Leading Articles on Various Subjects Part 12

{1} _Ismeer, or Smyrna and its British Hospital in 1855._ By a Lady. London: James Madder, 8, Leadenhall Street.

THE POETS OF THE CHURCH.

It is not uninteresting to mark the rise and progress of certain branches of poetry and the _belles lettres_ in their connection with sects and Churches. They form tests by which at least the taste and literary standing of these bodies can be determined; and the degree of success with which they are cultivated within the same Church, in different ages, throws at times very striking lights on its condition and history. One wholly unacquainted with the recorded annals of the Church of Scotland might safely infer, from its literature alone, that it fared much more hardly in the seventeenth century, during which the literature of England rose to its highest pitch of grandeur, than in the previous sixteenth, in which its Knoxes, Buchanans, and Andrew Melvilles flourished; and further, that its eighteenth century was, on the whole, a quiet and tranquil time, in which even mediocrity had leisure afforded it to develope itself in its full proportions. Literature is not the proper business of Churches; but it is a means, though not an end. And it will be found that all the better Churches have been as literary as they could; and that, if at any time the literature has been defective, it has been rather their circ.u.mstances that were unpropitious, than themselves that were in fault. Their enemies have delighted to represent the case differently. Our readers must remember the famous instance in _Old Mortality_, so happily exposed by the elder M'Crie, in which Sir Walter, when he makes his Sergeant Bothwell a writer of verses, introduces Burley as peculiarly a verse-hater, and 'puts into his mouth that condemnation of elegant pursuits which he imputes to the whole party;' 'overlooking or suppressing the fact,' says the Doctor, 'that there was at that very time in the camp of the Covenanters a man who, besides his other accomplishments, was a poet superior to any on the opposite side.' It is equally a fact, however, and shows how thoroughly the mind of even a highly intellectual people may be prostrated by a long course of tyranny and persecution, that Scotland had properly no literature after the extinction of its old cla.s.sical school in the person of Drummond of Hawthornden, until the rise of Thomson. The age in England of Milton and of Cowley, of Otway, of Waller, of Butler, of Dryden, and of Denham, was in Scotland an age without a poet vigorous enough to survive in his writings his own generation. For even the greater part of the popular version of its Psalms, our Church was indebted to the English lawyer Rous. Here and there we may find in it the remains of an earlier and more cla.s.sical time: its version of the hundredth Psalm, for instance, with its quaintly-turned but stately octo-syllabic stanzas, was written nearly a hundred years earlier than most of the others, by William Keith, a Scottish contemporary of Beza and Buchanan, and one of the translators of the Geneva Bible. But we find little else that is Scotch in it; the Church to which, in the previous age, the author of the most elegant version of the Psalms ever given to the world had belonged, had now--notwithstanding the exertions of its Zachary Boyds--to import its poetry. In the following century, the Church shared in the general literature of the time. She missed, and but barely missed, having one of its greatest poets to herself--the poet Thomson--who at least carried on his studies so far with a view to her ministry, as to commence delivering his probationary discourses. We fear, however, he would have made but an indolent minister; and that, though his occasional sermons, judging from the hymn which concludes the _Seasons_, might have been singularly fine ones, they would have been marvellously few, and very often repeated. The greatest poet that did actually arise within the Church during the century was Thomson's contemporary, Robert Blair,--a man who was not an idle minister, and who, unlike his cousin Hugh, belonged to the evangelical side. The author of the _Grave_ was one of the bosom friends of Colonel Gardiner, and a valued correspondent of Doddridge and Watts.

