Chapter XIII: Part 13

But to show how completely Wordsworth's system is a system of poetical Quakerism, I should be obliged to take his Excursion, and collate the whole with passages from the writings of the early Friends, Fox, Penn, Barclay, Pennington, and others. The Excursion is a very bible of Quakerism. Every page abounds with it. It is, in fact, wholly and fervently permeated by the soul of Quaker theology. The Friends teach that the great guide of life is "the light which enlighteneth every man that cometh into the world;" hence they were originally termed "children of light," till the nickname of Quakers superseded it. They declare this light to be "the infallible guide" of all men who will follow it. What says Wordsworth?

"Early he perceives
Within himself a measure and a rule,
Which to the Sun of Truth he can apply,
That shines for him, and shines for all mankind.
* * * he refers
His notions to this standard; on this rock
Rest his desires; and hence in after-life,
Soul-strengthening patience, and sublime content."

The whole of the fourth Book, from which this extract is made, is no other than a luminous and vivid exposition of pure Quakerism. The Wanderer is its apostle. He shows how in all ages and countries men have been influenced by this voice of God in nature; and, not comprehending it fully, have mixed it up with the forms and phenomena of nature itself, and shaped religions out of it. Hence the Chaldean faith; hence the Grecian mythology.

"They felt
A spiritual Presence, ofttimes misconceived,
But still a high dependence, a divine
Beauty and government, that filled their hearts
With joy and gratitude, and fear and love;
And from their fervent lips drew hymns of praise,
That through the desert rung. Though favored less,
Far less than these, yet rich in their degree,
Were those bewildered pagans of old time."--P. 169.

So say the Friends; and to such a pitch do they carry their belief in their "universal and saving light," that they contend, that to the most savage nations, "having not law, it becomes a law," and that through it the spirit, if not the history of the Savior is revealed and made operative, and that thus the voice of salvation is preached in the heart where never outward gospel has been heard. The Friends contend that science and mere human wisdom most commonly tend to darken and weigh down this divine principle, to cloud this eternal luster in the soul. So says the eloquent Wanderer, the preacher of the Quakerism of poetry. He asks, Shall our great discoverers obtain less from sense and reason than these obtained?

"Shall men for whom our age
Unbaffled powers of vision hath prepared,
To explore the world without, and world within,
Be joyless as the blind? Ambitious souls,
Whom earth, at this late season, hath produced
To regulate the moving spheres, and weigh
The planets in the hollow of their hand;
And they who rather dive than soar, whose pains
Have solved the elements, or analyzed
The thinking principle;--shall they in fact
Prove a degraded race? And what avails
Renown, if their presumption makes them such?
O! there is laughter at their work in heaven!
Inquire of ancient wisdom; go, demand
Of mighty nature, if 'twas ever meant
That we should pray far off, yet be unraised;
That we should pore, and dwindle as we pore.

* * * * *

That this magnificent effect of power,
The earth we tread, the sky that we behold
By day, and all the pomp which night reveals--
That these, and that superior mystery,
Our vital frame, so fearfully devised,
And the dread soul within it, should exist
Only to be examined, pondered, searched,
Probed, vexed, and criticised?--Accuse me not
Of arrogance, unknown Wanderer as I am,
If, having walked with nature three score years,
And offered, far as frailty would allow,
My heart a daily sacrifice to Truth,
I now affirm of Nature and of Truth,
Whom I have served, that their DIVINITY
Revolts, offended at the ways of men,
Swayed by such motives, to such ends employed."--Pp. 170-1.

This divine principle, which can thus outsoar and put to shame the vanity and conceit of science, can also baffle and repulse all the sophistries of metaphysics.

"Within the soul a faculty abides,
That with interpositions which would hide
And darken, so can deal, that they become
Contingencies of pomp, and serve to exalt
Her native brightness."--P. 174.

There, too, Wordsworth and the Friends are entirely agreed, and yet further. This faculty exists in and operates for all; and whoever trusts in it shall, like the Friends, pursue their way careless of all the changes of fashions or opinions.

"Access for you
Is yet preserved to principles of truth,
Which the imaginative Will upholds
In seats of wisdom, not to be approached
By the inferior faculty that molds,
With her minute and speculative pains,
Opinion, ever changing."

He illustrates the operation of this inward and primeval faculty by the simile of the child listening to a shell, and hearing, as it were, the murmurs of its native sea. Such a shell, he says, is

"The universe itself
Unto the ear of faith;"

and in this you have a sanctuary to retire to at will, where you will become victorious over every delusive power and principle. The Friends consider this the glory of our mortal state, and Wordsworth says,--

"Yes, you have felt, and may not cease to feel,
The estate of man would be indeed forlorn,
If false conclusions of the reasoning power
Made the eye blind, and closed the passages
Through which the ear converses with the heart."--P. 178.

But the poet and the Friends agree that there is a power seated in the human soul, superior to the understanding, superior to the reasoning faculty, the sure test of truth, to which every man may confidently appeal in all cases, for it is the voice of God himself. With the poet and the Friends the result of this divine philosophy is the same;--the most perfect patience, the most holy confidence in the ever present divinity; connected with no forms, no creeds, no particular conditions of men; not confined by, not approachable only in, temples and churches, but free as his own winds, boundless as his own seas, universal as his own sunshine over all his varied lands and people; whispering peace in the lonely forest, courage on the seas, adoration on the mountain tops, hope under the burning tropics and the blistering lash of the savage white man, joy in the dungeon, and glory on the death-bed.

