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

* * * * *

Contented now, upon my thigh
I halt till life's short journey end;
All helplessness, all weakness, I
On thee alone for strength depend;
Nor have I power from thee to move:
Thy nature and thy name is Love.

Lame as I am, I take the prey;
Hell, earth, and sin, with ease o'ercome;
I leap for joy, pursue my way,
And as a bounding hart fly home;
Through all eternity to prove
Thy nature and thy name is Love.

It seems to me that the art with which his very difficult end in the management of the allegory is reached, is admirable. I have omitted three stanzas.

I cannot give much from William Cowper. His poems-graceful always, and often devout even when playful-have few amongst them that are expressly religious, while the best of his hymns are known to every reader of such. Born in 1731, he was greatly influenced by the narrow theology that prevailed in his circle; and most of his hymns are marred by the exclusiveness which belonged to the system and not to the man. There is little of it in the following:-

Far from the world, O Lord, I flee,
From strife and tumult far;
From scenes where Satan wages still
His most successful war.

The calm retreat, the silent shade,
With prayer and praise agree,
And seem by thy sweet bounty made
For those who follow thee.

There if thy spirit touch the soul,
And grace her mean abode,
Oh with what peace, and joy, and love,
She communes with her God!

There, like the nightingale, she pours
Her solitary lays,
Nor asks a witness of her song,
Nor thirsts for human praise.

Author and guardian of my life,
Sweet source of light divine,
And-all harmonious names in one-
My Saviour, thou art mine!

What thanks I owe thee, and what love-
A boundless, endless store-
Shall echo through the realms above
When time shall be no more.

Sad as was Cowper's history, with the vapours of a low insanity, if not always filling his garden, yet ever brooding on the hill-tops of his horizon, he was, through his faith in God, however darkened by the introversions of a neat, poverty-stricken theology, yet able to lead his life to the end. It is delightful to discover that, when science, which is the anatomy of nature, had poisoned the theology of the country, in creating a demand for clean-cut theory in infinite affairs, the loveliness and truth of the countenance of living nature could calm the mind which this theology had irritated to the very borders of madness, and give a peace and hope which the man was altogether right in attributing to the Spirit of God. How many have been thus comforted, who knew not, like Wordsworth, the immediate channel of their comfort; or even, with Cowper, recognized its source! God gives while men sleep.


CHAPTER XXI.

THE NEW VISION.


William Blake, the painter of many strange and fantastic but often powerful-sometimes very beautiful pictures-wrote poems of an equally remarkable kind. Some of them are as lovely as they are careless, while many present a curious contrast in the apparent incoherence of the simplest language. He was born in 1757, towards the close of the reign of George II. Possibly if he had been sent to an age more capable of understanding him, his genius would not have been tempted to utter itself with such a wildness as appears to indicate hopeless indifference to being understood. We cannot tell sometimes whether to attribute the bewilderment the poems cause in us to a mysticism run wild, or to regard it as the reflex of madness in the writer. Here is a lyrical gem, however, although not cut with mathematical precision.


DAYBREAK.

To find the western path,
Right through the gates of wrath
I urge my way;
Sweet morning leads me on:
With soft repentant moan,
I see the break of day

The war of swords and spears,
Melted by dewy tears,
Exhales on high;
The sun is freed from fears,
And with soft grateful tears,
Ascends the sky.

The following is full of truth most quaintly expressed, with a homeliness of phrase quite delicious. It is one of the Songs of Innocence , published, as we learn from Gilchrist's Life of Blake, in the year 1789. They were engraved on copper with illustrations by Blake, and printed and bound by his wife. When we consider them in respect of the time when they were produced, we find them marvellous for their originality and simplicity.


ON ANOTHER'S SORROW.

Can I see another's woe,
And not be in sorrow too?
Can I see another's grief,
And not seek for kind relief?

Can I see a falling tear,
And not feel my sorrow's share?
Can a father see his child
Weep, nor be with sorrow filled?

