England's Antiphon Part 28

Life of delight and soul of bliss!

Sure source of lasting happiness!

Higher than heaven! lower than h.e.l.l!

What is thy tent? Where may'st thou dwell?

"My mansion hight _Humility_, _is named._ Heaven's vastest capability.

The further it doth downward tend, The higher up it doth ascend; If it go down to utmost nought, It shall return with that it sought."

Lord, stretch thy tent in my strait breast; Enlarge it downward, that sure rest May there be pight for that pure fire _pitched._ Wherewith thou wontest to inspire All self-dead souls: my life is gone; Sad solitude's my irksome won; _dwelling._ Cut off from men and all this world, In Lethe's lonesome ditch I'm hurled; Nor might nor sight doth ought me move, Nor do I care to be above.

O feeble rays of mental light, That best be seen in this dark night, What are you? What is any strength If it be not laid in one length With pride or love? I nought desire But a new life, or quite to expire.

Could I demolish with mine eye Strong towers, stop the fleet stars in sky, Bring down to earth the pale-faced moon, Or turn black midnight to bright noon; Though all things were put in my hand-- As parched, as dry as the Libyan sand Would be my life, if charity Were wanting. But humility Is more than my poor soul durst crave That lies entombed in lowly grave; But if 'twere lawful up to send My voice to heaven, this should it rend: "Lord, thrust me deeper into dust, That thou may'st raise me with the just."

There are strange things and worth pondering in all these. An occasional cla.s.sical allusion seems to us quite out of place, but such things we must pa.s.s. The poems are quite different from any we have had before.

There has been only a few of such writers in our nation, but I suspect those have had a good deal more influence upon the religious life of it than many thinkers suppose. They are in closest sympathy with the deeper forms of truth employed by St. Paul and St. John. This last poem, concerning humility as the house in which charity dwells, is very truth.

A repentant sinner feels that he is making himself little when he prays to be made humble: the Christian philosopher sees such a glory and spiritual wealth in humility that it appears to him almost too much to pray for.

The very essence of these mystical writers seems to me to be poetry. They use the largest figures for the largest spiritual ideas--_light_ for _good, darkness_ for _evil_. Such symbols are the true bodies of the true ideas. For this service mainly what we term _nature_ was called into being, namely, to furnish forms for truths, for without form truth cannot be uttered. Having found their symbols, these writers next proceed to use them logically; and here begins the peculiar danger. When the logic leaves the poetry behind, it grows first presumptuous, then hard, then narrow and untrue to the original breadth of the symbol; the glory of the symbol vanishes; and the final result is a worship of the symbol, which has withered into an apple of Sodom. Witness some of the writings of the European master of the order--Swedenborg: the highest of them are rich in truth; the lowest are poverty-stricken indeed.

In 1615 was born Richard Baxter, one of the purest and wisest and devoutest of men--and no mean poet either. If ever a man sought between contending parties to do his duty, siding with each as each appeared right, opposing each as each appeared wrong, surely that man was Baxter.

Hence he fared as all men too wise to be partisans must fare--he pleased neither Royalists nor Puritans. Dull of heart and sadly unlike a mother was the Church when, by the Act of Uniformity of Charles II., she drove from her bosom such a son, with his two thousand brethren of the clergy!

He has left us a good deal of verse--too much, perhaps, if we consider the length of the poems and the value of condensation. There is in many of them a delightful fervour of the simplest love to G.o.d, uttered with a plain half poetic, half logical strength, from which sometimes the poetry breaks out clear and fine. Much that he writes is of death, from the dread of which he evidently suffered--a good thing when it drives a man to renew his confidence in his Saviour's presence. It has with him a very different origin from the vulgar fancy that to talk about death is religious. It was refuge from the fear of death he sought, and that is the part of every man who would not be a slave. The _door of death_ of which he so often speaks is to him a door out of the fear of death.

The poem from which the following excerpt is made was evidently written in view of some imminent suffering for conscience-sake, probably when the Act of Uniformity was pa.s.sed: twenty years after, he was imprisoned at the age of sixty-seven, and lay nearly a year and a half.--I omit many verses.

THE RESOLUTION.

It's no great matter what men deem, Whether they count me good or bad: In their applause and best esteem, There's no contentment to be had.

Thy steps, Lord, in this dirt I see; And lest my soul from G.o.d should stray, I'll bear my cross and follow thee: Let others choose the fairer way.

My face is meeter for the spit; I am more suitable to shame, And to the taunts of scornful wit: It's no great matter for my name.

My Lord hath taught me how to want A place wherein to put my head: While he is mine, I'll be content To beg or lack my daily bread.

Must I forsake the soil and air Where first I drew my vital breath?