"Religion tells of amity sublime,
Which no condition can preclude: of One
Who sees all suffering, comprehends all wants,
All weakness fathoms, can supply all needs."--P. 175.

Perhaps this perfected spirit, this divine patience, this God-pervaded soul of man, gentle, loving, yet stronger than death or evil, never were more beautifully expressed than by the repentant and dying Quaker, James Naylor.

"There is a spirit which I feel, that delights to do no evil, nor to revenge any wrong; but delights to endure all things, in hope to enjoy its own in the end. Its hope is to outlive all wrath and contention, to weary out all exaltation and cruelty, or whatever is of a nature contrary to itself. It sees to the end of all temptations. As it bears no evil in itself, so it conceives none in thought to any other; if it be betrayed, it bears it, for its ground and spring are the mercies and forgiveness of God. Its course is meekness; its life is everlasting love unfeigned; it takes its kingdom with entreaty, and not with contention, and keeps it by lowliness of mind. In God alone it can rejoice, though none else regard it, or can own its life. It is conceived in sorrow, and brought forth without any to pity it; nor doth it murmur at grief and oppression. It rejoiceth, but through sufferings, for with the world's joy it is murdered. I found it alone, being forsaken. I have fellowship therein with those who live in dens and desolate places of the earth, who through death obtained this resurrection, and eternal holy life."

There is an illumination for the critics! For these thirty years have they been astounding themselves at the originality of Wordsworth's philosophy, and expounding it by all imaginable aids of metaphysics. We have heard endless lectures on the ideality, the psychological profundity, the abstract doctrines of the poet; his new views, his spiritual communion with and exposition of the mysteries of nature, and of the soul in harmony with nature, etc., etc. That is the simple solution; it is Quakerism in poetry, neither more nor less. The question is, how Wordsworth stumbled on this doctrine; a doctrine on which his great poetical reputation is, in fact, built. Possibly, like George Fox, he found it in his solitary wanderings, and cogitations; but more probably he drew it direct from his Journal itself. It is a curious, but a well known fact, that all that knot of young and enthusiastic writers at Bristol, and afterward at Stowey and Allfoxden, Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge, were deeply read and imbued with the old Quaker worthies. Probably they were made acquainted with them by their two Quaker friends Lovell and Lloyd. Coleridge was so impressed with their principles that, though he preached, he did it in a blue coat and white waistcoat, that, as he said, "he might not have a rag of the woman of Babylon on him." He imbibed and proclaimed all the Quaker hatred of slavery and war. He declares in his Biographia Literaria his admiration of Fox. "One assertion I will venture to make, as suggested by my own experience, that there exist folios on the human understanding, and the nature of man, which would have a far juster claim to their high rank and celebrity, if, in the whole huge volume, there could be found as much fullness of heart and intellect, as bursts forth in many a simple page of George Fox." Southey always cherished the idea of writing the life of George Fox, but never accomplished it. Charles Lamb, another visitor of Stowey, at the time of this youthful effervescence, has recorded his visit to a Friends' meeting, and says, that in it he soon began to ask himself far more questions than he could quickly answer. He declares Sewell's History of the Quakers worth all ecclesiastical history put together. Wordsworth was not only as deeply read in these books as any of them, but is still, to my knowledge, remarkably well acquainted with the history and opinions of Friends; he has immortalized the very spade of one of them, Thomas Wilkinson, and--_Ecce signum_--has perfected the development of this great poetical system.

Whence Wordsworth, however, gathered his philosophy, whether from the books of the Friends, or from his own meditations, it is, nevertheless, a great truth. Jacob Behmen, Emanuel Swedenborg, Kant, Justinus Kerner, and many another philosopher and poet, proclaim and maintain the same. That the Spirit of God lives throughout the universe and in the soul of man; that the more we commune with his Spirit, the more our ears and eyes, or, in better phrase, our spiritual sense, becomes open to perceive it. The closer we draw to it, and live in it, the more we become strengthened, purified, and enriched by it; the more we are able to walk amid all the fascinations, glories, and deceptions of the world, as the men of God walked in the midst of the fiery furnace, so scathless that the very smell of fire passed not on their garments. It is called by the Friends THE TRUTH, as superior to, and including all other truths. Wordsworth gives it the same magnificent title. Standing by this central light of the universe, man learns to see how far all other offered lights, whether of books or spoken doctrines, are lights, or are actually darkness--are great or small. Holding fast by this true substance, he learns to feel how far all other things are substance or shadow; and, if he hold on, at length walks the highway of life free, invincible, and rejoicing; all nature yielding him aliment and peace.

"As the ample moon,
In the deep stillness of a summer even
Rising behind a thick and lofty grove,
Burns, like an unconsuming fire of light,
In the green trees; and kindling on all sides
Their leafy umbrage, turns the dusky veil
Into a substance glorious as her own,
Yea, with her own incorporate, by power
Capacious and serene: like power abides
In man's celestial spirit: virtue thus
Sets forth and magnifies herself; thus feeds
A calm, a beautiful, and silent fire,
From the incumbrances of mortal life,
From even disappointment--nay, from guilt:
And sometimes, so relenting justice wills,
From palpable oppressions of despair."--P. 174, 175.