Curiously enough, though the great merit of his piece has been acknowledged by critics such as Southey, it has been regarded as an imitation of the _Night Thoughts_ of Young. 'Blair's _Grave_,' says Southey in his _Life of Cowper_, 'is the only poem I can call to mind which has been composed in imitation of the _Night Thoughts_;' and though Campbell himself steered clear of the error, we find it introduced in a note, as supplementary to the information regarding Blair given in his _Essay on English Poetry_ by his editor, Mr. Cunningham. It is demonstrable, however, that the Scotchman could not have been the imitator. As shown by a letter in the Doddridge collection, which bears date more than a twelvemonth previous to that of the publication of even the first book of the _Night Thoughts_, Blair, after stating that his poem, then in the hands of Isaac Watts, had been offered without success to two London publishers, states further, that the greater part of it had been written previous to the year 1731, ere he had yet entered the ministry; whereas the first book of Young's poem was not published until the year 1744. Poetry such as that of Blair is never the result of imitation: its verbal happinesses are at least as great as those of the _Night Thoughts_ themselves, and its power and earnestness considerably greater. 'The eighteenth century,' says Thomas Campbell, 'has produced few specimens of blank verse of so powerful and simple a character as that of the _Grave_. It is a popular poem, not merely because it is religious, but because its language and imagery are free, natural, and picturesque. The latest editor of the poets has, with singularly bad taste, noted some of the author's most nervous and expressive phrases as vulgarisms, among which he reckons that of friendship, the "solder of society." Blair may be a homely, and even a gloomy poet, in the eye of fastidious criticism; but there is a masculine and p.r.o.nounced character even in his gloom and homeliness, that keeps it most distinctly apart from either dulness or vulgarity. His style pleases us like the powerful expression of a countenance without regular beauty.' Such is the judgment on Blair--destined, in all appearance, to be a final one--of a writer who was at once the most catholic of critics and the most polished of poets. There succeeded to the author of the _Grave_, a group of poets of the Church, of whom the Church has not been greatly in the habit of boasting. Of Home, by a curious chance the successor of Blair in his parish, little need be said. He produced one good play and five enormously bad ones; and his connection with the Church was very much an accident, and soon dissolved.

Blacklock, too, was as much a curiosity as a poet; and, save for his blindness, would scarce have been very celebrated in even his own day.

Nor was Ogilvie, though more favourably regarded by Johnson than most of his Scottish contemporaries, other than a mediocre poet. He is the author, however, of a very respectable paraphrase--the sixty-second--of all his works the one that promises to live longest; and we find the productions of several other poets of the Church similarly preserved, whose other writings have died. And yet the group of Scottish _literati_ that produced our paraphrases, if looking simply to literary accomplishment--we do not demand genius--must be regarded as a very remarkable one, when we consider that the greater number of the individuals which composed it were all at one time the ministers of a single Church, and that one of the smallest. We know of no Church, either in Britain or elsewhere, that could now command such a committee as that which sat, at the bidding of the General a.s.sembly, considerably more than sixty years ago, to prepare the 'Translations and Paraphrases.' Of the sixty-eight pieces of which the collection is composed, thirty are the work of Scottish ministers; and the groundwork of most of the others, furnished in large part by the previously existing writings of Watts and Doddridge, has been greatly improved, in at least the composition, by the emendations of Morrison and Logan.

With all its faults, we know of no other collection equal to it as a whole. The meretricious stanzas of Brady and Tate are inanity itself in comparison. True, the later Blair, though always sensible, was ofttimes quite heavy enough in the pieces given to him to render--more so than in his prose; though, even when first introduced to that, Cowper could exclaim, not a little to the chagrin of those who regarded it as perfection of writing: 'Oh, the sterility of that man's fancy! if, indeed, he has any such faculty belonging to him. Dr. Blair has such a brain as Shakespeare somewhere describes, "dry as the remainder biscuit after a voyage.'" But the fancy that Blair wanted, poor Logan had; and the man who too severely criticises his flowing and elegant paraphrases would do well to beware of the memories of his children. A poet whose pieces cannot be forgotten may laugh at the critics. Altogether, our 'Translations and Paraphrases' are highly creditable to the literary taste and ability of the Church during the latter half of the last century; and it serves to show how very much matters changed in this respect in about forty years, that while in the earlier period the men fitted for such work were all to be found within the pale of the Church's ministry, at a later time, when the late Princ.i.p.al Baird set himself, with the sanction of the General a.s.sembly, to devise means for adding to the collection, and for revising our metrical version of the Psalms, he had to look for a.s.sistance almost exclusively to poets outside the precincts of even its membership.