That way may be as near and fair: Thence I may come to thee by death.

All countries are my Father's lands; Thy sun, thy love, doth shine on all; We may in all lift up pure hands, And with acceptance on thee call.

What if in prison I must dwell?

May I not there converse with thee?

Save me from sin, thy wrath, and h.e.l.l, Call me thy child, and I am free.

No walls or bars can keep thee out; None can confine a holy soul; The streets of heaven it walks about; None can its liberty control.

This flesh hath drawn my soul to sin: If it must smart, thy will be done!

O fill me with thy joys within, And then I'll let it grieve alone.

Frail, sinful flesh is loath to die; Sense to the unseen world is strange; The doubting soul dreads the Most High, And trembleth at so great a change.

O let me not be strange at home, Strange to the sun and life of souls, Choosing this low and darkened room, Familiar with worms and moles!

Am I the first that go this way?

How many saints are gone before!

How many enter every day Into thy kingdom by this door!

Christ was once dead, and in a grave; Yet conquered death, and rose again; And by this method he will save His servants that with him shall reign.

The strangeness will be quickly over, When once the heaven-born soul is there: One sight of G.o.d will it recover From all this backwardness and fear.

To us, Christ's lowest parts, his feet, Union and faith must yet suffice To guide and comfort us: it's meet We trust our head who hath our eyes.

We see here that faith in the Lord leads Richard Baxter to the same conclusions immediately to which his faithful philosophy led Henry More.

There is much in Baxter's poems that I would gladly quote, but must leave with regret. Here is a curious, skilful, and, in a homely way, poetic ballad, embodying a good parable. I give only a few of the stanzas.

THE RETURN.

Who was it that I left behind When I went last from home, That now I all disordered find When to myself I come?

I left it light, but now all's dark, And I am fain to grope: Were it not for one little spark I should be out of hope.

My Gospel-book I open left, Where I the promise saw; But now I doubt it's lost by theft: I find none but the Law.

The stormy rain an entrance hath Through the uncovered top: How should I rest when showers of wrath Upon my conscience drop?

I locked my jewel in my chest; I'll search lest that be gone:-- If this one guest had quit my breast, I had been quite undone.

My treacherous Flesh had played its part, And opened Sin the door; And they have spoiled and robbed my heart, And left it sad and poor.

Yet have I one great trusty friend That will procure my peace, And all this loss and ruin mend, And purchase my release.

The bellows I'll yet take in hand, Till this small spark shall flame: Love shall my heart and tongue command To praise G.o.d's holy name.

I'll mend the roof; I'll watch the door, And better keep the key; I'll trust my treacherous flesh no more, But force it to obey.

What have I said? That I'll do this That am so false and weak, And have so often done amiss, And did my covenants break?

I mean, Lord--all this shall be done If thou my heart wilt raise; And as the work must be thine own, So also shall the praise.

The allegory is so good that one is absolutely sorry when it breaks down, and the poem says in plain words that which is the subject of the figures, bringing truths unmasked into the midst of the maskers who represent truths--thus interrupting the pleasure of the artistic sense in the transparent illusion.

The command of metrical form in Baxter is somewhat remarkable. He has not much melody, but he keeps good time in a variety of measures.

CHAPTER XVII.

CRASHAW AND MARVELL.

I come now to one of the loveliest of our angel-birds, Richard Crashaw.

Indeed he was like a bird in more senses than one; for he belongs to that cla.s.s of men who seem hardly ever to get foot-hold of this world, but are ever floating in the upper air of it.

What I said of a peculiar aeolian word-music in William Drummond applies with equal truth to Crashaw; while of our own poets, somehow or other, he reminds me of Sh.e.l.ley, in the silvery shine and bell-like melody both of his verse and his imagery; and in one of his poems, _Music's Duel_, the fineness of his phrase reminds me of Keats. But I must not forget that it is only with his sacred, his best poems too, that I am now concerned.

The date of his birth is not known with certainty, but it is judged about 1616, the year of Shakspere's death. He was the son of a Protestant clergyman zealous even to controversy. By a not unnatural reaction Crashaw, by that time, it is said, a popular preacher, when expelled from Oxford in 1644 by the Puritan Parliament because of his refusal to sign their Covenant, became a Roman Catholic. He died about the age of thirty-four, a canon of the Church of Loretto. There is much in his verses of that sentimentalism which, I have already said in speaking of Southwell, is rife in modern Catholic poetry. I will give from Crashaw a specimen of the kind of it. Avoiding a more sacred object, one stanza from a poem of thirty-one, most musical, and full of lovely speech concerning the tears of Mary Magdalen, will suit my purpose.