As this is a curious subject, and particularly curious, as it has escaped the research of those who have thought themselves the most profound, I have gone the more fully into it. But to compare all such passages in Wordsworth and the writings of the early Friends, as would amply prove the fact here introduced, would make a very large volume. The writings of these old worthies are one mass of Wordsworthisms. In some particulars, he has not reached the sublime moral elevation of his masters, as in regard to war; he is martial, and thinks Slaughter, God's daughter. They very sensibly set Slaughter down as the daughter of a very opposite personage. In fact, had not the Friends overshadowed their great doctrines by broad brims, and disguised them in collarless coats; had they not put forward as the outward signs of their community, formality and singularity, the great doctrines which they hold of the great and immutable truth, more than any other people, would have made them far greater than any other people; the high and universally acknowledged instructors of the world in the principles of freedom, moral greatness, and social happiness. As it is, they have made them the most sturdy and efficient agents of peace, right notions of church government, and liberty to the enslaved; and, not the less certainly, the greatest of modern reformers in poetical philosophy. As Fox and his disciples were fiercely attacked as innovators in religion, so Wordsworth was as fiercely attacked as an innovator in literature. Little did the cold and material spirit of Scotch skeptical criticism dream that it was running its head against the old sturdy spirit of Quakerism, in the new heresy, of what they were pleased to term the Lake school.

There is, perhaps, no residence in England better known than that of William Wordsworth. Rydal Mount, where he has now lived for more than thirty years, is as perfectly poetical in its location as any poet could possibly conceive in his brightest moment of inspiration. As you advance a mile or more on the road from Ambleside toward Grasmere, a lane overhung with trees turns up to the right, and there, at some few hundred yards from the highway, stands the modest cottage of the poet, elevated on Rydal Mount, so as to look out over the surrounding sea of foliage, and to take in a glorious view. Before it, at some distance across the valley, stretches a high screen of bold and picturesque mountains; behind, it is overtowered by a precipitous hill, called Nab-scar; but to the left, you look down over the broad waters of Windermere, and to the right over the still and more embosomed flood of Grasmere. Whichever way the poet pleases to advance from his house, it must be into scenery of that beauty for mountain, stream, wood, and lake, which has made Cumberland so famous over all England. He may steal away up backward from his gate, and ascend into the solitary hills, or diverging into the grounds of Lady Mary Fleming, his near neighbor, may traverse the deep shades of the woodland, wander along the banks of the rocky rivulet, and finally stand before the well known water-fall there. If he descend into the highway, objects of beauty still present themselves. Cottages and quiet houses here and there glance from their little spots of Paradise, through the richest boughs of trees; Windermere, with its wide expanse of waters, its fairy islands, its noble hills, allures his steps in one direction; while the sweet little lake of Rydal, with its heronry and its fine background of rocks, invites him in another. In this direction the vale of Grasmere, the scene of his early married life, opens before him, and Dunmail-raise and Langdale-pikes lift their naked corky summits, as hailing him to the pleasures of old companionship. Into no quarter of this region of lakes, and mountains, and vales of primitive life, can he penetrate without coming upon ground celebrated by his muse. He is truly "sole king of rocky Cumberland."

The immediate grounds in which his house stands are worthy of the country and the man. It is, as its name implies, a mount. Before the house opens a considerable platform, and around and beneath lie various terraces and descend various walks, winding on amid a profusion of trees and luxuriant evergreens. Beyond the house, you ascend various terraces, planted with trees now completely overshadowing them; and these terraces conduct you to a level above the house-top, and extend your view of the enchanting scenery on all sides. Above you tower the rocks and precipitous slopes of Nab-scar; and below you, embosomed in its trees, lies the richly ornate villa of Mr. William Ball, a Friend, whose family and the poet's are on such social terms, that a little gate between their premises opens them both to each family alike. This cottage and grounds were formerly the property of Charles Lloyd, also a Friend, and one of the Bristol and Stowey coterie. Both he and Lovell have long been dead; Lovell, indeed, was drowned, on a voyage to Ireland, in the very heyday of the dreams of Pantisocracy, in which he was an eager participant.

The poet's house, itself, is a proper poet's abode. It is at once modest, plain, yet tasteful and elegant. An ordinary dining-room, a breakfast-room in the center, and a library beyond, form the chief apartments. There are a few pictures and bust, especially those of Scott and himself, a good engraving of Burns, and the like, with a good collection of books, few of them very modern. In the dining-room there stands an old cabinet, which is a sort of genealogical piece of furniture, bearing this inscription:--

Hoc op' fiebat Aº D ni MºCCCCCºXXVº ex suptu Will'mi Wordsworsh,
filii W. fil. Joh. fil. W. fil. Nich. viri Elizabeth filia et
hered W. P'ctor de Pengsto qoru aneabus p' picietur De'!

A great part of the labor of laying out the garden, raising the terraces at Rydal, and planting the trees, has been that of the poet himself. The property belongs to Lady Fleming, but Wordsworth has bought a piece of land lying just below, with the fatherly intent, that should his daughter at any time incline to live there, she may, if she choose, erect a house for herself in the old and endeared situation.

The trees display a prodigality of growth, that make what are meant for walks almost a wilderness. On observing to the poet that he really should have his laurels pruned a little, the old man smiled, paused, and said, with a pardonable self-complacency,--"Ay, I will tell you an anecdote about that. A certain general was going round the place, attended by the gardener, when he suddenly remarked, as you do, the flourishing growth of the trees, especially of the evergreens, and said, 'Which of all your trees do you think flourishes most here?"