And yet, even at this later time, the Church had its true poets--poets who, though, according to Wordsworth, they 'wanted the accomplishment of verse,' were of larger calibre and greater depth than their predecessors. Chalmers had already produced his _Astronomical Discourses_, and poor Edward Irving had begun to electrify his London audiences with the richly antique imagination and fiery fervour of his singularly vigorous orations. Stewart of Cromarty, too, though but comparatively little known, was rising, in his quiet parish church, into flights of genuine though unmeasured poetry, of an alt.i.tude to which minor poets, in their nicely rounded stanzas, never attain. Nor is the race yet extinct. Jeffrey used to remark, that he found more true feeling in the prose of Jeremy Taylor than in the works of all the second-cla.s.s British poets put together; and those who would now wish to acquaint themselves with the higher and more spirit-rousing poetry of our Church, would have to seek it within earshot of the pulpits of Bruce, of Guthrie, and of James Hamilton. Still, however, it ever affords us pleasure to find it in the more conventional form of cla.s.sic and harmonious verse. A Church that possesses her poets gives at least earnest in the fact that she is not falling beneath the literature of her age; and much on this account, but more, we think, from their great intrinsic merit, have we been gratified by the perusal of a volume of poems which has just issued from the press under the name of one of our younger Free Church ministers, the Rev.

James D. Burns. We are greatly mistaken if Mr. Burns be not a genuine poet, skilled, as becomes a scholar and a student of cla.s.sic lore, in giving to his verse the true artistic form, but not the less born to inherit the 'vision and the faculty' which cannot be acquired. Most men of great talent have their poetic age: it is very much restricted, however, to the first five years of full bodily development, also particularly then a sterner and more prosaic mood follows. But recollections of the time survive; and it is mainly through the medium of these recollections that in the colder periods the feelings and visions of the poets continue to be appreciated and felt. It was said of Thomson the poet by Samuel Johnson, that he could not look at two candles burning other than poetically. The phrase was employed in conversation by _old_ Johnson; but it must have been the experience of _young_ Johnson, derived from a time long gone by, that suggested it. It is characteristic of the poetic age, that objects which in later life become commonplace in the mind, are then surrounded as if by a halo of poetic feeling. The candles were, no doubt, an extreme ill.u.s.tration; but there is scarce any object in nature, and there are very few in art, especially if etherealized by the adjuncts of antiquity or a.s.sociation, that are not capable of being thus, as it were, embathed in sentiment. With the true poet, the ability of investing every object with a poetic atmosphere remains undiminished throughout life; and we find it strikingly manifested in the volume before us. In almost every line in some of the pieces we find a distinct bit of picture steeped in poetic feeling. The following piece, peculiarly appropriate to the present time, we adduce as an ill.u.s.tration of our meaning:--

DISCOVERY OF THE NORTH-WEST Pa.s.sAGE.

'Strait of Ill Hope! thy frozen lips at last Unclose, to teach our seamen how to sift A pa.s.sage where blue icebergs clash and drift, And the sh.o.r.e loosely rattles in the blast.

We hold the secret thou hast clench'd so fast For ages,--our best blood has earned the gift.-- Blood spilt, or h.o.a.rded up in patient thrift, Through sunless months in ceaseless peril pa.s.sed.

But what of daring Franklin? who may know The pangs that wrung that heart so proud and brave, In secret wrestling with its deadly woe, And no kind voice to reach him o'er the wave?

Now he sleeps fast beneath his shroud of snow, And the cold pole-star only knows his grave.

'Alone, on some sharp cliff, I see him strain, O'er the white waste, his keen, sagacious eye, Or scan the signs of the snow-m.u.f.fled sky, In hope of quick deliverance--but in vain; Then, faring to his icy tent again, To cheer his mates with a familiar smile, And talk of home and kinsfolk to beguile Slow hours which freeze the blood and numb the brain.

Long let our hero's memory be enshrined In all true British hearts! He calmly stood In danger's foremost rank, nor looked behind.

He did his work, not with the fever'd blood Of battle, but with hard-tried fort.i.tude; In peril dauntless, and in death resigned.

'Despond not, Britain! Should this sacred hold Of freedom, still inviolate, be a.s.sailed, The high, unblenching spirit which prevailed In ancient days, is neither dead nor cold.

Men are still in thee of heroic mould-- Men whom thy grand old sea-kings would have hailed As worthy peers, invulnerably mailed, Because by Duty's sternest law controlled.

Thou yet wilt rise and send abroad thy voice Among the nations battling for the right, In the unrusted armour of thy youth; And the oppressed shall hear it and rejoice: For on thy side is the resistless might Of Freedom, Justice, and Eternal Truth!'

