England's Antiphon, George MacDonald [ready to read books TXT] 📗

individual and related beauty. Then let him ponder the pictures given: the sudden arraying of the shame-faced night in long beams; the amazed kings silent on their thrones; the birds brooding on the sea: he will find many such. Let him consider the clear-cut epithets, so full of meaning. A true poet may be at once known by the justice and force of the adjectives he uses, especially when he compounds them,-that is, makes one out of two. Here are some examples: meek-eyed Peace; pale-eyed priest; speckled vanity; smouldering clouds; hideous hum; dismal dance; dusky eyne: there are many such, each almost a poem in itself. The whole is a succession of pictures set in the loveliest music for the utterance of grandest thoughts.

No doubt there are in the poem instances of such faults in style as were common in the age in which his verse was rooted: for my own part, I never liked the first two stanzas of the hymn. But such instances are few; while for a right feeling of the marvel of this poem and of the two preceding it, we must remember that Milton was only twenty-one when he wrote them.

Apparently to make one of a set with the Nativity , he began to write an ode on the Passion , but, finding the subject "above the years he had when he wrote it, and nothing satisfied with what was begun, left it unfinished." The fragment is full of unworthy, though skilful, and, for such, powerful conceits, but is especially interesting as showing how even Milton, trying to write about what he felt, but without yet having generated thoughts enow concerning the subject itself, could only fall back on conventionalities. Happy the young poet the wisdom of whose earliest years was such that he recognized his mistake almost at the outset, and dropped the attempt! Amongst the stanzas there is, however, one of exceeding loveliness:

He, sovereign priest, stooping his regal head,
That dropped with odorous oil down his fair eyes,
Poor fleshly tabernacle enteréd,
His starry front low-roofed beneath the skies.
Oh what a masque was there! what a disguise!
Yet more! the stroke of death he must abide;
Then lies him meekly down fast by his brethren's side.

In this it will be seen that he has left the jubilant measure of the
Hymn , and returned to the more stately and solemn rhyme-royal of its overture, as more suited to his subject. Milton could not be wrong in his music, even when he found the quarry of his thought too hard to work.


CHAPTER XV.

EDMUND WALLER, THOMAS BROWN, AND JEREMY TAYLOR.


Edmund Waller, born in 1605, was three years older than Milton; but I had a fancy for not dividing Herbert and Milton. As a poet he had a high reputation for many years, gained chiefly, I think, by a regard to literary proprieties, combined with wit. He is graceful sometimes; but what in his writings would with many pass for grace, is only smoothness and the absence of faults. His horses were not difficult to drive. He dares little and succeeds in proportion-occasionally, however, flashing out into true song. In politics he had no character-let us hope from weakness rather than from selfishness; yet, towards the close of his life, he wrote some poems which reveal a man not unaccustomed to ponder sacred things, and able to express his thoughts concerning them with force and justice. From a poem called Of Divine Love , I gather the following very remarkable passages: I wish they had been enforced by greater nobility of character. Still they are in themselves true. Even where we have no proof of repentance, we may see plentiful signs of a growth towards it. We cannot tell how long the truth may of necessity require to interpenetrate the ramifications of a man's nature. By slow degrees he discovers that here it is not, and there it is not. Again and again, and yet again, a man finds that he must be born with a new birth.

The fear of hell, or aiming to be blest,
Savours too much of private interest:
This moved not Moses, nor the zealous Paul,
Who for their friends abandoned soul and all;
A greater yet from heaven to hell descends,
To save and make his enemies his friends.

* * * * *

That early love of creatures yet unmade,
To frame the world the Almighty did persuade.
For love it was that first created light,
Moved on the waters, chased away the night
From the rude chaos; and bestowed new grace
On things disposed of to their proper place-
Some to rest here, and some to shine above:
Earth, sea, and heaven, were all the effects of love.

* * * * *

Not willing terror should his image move,
He gives a pattern of eternal love:
His son descends, to treat a peace with those
Which were, and must have ever been, his foes.
Poor he became, and left his glorious seat,
To make us humble, and to make us great;
His business here was happiness to give
To those whose malice could not let him live.

* * * * *

He to proud potentates would not be known:
Of those that loved him, he was hid from none.
Till love appear, we live in anxious doubt;
But smoke will vanish when that flame breaks out:
This is the fire that would consume our dross,
Refine, and make us richer by the loss.

* * * * *

Who for himself no miracle would make,
Dispensed with[134] several for the people's sake.
He that, long-fasting, would no wonder show,
Made loaves and fishes, as they eat them, grow.
Of all his power, which boundless was above,
Here he used none but to express his love;
And such a love would make our joy exceed,
Not when our own, but others' mouths we feed.

* * * * *

Love as he loved! A love so unconfined
With arms extended would embrace mankind.
Self-love would cease, or be dilated, when
We should behold as many selfs as men;
All of one family, in blood allied,
His precious blood that for our ransom died.

* * * * *

Amazed at once and comforted, to find
A boundless power so infinitely kind,
The soul contending to that light to fly
From her dark cell, we practise how to die,
Employing thus the poet's wingéd art
To reach this love, and grave it in our heart.
Joy so complete, so solid, and severe,
Would leave no place for meaner pleasures there:
Pale they would look, as stars that must be gone
When from the east the rising sun comes on.

* * * * *

To that and some other poems he adds the following-a kind of epilogue.


ON THE FOREGOING DIVINE POEMS.

When we for age could neither read nor write,
The subject made us able to indite:
The soul with nobler resolutions decked,
The body stooping, does herself erect:
No mortal parts are requisite to raise
Her that unbodied can her Maker praise.
The seas are quiet when the winds give o'er:
So calm are we when passions are no more;
For then we know how vain it was to boast
Of fleeting things, so certain to be lost.
Clouds of affection from our younger eyes passion.
Conceal that emptiness which age descries.

The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed,
Lets in new light, through chinks that time has made:
Stronger by weakness, wiser men become,
As they draw near to their eternal home.
Leaving the old, both worlds at once they view
That stand upon the threshold of the new.

It would be a poor victory where age was the sole conqueror. But I doubt if age ever gains the victory alone. Let Waller, however, have this praise: his song soars with his subject. It is a true praise. There are men who write well until they try the noble, and then they fare like the falling star, which, when sought where it fell, is, according to an old fancy, discovered a poor jelly.

Sir Thomas Brown, a physician, whose prose writings are as peculiar as they are valuable, was of the same age as Waller. He partakes to a considerable degree of the mysticism which was so much followed in his day, only in his case it influences his literature most-his mode of utterance more than his mode of thought. His True Christian Morals is a very valuable book, notwithstanding the obscurity that sometimes arises in that, as in all his writings, from his fondness for Latin words. The following fine hymn occurs in his Religio Medici , in which he gives an account of his opinions. I am not aware of anything else that he has published in verse, though he must probably have written more to be able to write this so well. It occurs in the midst of prose, as the prayer he says every night before he yields to the death of sleep. I follow it with the succeeding sentence of the prose.

The night is come. Like to the day,
Depart not thou, great God, away.
Let not my sins, black as the night,
Eclipse the lustre of thy light.
Keep still in my horizon,