"'I don't know, sir,' said James; "but I think the laurel.'

"'Well, that is as it should be, you know,' added the general.

"'Why it should be so, James could not tell, and made the remark.

"'Don't you know,' continued the general, 'that the laurel is the symbol of distinction for some achievement, and especially in that art of which Mr. Wordsworth is so eminent a master? therefore it is quite right that it should flourish so conspicuously here.'

"By this," continued the poet, "James acquired two new pieces of intelligence; first, that the laurel was a symbol of eminence, and, that his master was an eminent man, of both which facts he had been before very innocently ignorant."

It may be supposed that, during the summer, Wordsworth being in the very center of a region swarming with tourists and hunters of the picturesque, and in the very highway of their route is regularly beset by them. Day after day brings up whole troops of them from every quarter of these kingdoms, and no few from America. The worthy old man professes a good deal of annoyance at being thus lionized, but it is an annoyance which obviously has its agreeable side. No one can doubt that it would be a far greater annoyance, if, after a life devoted to poetry, people, all in quest of "the sublime and beautiful," hurried past, scoured over all the hills and dales, and passed unnoticed the poet's gate. As it is, he has an ever swinging censer of the flattery of public curiosity tossing at his door. Note after note is sent in, the long levee continues from day to day--the aged minstrel votes it a bore, and quietly enjoys it. If not, how easy it would be, just, during the laking season, to vanish from the spot to another equally pleasant, and yet more retired. Yet why should he? It is not as if the visitor interrupted the progress of a life's great labor. That labor is done; competence and fame are acquired; the laurel and the larder have equally flourished at Rydal Mount: and what is more agreeable than to receive the respect of his fellow-men, and diffuse the pleasure of having seen and conversed with one of the lights of the age?

Some years ago, spending a few days there with Mrs. Howitt, we witnessed a curious scene. The servant came in, announcing that a gentleman and a large party of ladies wished to see the place. "Very well, they can see it," said Mr. Wordsworth.

"But the gentleman wished to see you, sir."

"Who is it?--Did he give his name?"

"No, sir."

"Then ask him for it."

The servant went, and returned, saying, "The gentleman said that he knew Mr. Wordsworth's name very well, as every body did, but that Mr. Wordsworth would not know his if he sent him his card."

"Then say, I am sorry, but I can not see him."

The servant once more disappeared, and the poet broke forth into a declamation on the bore of these continual and importunate, not to say impudent, visits. In the midst of it the servant entered.

"Well, what did the man say?"

"That he had had the honor to shake hands with the Duke of Wellington, and that his last remaining wish in life was to shake hands with Mr. Wordsworth."

This was too good. A universal scream of merriment burst from us. The poet rose, laughing heartily. Mrs. and Miss Dora Wordsworth, laughing as heartily, gently seized him, each by an arm, and thus merrily pushed him out of the room. In another minute, we beheld the worthy host bowing to the man who possessed such irresistible rhetoric, and to his large accompaniment of ladies, and doing the amiable, by pointing out to them the prominent beauties of the view. The cunning fellow was a Manchester manufacturer.

It is well known that the dread of a railroad into the lake country has alarmed Wordsworth into the firing off a sonnet against it, and that his annoyance has been increased by the lanch of a steamboat on Windermere. There is some mitigation of our surprise, that the poet who knows and has so well described the nuisances of cities and manufacturing towns, should thus see with disgust the beautiful and breezy region of the lakes laid open to them, when we know that this railroad is proposed to be carried close under his beloved retirement; but still it is befitting the generosity of the man, who has, in so many forms, given us an interest in the toil-worn and the lowly, to be prepared to make some sacrifice of that quiet which he has so long and so richly enjoyed, to the spread of truth and rational pleasure among the humble workers of the mill; remembering his own impressive words:--

"Turn to private life
And social neighborhood: look we to ourselves;
A light of duty shines on every day
For all, and yet how few are warmed or cheered!"

JAMES MONTGOMERY.

Sheffield has been poetically fortunate. It has had the honor, not to give birth to two eminent poets--a mere accident--but to produce them. Neither Montgomery nor Elliott was born in Sheffield; but they were drawn to it as the trading capital of the district in which they _were_ born; and there their minds, tastes, and reputations grew. In both poets are strongly recognizable the intellectual features of a manufacturing town. They are both of a popular and liberal tendency of mind. They, or rather their spirits and characters, grew amid the physical sufferings and the political struggles of a busy and high-spirited population, and by these circumstances all the elements of freedom and patriotism were strengthened to full growth in their bosoms. Montgomery came upon the public stage, both as a poet and a political writer, long before Elliott, though the difference of their ages is not so vast as might be supposed from this fact, being as near as possible ten years only.