This is surely genuine poetry both in form and matter; as just in its thinking as it is vivid in its imagery and cla.s.sic in its language.

The vein of strong sense which runs through all the poetry of Mr.

Burns, and imparts to it solidity and coherency, is, we think, not less admirable than the poetry itself, and is, we are sure, quite as little common. Let the reader mark how freely the thoughts arise in the following very exquisite little piece, written in Madeira, and suggested by the distant view of the neighbouring island of Porto Santo, one of the first colonized by the Portuguese adventurers of the fifteenth century. Columbus married a daughter of Bartolomeo Perestrillo, the first governor of the island, and after his marriage lived in it for some time with his father-in-law. And on this foundation Mr. Burns founds his poem:--

PORTO SANTO, AS SEEN FROM THE NORTH OF MADEIRA.

'Glance northward through the haze, and mark That shadowy island floating dark Amidst the seas serene: It seems some fair enchanted isle, Like that which saw Miranda's smile When Ariel sang unseen.

'Oh happy, after all their fears, Were those old Lusian mariners Who hailed that land the first, Upon whose seared and aching eyes, With an enrapturing surprise, Its bloom of verdure burst.

'Their anchor in a creek, sh.e.l.l-paven, They dropped,--and hence "The Holy Haven"

They named the welcome land: The breezes strained their masts no more, And all around the sunny sh.o.r.e Was summer, laughing bland.

'They wandered on through green arcade Where fruits were hanging in the shades, And blossoms cl.u.s.tering fair; Strange gorgeous insects shimmered And from the brakes sweet minstrelsy Entranced the woodland air.

'Years pa.s.sed, and to the island came A mariner of unknown name, And grave Castilian speech: The spirit of a great emprise Aroused him, and with flashing eyes He paced the pebbled beach.

'What time the sun was sinking slow, And twilight spread a rosy glow Around its single star, His eye the western sea's expanse Would search, creating by its glance Some cloudy land afar.

'He saw it when translucent even Shed mystic light o'er earth and heaven, Dim shadowed on the deep; His fancy tinged each pa.s.sing cloud With the fine phantom, and he bowed Before it in his sleep.

'He hears grey-bearded sailors tell How the discoveries befell That glorify their time; "And forth I go, my friends," he cries, "To a severer enterprise Than tasked your glorious prime.

'"Time was when these green isles that stud The expanse of this familiar flood, Lived but in fancy fond.

Earth's limits--think you here they are?

Here has the Almighty fixed His bar, Forbidding glance beyond?

'"Each sh.e.l.l is murmuring on the sh.o.r.e, And wild sea-voices evermore Are sounding in my ear: I long to meet the eastern gale, And with a free and stretching sail Through virgin seas to steer.

'"Two galleys trim, some comrades stanch, And I with hopeful heart would launch Upon this sh.o.r.eless sea.

Till I have searched it through and through.

And seen some far land looming blue, My heart will not play free."

'Forth fared he through the deep to rove: For months with angry winds he strove, And pa.s.sions fiercer still; Until he found the long-sought land, And leaped upon the savage strand With an exulting thrill.

'The tide of life now eddies strong Through that broad wilderness, where long The eagle fearless flew; Where forests waved, fair cities rise, And science, art, and enterprise Their restless aim pursue.

'There dwells a people, at whose birth The shout of Freedom shook the earth, Whose frame through all the lands Has travelled, and before whose eyes, Bright with their glorious destinies, A proud career expands.

'I see their life by pa.s.sion wrought To intense endeavour, and my thought Stoops backwards in its reach To him who, in that early time, Resolved his enterprise sublime On Porto Santo's beach.

'Methinks that solitary soul Held in its ark this radiant roll Of human hopes upfurled,-- That there in germ this vigorous life Was sheathed, which now in earnest strife Is working through the world.

'Still on our way, with careworn face, Abstracted eye, and sauntering pace, May pa.s.s one such as he, Whose mind heaves with a secret force, That shall be felt along the course Of far Futurity.

'Call him not fanatic or fool, Thou Stoic of the modern school; Columbus-like, his aim Points forward with a true presage, And nations of a later age May rise to bless his name.'

