, 
 Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, 
 Pestilence stricken multitudes : O, thou, 
 Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed 
 The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low, 
 Each like a corpse within its grave, until 
 Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow 
 Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill 
 (Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air) 
 With living hues and odours plain and hill : 
 Wild spirit, which art moving everywhere ; 
 Destroyer and preserver ; hear, O, hear ! 
 ***** 
 
 If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear ; 
 
 If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee 
 
 A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share 
 
 The impulse of thy strength, only less free 
 
 Than thou, O, uncontrollable ! if even 
 
 I were as in my boyhood, and could be 
 
 The comrade of thy wanderings over heaven, 
 
 As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed 
 
 Scarce seem'd a vision ; I would ne'er have striven 
 
 As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.
 
 The Golden Treasury. 289 
 
 Oh ! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud ! 
 
 I fall upon the thorns of life ! I bleed ! 
 
 A heavy weight of hours has chain'd and bow'd 
 
 One too like thee : tameless, and swift, and proud. 
 
 Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is : 
 
 What if my leaves are falling like its own ! 
 
 The tumult of thy mighty harmonies 
 
 Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone, 
 
 Sweet thought in sadness. Be thou, spirit fierce, 
 
 My spirit ! Be thou me, impetuous one ! 
 
 Drive my dead thoughts over the universe, 
 
 Like wither'd leaves to quicken a new birth ! 
 
 Scatter, as from an unextinguish'd hearth 
 
 Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind ! 
 
 Be through my lips to unawaken'd earth 
 
 The trumpet of a prophecy ! O wind, 
 
 If winter comes, can spring be far behind ? " 
 
 I close our meditations to-night with one sober 
 little poem, which is a sweet and natural descrip- 
 tion of human life, which ordains that the years of 
 childhood should seem long, long years, and that 
 the years of middle life and old age shall speed 
 rapidly away, like the swiftly falling sands in the 
 inexorable hour-glass of time. It is an experience 
 which most of us have had. We remember as 
 children the long periods up to Christmas time, 
 and the long drawn out summer months : how 
 short they are now to some of us, now that the 
 
 U
 
 2go Poets in the Pulpit. 
 
 leaves of life are reddening, and the days draw 
 in, and the shadows fall quickly ! This little poem 
 by Campbell is a perfect contrast to Shelley; it is 
 sober, didactic, yet with a certain lightness of 
 touch, and a tinge of pathos and regret, which 
 saves it from the commonplace of Pope, or the 
 dulness of Addison. 
 
 " The more we live, more brief appear 
 
 Our life's succeeding stages : 
 
 A day to childhood seems a year, 
 
 And years like passing ages. 
 
 The gladsome current of our youth, 
 
 Ere passion yet disorders, 
 Steals lingering like a river smooth 
 
 Along its grassy borders. 
 
 But as the careworn cheek grows wan, 
 
 And sorrow's shafts fly thicker, 
 Ye stars that measure life to man, 
 
 Why seem your courses quicker ? 
 
 When joys have lost their bloom and breath, 
 
 And life itself is vapid, 
 Why as we reach the Falls of Death, 
 
 Feel we its tide more rapid ? 
 
 It may be strange yet who would change 
 
 Time's course to slower speeding, 
 When one by one our friends have gone. 
 
 And left our bosoms bleeding ?
 
 The Golden Treasury. 
 
 Heaven gives our years of fading strength 
 
 Indemnifying fleetness ; 
 And those of youth, a seeming length 
 
 Proportion'd to their sweetness." 
 
 291
 
 tOXDON : 
 
 PRINTED I!Y GILBERT AND RIVINGTOST, LD ., 
 ST. JOHN'S HOUSE, CLBKKENWELL ROAD, B.C.
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
 
 Los Angeles 
 This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. 
 
 NO PHONtlKENE' 
 SEP 
 
 f 
 
 REC' 
 SEP 21987 
 
 87
 
 115801209 6060