It is not my object in this article to compare or to contrast the intellectual characters of these two genuine poets. They are widely different. In both the spirit of freedom, of progress, of sympathy with the multitude, and of steady antagonism to oppression, manifest themselves, but with much difference of manner. Both possess great vigor and fervor of feeling; but in James Montgomery the decorums of style are more strictly preserved. We feel that he received his education in a very different school to that of Ebenezer Elliott. In the still halls and gardens of the Moravian brethren, Montgomery imbibed the softness of bearing, and that peculiarly religious tone which distinguish him. Amid the roughest and often most hostile crowd of struggling life, Elliott acquired a more fiery and battling aspect, and he learned involuntarily to thunder against evils, where Montgomery would reason and lament. Yet it would be difficult to say in which all that characterizes real patriotism, and real religion, most truly resides. In very different walks they have both done gloriously and well, and we will leave to others to decide which is the greater poet of the two. Elliott, by both circumstance and temperament, has been led to make his poetry bear more directly and at once upon the actual condition of the working-classes; Montgomery has displayed more uniform grace, and in lyrical beauty has far surpassed his townsman, though not in the exquisite harmony of many portions of his versification. But, they are not now to be compared, but to be admired; and nothing is more beautiful than to hear in what tone and manner they speak of each other. Montgomery gives Ebenezer Elliot the highest praise for his genius, and says, that for years in the Iris he was the only one who could or would see the merit of the great but unacknowledged bard; while Elliott modestly dedicates his poem of Spirits and Men to the author of The World before the Flood, "as an evidence of his presumption and his despair."

Mr. Montgomery had a strictly religious education; he was the son of religious parents, and belonged to a pre-eminently religious body, the Moravian brethren; and the spirit of that parentage, education, and association, is deeply diffused through all that he has written. He is essentially a religious poet. It is what of all things upon earth we can well believe he most would desire to be; and that he is in the truest sense of the word. In all his poems the spirit of a piety, profound, and beautifully benevolent, is instantly felt. Perhaps there are no lyrics in the language which are so truly Christian; that is, which breathe the same glowing love to God and man, without one tinge of the bigotry that too commonly eats into zeal as rust into the finest steel. We have no dogmas, but a pure and heavenly atmosphere of holy faith, filial and fraternal affection, and reverence of the great Architect of the universe, and of the destinies of man. There is often a tone of melancholy, but it is never that of doubt. It is the sighing of a feeling and sensitive heart over the evils of life; but ever and anon this tone rises into the more animated one of conscious strength and well placed confidence; and terminates in that pæan of happy triumph which the Christian only can ascend to. There is no "dealing damnation round the land" in the religious poetry of James Montgomery; we feel that he has peculiarly caught the genuine spirit of Christ; and a sense of beauty and goodness, and of the glorious blessedness of an immortal nature, accompanies us through all his works. That is the spirit which, more than all other, distinguishes his lyrical compositions; and how many and how beautiful are they! as, The Grave, The Joy of Grief, Verses on the Death of Joseph Browne, a prisoner for conscience' sake in York Castle, commencing, "Spirit, leave thine house of clay;" The Common Lot, The Harp of Sorrow, The Dial, The Molehill, The Peak Mountains, A Mother's Love, those noble Stanzas to the Memory of the Rev. Thomas Spencer, The Alps, Friends, Night, and the many in the same volume with the Pelican Island, perhaps some of them the most beautiful and spiritual things he ever wrote. The poetry of Montgomery is too familiar to most readers, and especially religiously intellectual readers, to need much quotation here; but a few stanzas may be ventured upon, and will of themselves more forcibly indicate the peculiar features of his poetical character, than much prose description.

The opening stanzas on the death of Thomas Spencer embody his very creed and doctrine as a poet.

"I will not sing a mortal's praise,
To thee I consecrate my lays,
To whom my powers belong;
Those gifts upon thine altar thrown,
O GOD! accept;--accept thine own:
My gifts are Thine,--be Thine alone
The glory of my song.

"In earth and ocean, sky and air,
All that is excellent and fair,
Seen, felt, or understood,
From one eternal cause descends,
To one eternal center tends,
With GOD begins, continues, ends,
The source and stream of good.

"I worship not the Sun at noon,
The wandering Stars, the changing Moon,
The Wind, the Flood, the Flame;
I will not bow the votive knee
To Wisdom, Virtue, Liberty;
'There _is_ no GOD but GOD,' for me:
Jehovah is his name.

"Him through all nature I explore,
Him in his creatures I adore,
Around, beneath, above;
But clearest in the human mind,
His bright resemblance when I find,
Grandeur with purity combined,
I must admire and love."

I can not resist transcribing one more specimen. It is one in which the quaint but adoring spirit of Quarll, Withers, or Herrick, seems to speak; nor shall I ever forget the thrilling tone in which I have heard it repeated by a sainted friend, in whom the love of her Savior was the very life-blood of her heart, and who resembled him in his beneficent walk on earth as much, perhaps, as it is possible for mortal to do.

THE STRANGER AND HIS FRIEND.

"Ye have done it unto me."--_Matt._, xxv. 40.

"A poor wayfaring man of grief
Hath often crossed me on my way,
Who sued so humbly for relief,
That I could never answer, 'Nay:'
I had not power to ask his name,
Whither he went, or whence he came;
Yet there was something in his eye
That won my love, I knew not why.

"Once when my scanty meal was spread,
He entered;--not a word he spake;--
Just perishing for want of bread,
I gave him all; he blessed it, brake,
And ate,--but gave me part again:
Mine was an angel's portion then,
For while I fed with eager haste,
That crust was manna to my taste.

"I spied him where a fountain burst
Clear from the rock; his strength was gone;
The heedless waters mocked his thirst,
He heard it, saw it hurrying on.
I ran to raise the sufferer up;
Thrice from the stream he drained my cup,
Dipped, and returned it running o'er;
I drank, and never thirsted more.