There runs throughout Mr. Burns's volume a rich vein of scriptural imagery and allusion, and much oriental description--rather quiet, however, than gorgeous--that bears in its unexaggerated sobriety the impress of truth. From a weakness of chest and general delicate health, Mr. Burns has had to spend not a few of his winters abroad, under climatal influences of a more genial character than those of his own country; and hence the truthfulness of his descriptions of scenes which few of our native poets ever see, and a corresponding amount of variety in his verse. But we have exhausted our s.p.a.ce, and have given only very meagre samples of this delightful volume, and a very inadequate judgment on its merits. But we refer our readers to the volume itself, as one well fitted to grow upon their regards; and meanwhile conclude with the following exquisite landscape,--no bad specimen of that ability of word-painting which is ever so certain a mark of the true poet:--

'Below me spread a wide and lonely beach, The ripple washing higher on the sands: A river that has come from far-off lands Is coiled behind in many a shining reach; But now it widens, and its banks are bare-- It settles as it nears the moaning sea; An inward eddy checks the current free, And breathes a briny dampness through the air: Beyond, the waves' low vapours through the skies Were trailing, like a battle's broken rear; But smitten by pursuing winds, they rise, And the blue slopes of a far coast appear, With shadowy peaks on which the sunlight lies, Uplifted in aerial distance clear.

_November 8, 1854._

THE ENCYCLOPaeDIA BRITANNICA.

After the labour of years, the seventh edition of the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ has been at length completed. It is in every respect a great work--great even as a commercial speculation. We have been a.s.sured the money expended on this edition alone would be more than sufficient to build three such monuments as that now in the course of erection in Edinburgh to the memory of Sir Walter Scott. And containing, as it does, all the more valuable matter of former editions--all that the advancing tide of knowledge has not obliterated or covered up, and which at one time must have represented in the commercial point of view a large amount of capital--it must be obvious that, great as the cost of the present edition has been, it bears merely some such relation to the acc.u.mulated cost of the whole, as that borne by the expense of partial renovations and repairs in a vast edifice to the sum originally expended on the entire erection.

It is a great work, too, regarded as a trophy of the united science and literature of Britain. Like a lofty obelisk, raised to mark the spot where some important expedition terminated, it stands as it were to indicate the line at which the march of human knowledge has now arrived. We see it rising on the extreme verge of the boundary which separates the clear and the palpable from the indistinct and the obscure. The explored province of past research, with all its many party-coloured fields, stretches out from it in long perspective on the one hand,--luminous, well-defined, rejoicing in the light. The _terra incognita_ of future discovery lies enveloped in cloud on the other--an untried region of fogs and darkness.

The history of this publication for the last seventy years--for so slow has been its growth, that rather more than seventy years have now elapsed since its first appearance in the world of letters--would serve curiously to ill.u.s.trate the literary and scientific history of Scotland during that period. The naturalist, by observing the rings of annual growth in a tree newly cut down, can not only tell what its exact bulk had been at certain determinate dates in the past--from its first existence as a tiny sapling of a single twelvemonth, till the axe had fallen on the huge circ.u.mference of perchance its hundredth ring--but he can also form from them a shrewd guess of the various characters of the seasons that have pa.s.sed over it. Is the ring of wide development?--it speaks of genial warmth and kindly showers. Is it narrow and contracted?--it tells of scorching droughts or of biting cold. Now the succeeding editions of this great work narrate a somewhat similar story, in a somewhat similar manner. They speak of the growth of science and the arts during the various succeeding periods in which they appeared. The great increase, too, at certain times, in particular departments of knowledge, is curiously connected with peculiar circ.u.mstances in the history of our country. In the present edition, for instance, almost all the geography is new. The age has been peculiarly an age of exploration--a locomotive age: commerce, curiosity, the spirit of adventure, the desire of escaping from the tedium of inactive life,--these, and other motives besides, have scattered travellers by hundreds, during the period of our long European peace, over almost every country of the world. And hence so mighty an increase of knowledge in this department, that what the last age knew of the subject has been altogether overgrown. Vast additions, too, have been made to the province of mechanical contrivance: the constructive faculties of the country, stimulated apparently by the demands of commerce and the influence of compet.i.tion both at home and abroad, have performed in well-nigh a single generation the work of centuries.