Can a mother sit and hear
An infant groan, an infant fear?
No, no; never can it be!
Never, never can it be!

And can he, who smiles on all,
Hear the wren, with sorrows small-
Hear the small bird's grief and care,
Hear the woes that infants bear,

And not sit beside the nest,
Pouring pity in their breast?
And not sit the cradle near,
Weeping tear on infant's tear?

And not sit both night and day,
Wiping all our tears away?
Oh, no! never can it be!
Never, never can it be!

He doth give his joy to all;
He becomes an infant small;
He becomes a man of woe;
He doth feel the sorrow too.

Think not thou canst sigh a sigh,
And thy Maker is not by;
Think not thou canst weep a tear,
And thy Maker is not near.

Oh! he gives to us his joy,
That our grief he may destroy:
Till our grief is fled and gone,
He doth sit by us and moan.

There is our mystic yet again leading the way.

A supreme regard for science, and the worship of power, go hand in hand: that knowledge is power has been esteemed the grandest incitement to study. Yet the antidote to the disproportionate cultivation of science, is simply power in its crude form-breaking out, that is, as brute force. When science, isolated and glorified, has produced a contempt, not only for vulgar errors, but for the truths which are incapable of scientific proof, then, as we see in the French Revolution, the wild beast in man breaks from its den, and chaos returns. But all the noblest minds in Europe looked for grand things in the aurora of this uprising of the people. To the terrible disappointment that followed, we are indebted for the training of Wordsworth to the priesthood of nature's temple. So was he possessed with the hope of a coming deliverance for the nations, that he spent many months in France during the Revolution. At length he was forced to seek safety at home. Dejected even to hopelessness for a time, he believed in nothing. How could there be a God that ruled in the earth when such a rising sun of promise was permitted to set in such a sea! But for man to worship himself is a far more terrible thing than that blood should flow like water: the righteous plague of God allowed things to go as they would for a time. But the power of God came upon Wordsworth-I cannot say as it had never come before, but with an added insight which made him recognize in the fresh gift all that he had known and felt of such in the past. To him, as to Cowper, the benignities of nature restored peace and calmness and hope-sufficient to enable him to look back and gather wisdom. He was first troubled, then quieted, and then taught. Such presence of the Father has been an infinitely more active power in the redemption of men than men have yet become capable of perceiving. The divine expressions of Nature, that is, the face of the Father therein visible, began to heal the plague which the worship of knowledge had bred. And the power of her teaching grew from comfort to prayer, as will be seen in the poem I shall give. Higher than all that Nature can do in the way of direct lessoning, is the production of such holy moods as result in hope, conscience of duty, and supplication. Those who have never felt it have to be told there is in her such a power-yielding to which, the meek inherit the earth.


NINTH EVENING VOLUNTARY.

Composed upon an evening of extraordinary splendour and beauty.

I.

Had this effulgence disappeared
With flying haste, I might have sent
Among the speechless clouds a look
Of blank astonishment;
But 'tis endued with power to stay,
And sanctify one closing day,
That frail Mortality may see-
What is?-ah no, but what can be!
Time was when field and watery cove
With modulated echoes rang,
While choirs of fervent angels sang
Their vespers in the grove;
Or, crowning, star-like, each some sovereign height,
Warbled, for heaven above and earth below,
Strains suitable to both.-Such holy rite,
Methinks, if audibly repeated now
From hill or valley could not move
Sublimer transport, purer love,
Than doth this silent spectacle-the gleam-
The shadow-and the peace supreme!

II.

No sound is uttered,-but a deep
And solemn harmony pervades
The hollow vale from steep to steep,
And penetrates the glades.
Far distant images draw nigh,
Called forth by wondrous potency
Of beamy radiance, that imbues
Whate'er it strikes with gem-like hues.
In vision exquisitely clear,
Herds range along the mountain side,
And glistening antlers are descried,
And gilded flocks appear.
Thine is the tranquil hour, purpureal Eve!
But long as godlike wish or hope divine
Informs