"'Twas night; the floods were out; it blew
A winter hurricane aloof;
I heard his voice abroad, and flew
To bid him welcome to my roof;
I warmed, I clothed, I cheered my guest,
Laid him on my own couch to rest;
Then made the hearth my bed, and seemed
In Eden's garden while I dreamed.

"Stripped, wounded, beaten, nigh to death,
I found him by the highway side;
I raised his pulse, brought back his breath,
Revived his spirit, and supplied
Wine, oil, refreshment; he was healed:
I had myself a wound concealed;
But from that hour forgot the smart,
And peace bound up my broken heart.

"In prison I saw him next, condemned
To meet a traitor's doom at morn;
The tide of lying tongues I stemmed,
And honored him 'mid shame and scorn:
My friendship's utmost zeal to try,
He asked if I for him would die;
The flesh was weak, my blood ran chill,
But the free spirit cried, 'I will.'

"Then in a moment to my view,
The stranger darted from disguise;
The tokens in his hands I knew,
My Savior stood before mine eyes:
He spake; and my poor name He named:
Of me thou hast not been ashamed:
Those deeds shall thy memorial be:
Fear not, thou didst them unto Me.'"

But it is not merely in the lyrical productions of his muse that Montgomery has indicated the deep feeling of piety that lives as a higher life in him; in every one of those larger and very beautiful poems, in which we might have rather supposed him bent on indulging his literary ambition, and sitting down to a long and systematic piece of labor, which should remain a monument of the more continuous, if not higher flights of his genius, we perceive the same still higher object of a sacred duty toward God and man. In no instance has he been content merely to develop his poetical powers, merely to aim at amusing and delighting. Song has been to him a holy vocation, an art practiced to make men wiser and better, a gift held like that of the preacher and the prophet, for the purposes of heaven and eternity. In every one of those productions are still recognized the zealous and devoted spirit of one of that indefatigable and self-renouncing people, who from the earliest ages of the Christian Church have trod the path of persecution, and won the burning crown of martyrdom; and in the present age continue to send out from their still retreats in Europe an increasing and untiring succession of laborers, male and female, to the frozen regions of the north, and to the southern wilds of Africa, to civilize and Christianize those rude tribes, which others, bearing the Christian name, have visited only to enslave or extirpate. The Wanderer of Switzerland, the poem which first won him a reputation, was a glowing lyric of liberty, and denunciation of the diabolical war-spirit of the revolutionary French. It was animated by the most sacred love of country, and of the hallowed ground and hallowed feelings of the domestic hearth. The West Indies was a heroic poem, on one of the most heroic acts which ever did honor to the decrees of a great nation--the abolition of the slave-trade. But it was a work not merely of triumph over what was done, but of incentive to what yet remained to do--to the abolition of slavery itself. Time has shown what a stupendous mustering of national powers that achievement has demanded. What a combination of all the eloquence, and wisdom, and exertions, of all the wisest, noblest, and best men of, perhaps, the most glorious period of our history, was needed! Time has shown that the very slave-trade was only abolished on paper. That like a giant monster, that hideous traffic laughed at our enactments, and laughs at them still, having nearly quadrupled the number of its annual victims since the great contest against it was begun. But among those whose voice and spirit have been in fixed and perpetual operation against this vile cannibal commerce, none have more effectually exercised their influence than James Montgomery. His poem, arrayed in all the charms and graces of his noble art, has been read by every genuine lover of genuine poetry. It has sunk into the generous heart of youth; and who shall say in how many it has been in after-years the unconscious yet actual spring of that manly demand for the extinction of the wrongs of the African, which all good men in England, and wherever the English language is read, still make, and will make till it be finally accomplished. What fame of genius can be put in competition with the profound satisfaction of a mind conscious of the godlike privilege of aiding in the happiness of man in all ages and regions of the earth, and feeling that it has done that by giving to its thoughts the power and privileges of a spirit, able to enter all houses at all hours, and stimulate brave souls to the bravest deeds of the heroism of humanity?

There are great charms of verse displayed in the poem of The West Indies. One would scarcely have believed the subject of the slave-trade capable of them. But the genial, glowing descriptions of the West-Indian islands, of the torrid magnificence of the interior of Africa--

"Regions immense, unsearchable, unknown--
Amid the splendors of the solar zone;
A world of wonders,--where creation seems
No more the work of Nature, but her dreams,--
Great, wild, and wonderful."

The white villains of Europe, desecrating the name of Christian--Spaniards, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Dutchmen, Danes, and Portuguese, all engaged in the brutal traffic, are all sketched with the same vigorous pencil; but the portraiture of the Creole is a master-piece, and I quote it because it still is not a mere picture, but a dreadful reality in the shape of Brazilian and North American, on which the humane can not too fully reflect. If any one would see all that is here described, he has only now to make a ten days' voyage, and he will see it on an enormous scale in the southern states of the _Free_ Republic of North America, as well as on the plains of the more torrid south.

"Lives there a reptile baser than the slave?
--Lothsome as death, corrupted as the grave;
See the dull Creole, at his pompous board,
Attendant vassals cringing round their lord;
Satiate with food, his heavy eyelids close,
Voluptuous minions fan him to repose;
Prone on the noonday couch he lolls in vain,
Delirious slumbers mock his maudlin brain;
He starts in horror from bewildering dreams;
His bloodshot eye with fire and frenzy gleams;
He stalks abroad; through all his wonted rounds,
The negro trembles, and the lash resounds,
And cries of anguish, thrilling through the air,
To distant fields his dread approach declare.
Mark, as he passes, every head reclined;
Then slowly raised--to curse him from behind.
This is the veriest wretch on nature's face,
Owned by no country, spurned by every race;
The tethered tyrant of one narrow span;
The bloated vampire of a living man:
His frame,--a fungus form of dunghill birth,
That taints the air, and rots above the earth;
His soul;--has _he_ a soul, whose sensual breast
Of selfish passions is a serpent's nest?
Who follows headlong, ignorant and blind,
The vague, brute instincts of an idiot mind;
Whose heart 'mid scenes of suffering senseless grown,
Even from his mother's lap was chilled to stone;
Whose torpid pulse no social feelings move;
A stranger to the tenderness of love;
His motley harem charms his gloating eye,
Where ebon, brown, and olive beauties vie:
His children, sprung alike from sloth and vice,
Are born his slaves, and loved at market price:
Has _he_ a soul?--With his departing breath
A form shall hail him at the gates of death,
The specter Conscience,--shrieking through the gloom,
'Man, we shall meet again beyond the tomb!'"

There are few more pathetic passages in the English language than these, describing the labors and the extinctions of the Charib tribes:--

"The conflict o'er, the valiant in their graves,
The wretched remnant dwindled into slaves:
--Condemned in pestilential cells to pine,
Delving for gold amid the gloomy mine.
The sufferer, sick of life-protracting breath,
Inhaled with joy the fire-damp blast of death;
--Condemned to fell the mountain palm on high,
That cast its shadow from the evening sky,
Ere the tree trembled to his feeble stroke,
The woodman languished, and his heart-strings broke;
--Condemned in torrid noon, with palsied hand,
To urge the slow plough o'er the obdurate land,
The laborer, smitten by the sun's fierce ray,
A corpse along the unfinished furrow lay.
O'erwhelmed at length with ignominious toil,
Mingling their barren ashes with the soil,
Down to the dust the Charib people passed,
Like autumn foliage, withering in the blast;
The whole race sunk beneath the oppressor's rod,
And left a blank among the works of GOD."

When we bear in mind that these beautiful passages of poetry are not the mere ornamental descriptions of things gone by and done with; but that, though races are extinguished, and millions of negroes, kidnapped to supply their loss, have perished in their misery, the horrors and outrages of slavery remain, spite of all we have done to put an end to them,--we can not too highly estimate the productions of the muse which are devoted to the cause of these children of misery and sorrow, nor too often return to their perusal. According to the calculations of the Anti-slavery Society, there were, half-a-century ago, when the anti-slavery operations began, _from two to three millions of slaves in the world_; there are now said to be FROM SIX TO SEVEN MILLIONS! There were then calculated to be _one hundred thousand slaves annually ravished from Africa_; there are now calculated to be FOUR HUNDRED THOUSAND ANNUALLY! With these awful facts before us, I fear it will be long before the eloquent appeals of such writers as Montgomery and Cowper will cease to possess a living interest.

In the World before the Flood, and Greenland, the same great purpose of serving the cause of virtue is equally conspicuous. The one relates the contests and triumphs of the good over the vicious in the antediluvian ages, and is full of the evidences of a fine imagination and a lofty piety. Many think this the greatest of Mr. Montgomery's productions. It abounds with beauties which we must not allow ourselves to particularize here. In Greenland he celebrates the missionary labors of the body to which his parents and his brother belonged. In the Pelican Island he quitted his favorite versification, the heroic, in which he displays so much force and harmony, and employed blank verse. There is less human interest in this poem, but it is, perhaps, the most philosophical of his writings, and gives great scope to his imaginative and descriptive powers. He imagines himself as a sort of spiritual existence, watching the progress of the population of the world, from its inanimate state till it was thronged with men, and the savage began to think, and to be prepared for the visitation of the Gospel messengers of peace and knowledge. It may be imagined that vast opportunity is given for the recital of the wonders, awful and beautiful, of the various realms of nature--the growth of coral islands and continents in the sea, and the varied developments of life on the land. The last scene, with a noble savage and his grandchild, in which the old man is smitten with a sense of his immortality, and of the presence of God, and praying, is followed in his act of devotion by the child, is very fine. But I must only allow myself to quote, as a specimen of the style of this poem, so different to all others by the same author, one of its opening passages already referred to.

"I was a Spirit in the midst of these,
All eye, ear, thought; existence was enjoyment;
Light was an element of life, and air
The clothing of my incorporeal form,--
A form impalpable to mortal touch,
And volatile as fragrance from the flower,
Or music in the woodlands. What the soul
Can make itself at pleasure, that I was
A child in feeling and imagination;
Learning new lessons still, as Nature wrought
Her wonders in my presence. All I saw,
Like Adam, when he walked in Paradise,
I knew and named by surest intuition.
Actor, spectator, sufferer, each in turn,
I ranged, explored, reflected. Now I sailed,
And now I soared; anon, expanding, seemed
Diffused into immensity, yet bound
Within a space too narrow for desire.
The mind, the mind, perpetual themes must task,
Perpetual power impel, and hope allure.
I and the silent sun were here alone,
But not companions: high and bright he held
His course: I gazed with admiration on him--
There all communion ended; and I sighed
To feel myself a wanderer without aim,
An exile amid splendid desolation,
A prisoner with infinitude surrounded."

James Montgomery was born November 4th, 1771, in the little town of Irvine, in Ayrshire; a place which has also had the honor of giving birth to John Galt, and of being for about six months the abode of Robert Burns, when a youth, who was sent there to learn the art and mystery of flax-dressing, but his master's shop being burned, he quitted Irvine and that profession at the same time. The house in which Burns resided does not seem to be now very positively known, but it was in the Glasgow Vennel. The house where Montgomery was born is well known. It is in Halfway-street, and was pointed out to me by the zealous admirer and chronicler of all that belongs to genius, Mr. Maxwell Dick, of Irvine, in whose possession are some of the most interesting of the autograph copies of Burns's Poems, especially the Cotter's Saturday Night.

The house of Montgomery, at the time of his birth and till his fifth year, was a very humble one. His father was the Moravian minister there, and probably had not a large congregation. We know how the ministers of this pious people will labor on in the most physically or morally desolate scene, if they can hope but to win one soul. The cottage is now inhabited by a common weaver, and consists of two rooms only, on the ground-floor, one of which is occupied by the loom. The chapel, which used to stand opposite, is now pulled down. This cottage stands in a narrow alley, back from the street. Mr. Dick said he accompanied Mr. Montgomery, some years ago, to this lowly cottage of his birth, and that no sooner had he entered the first room, which used to be, as it is still, the sitting-room, than the memory of his childhood came strongly back upon him, and he sat down and recounted various things which he recollected of the apartment, and of what had taken place in it.

Yet, as we have said, he was sent thence in his fifth year to Grace hill, a settlement still of the Moravian Brethren, near Ballymony, in the county of Antrim, in Ireland; and in which the poet, I believe, has at present a niece residing. In the following year he was again removed to the seminary of the Brethren at Fulneck, in Yorkshire. Soon after this his parents were sent out as missionaries to the West Indies, to preach to the poor slave the consoling doctrine of another and a better world, "where the wretched hear not the voice of the oppressor," and "where the servant is free from his master." There they both died. One lies in the island of Barbadoes, the other in Tobago.

"Beneath the lion-star they sleep,
Beyond the western deep,
And when the sun's noon-glory crests the waves,
He shines without a shadow on their graves."

In the Fulneck academy, among a people remarkable for their ardor in religion, and their industry in the pursuit of useful learning, James Montgomery received his education. He was intended for the ministry, and his preceptors were every way competent to the task of preparing him for the important office for which he was designed. His studies were various: the French, German, Latin, and Greek languages; history, geography, and music: but a desire to distinguish himself as a poet among his school-fellows, soon interfered with the plan laid out for him. When ten years old he began to write verses, and continued to do it with unabated ardor till the period when he quitted Fulneck in 1787; they were chiefly on religious subjects.

This early devotion to poetry, irresistible as it was, he was wont himself to regard as the source of many troubles. That it retarded his improvement at school, and finally altered his destination in life, seducing him to exchange an almost monastic seclusion from society, for the hurry and bustle of a world, which, for a time, seemed disposed to repay him but ill for the sacrifice. We can not think that his opinions of this change remain the same now. In whatever character James Montgomery had performed his allotted work in this world, I am persuaded that he would have performed it with the same conscientious steadfastness. In his heart, the spirit of his pious parents, and of that society in which he was educated, would have made him a faithful servant of that Master whom he has so sincerely served. Whether he had occupied a pulpit here, or had gone out to preach Christianity in some far-off and savage land, he would have been the same man, faithful and devout. But it may well be questioned whether in any other vocation he could have been a tenth part as successfully useful as he has been. There was need of him in the world, and he was sent thither, spite of parentage, education, and himself There was a talent committed to him that is not committed to all. He was to be a minister of God, but it was to be from the hallowed chair of poetry, and not from the pulpit. There was a voice to be raised against slavery and vice, and that voice was to perpetuate itself on the rhythmical page, and to kindle thousands of hearts with the fire of religion and liberty long after his own was cold. There was a niche reserved for him in the temple of poetry, which no other could occupy. It was that of a bard who, freeing his most religious lays from dogmas, should diffuse the love of religion by the religion of love. He himself has shown how well he knew his appointed business, and how sacredly he had resolved to discharge it, when, in A Theme for a Poet, he asks,--

"What monument of mind
Shall I bequeath to deathless fame,
That after-times may love my name?"

And after detailing the characteristics of the principal poets of the age, he adds:--

"Transcendent masters of the lyre!
Not to your honors I aspire;
Humbler, yet higher views
Have touched my spirit into flame;
The pomp of fiction I disclaim:
Fair Truth! be thou my muse:
Reveal in splendor deeds obscure--
Abase the proud, exalt the poor.

"I sing the men who left their home,
Amid barbarian tribes to roam,
Who land and ocean crossed,--
Led by a loadstar, marked on high
By Faith's unseen, all-seeing eye,--
To seek and save the lost;
Where'er the curse on Adam spread.
To call his offspring from the dead.

"Strong in the great Redeemer's name,
They bore the cross, despised the shame;
And, like their Master here,
Wrestled with danger, pain, distress,
Hunger, and cold, and nakedness,
And every form of fear;
To feel his love their only joy.
To tell that love their sole employ."