above;-all of which graces enter as essential ingredients into the sanctification of the gospel."-Serm. V. The Judgment of Men compared with the Judgment of God. "Before we conclude, we shall just advert to another sense, in which the Mediator between God and man may be affirmed to have laid his hand upon them both :He fills up that mysterious interval which lies between every corporeal being, and the God who is a spirit and is invisible. : "No man hath seen God at any time,and the power which is unseen is terrible. Fancy trembles before its own picture, and superstition throws its darkest imagery over it. The voice of the thunder is awful, but not so awful as the conception of that angry Being who sits in mysterious concealment, and gives it all its energy. In these sketches of the imagination, fear is sure to predominate. We gather an impression of Nature's God, from those scenes where Nature threatens, and looks dreadful. We speak not of the theology of the schools, and the empty parade of its demonstrations.We speak of the theology of actual feeling, --that theology which is sure to derive its lessons from the quarter whence the human heart derives its strongest sensations,-and we refer both to your own feelings, and to the history of this world's opinions, if God is more felt or more present to your imaginations in the peacefulness of spring, or the loveliness of a summer landscape, than when winter with its mighty elements sweeps the forest of its leaves,-when the rushing of the storm is heard upon our windows, and man flees to cover himself from the desolation that walketh over the surface of the world. "If nature and her elements be dreadful, how dreadful that mysterious and unseen Being, who sits behind the elements he has formed, and gives birth and movement to all things! It is the mystery in which he is shrouded, it is that dark and unknown region of spirits, where he reigns in glory, and stands revealed to the immediate view of his worshippers, it is the inexplicable manner of his being so far removed from that province of sense, within which the understanding of man can expatiate,-it is its total unlikeness to all that nature can. furnish to the eye of the body, or to the conception of the mind which animates it, it is all this which throws the Being who formed us at a distance so inaccessible, which throws an impenetrable mantle over his way, and gives us the idea of some dark and untrodden interval betwixt the glory of God, and all that is visible and created. "Now, Jesus Christ has lifted up this mysterious veil, or rather he has entered within it. He is now at the right hand of God; and though the brightness of his Father's glory, and the express image of his person, he appeared to us in the palpable characters of a man; and those high attributes of truth, and justice, and mercy, which could not be felt or understood, as they existed in the abstract and invisible Deity, are brought down to our conceptions in a manner the most familiar and impressive, by having been made, through Jesus Christ, to flow in utterance from human lips, and to beam in expressive physiognomy from a human countenance. "So long as I had nothing before me but the unseen Spirit of God, my mind wandered in uncertainty, my busy fancy was free to expatiate, and its images filled heart with disquietude and terror. But my in the life, and person, and history of Jesus Christ, the attributes of the Deity are brought down to the observation of the senses; and I can no longer mistake them, when in the Son, who is the express image of his Father, I see them carried home to pression of human organs,-when I see the my understanding by the evidence and exkindness of the Father, in the tears which fell from the Son at the tomb of Lazaruswhen I see his justice blended with his mercy, in the exclamation, "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem," by Jesus Christ; uttered with human bosom ever prompted, while he be a tone more tender than the sympathy of wailed the sentence of its desolation,-and he threw upon Peter, I feel the judgment in the look of energy and significance which of God himself, flashing conviction upon my conscience, and calling me to repent while his wrath is suspended, and he still waiteth to be gracious. "And it was not a temporary character which he assumed. The human kindness, and the human expression which makes it intelligible to us, remained with him till his latest hour. They survived his resurrection, and he has carried them along with. him to the mysterious place which he now occupies. How do I know all this? I know it from his history,-I hear it in the parting words to his mother from the cross, I see it in his unaltered form when he rose triumphant from the grave,-I perceive it in his tenderness for the scruples of the unbelieving Thomas,-and I am given to understand, that as his body retained the impression of his own sufferings, so his mind retains a sympathy for ours, as warm, and gracious, and endearing, as ever. We have a Priest on high, who is touched with a fellow feeling of our infirmities. My soul, unable to support itself in its aërial flight among the spirits of the invisible, now reposes on Christ, who stands revealed to my conceptions in the figure, the counte nance, the heart, the sympathies of a man. He has entered within that veil which hung over the glories of the Eternal,-and the mysterious inaccessible throne of God is divested of all its terrors, when I think that a friend who bears the form of the species, and knows its infirmities, is there to plead for me."-Serm. VI. The necessity of a Media tor between God and Man. TALES OF THE HALL; BY THE REV. GEORGE CRABBE.* BURNS, Wordsworth, and Crabbe, are * Murray, London. 1819. who has seen deeper into the constitu→ But though we have thus classed these three great poets together, as the poets of human nature, who, in modern times, have thought nothing that belongs to human nature in our country unworthy of their regard, nothing surely can be more different than the views they take of its forms and shews, as well as the moods and emotions which the contemplation of all these awakens in their hearts. Each is in strength a king-but the boundaries of their kingdoms are marked by clear lines of light-and they have achieved their greatest conquests without the invasion of each other's territory. Burns is by far the greatest poet that ever sprung from the bosom of the People, and lived and died in a lowly condition of life. Indeed no country in the world, but Scotland, could have produced such a manand Burns will, through all posterity, be an object of intense and delighted interest, as the glorious representative of the national and intellectual character of his country. He was born a poet, if ever man was, and to his native genius alone is owing the perpetuity of his fame. For he manifestly never studied poetry as an art, nor reasoned on its principles-nor looked abroad, with the wide ken of intellect, for objects and subjects on which to pour out his inspiration. The condition of Two volumes 8vo. £1,4s. the peasantry of Scotland-the happiest, perhaps, that Providence ever allowed to the children of labour-was not surveyed and speculated on by Burns as the field of poetry, but as the field of his own existence; and he chronicled the events that passed there, not as food for his imagination as a poet, but as food for his heart as a man. Hence, when genius impelled him to write poetry, poetry came gushing freshly up from the well of his human affections-and he had nothing more to do, than to pour it, like streams irrigating a meadow, in many a cheerful tide over the drooping flowers and fading verdure of life. Imbued with vivid perceptions, warm feelings, and strong passions, he sent his existence into that of all things, animate and inanimate, around him; and not an occurrence in hamlet, village, or town, affecting in any way the happiness of the human heart, but roused as keen an interest in the soul of Burns, and as genial sympathy, as if it had immediately concerned himself and his own welfare. Other poets of moral life have looked on it through the aerial veil of imagination-often beautified, no doubt, by such partial concealment, and beaming with a misty softness more touching and more delicate than the truth. But Burns could not fancy where he had felt felt so poignantly all the agonies and all the transports of life. He looked around him and when he saw the smoke of the cottage rising up quietly and unbroken to heaven, he knew, for he had seen and blessed it, the quiet joy and unbroken contentment that slept below; and when he saw it driven and dispersed by the winds, he knew also but too well, for too sorely had he felt them, those agitations and disturbances which had shook him till he wept on the bed of toil and of misery. In reading his poetry, therefore, we feel what unsubstantial dreams are all those of the golden age. But bliss beams upon us with a more subduing brightness through the dim melancholy that shrouds lowly life; and when the Peasant Burns rises up in his might as Burns the poet, and is seen to derive all that might from the life which at this hour the noble peasantry of Scotland are leading, do not our hearts leap within us, because that such is our country, and such the nobility of her children. There is no delusion-no affectation-no exaggeration-no falsehood in the spirit of Burns' poetry. He rejoices like an untamed enthusiast-and he weeps like a prostrate penitent. In joy and in grief the whole man appears-his finest poetry was poured out before he had left the fields of his infancy, and when he scarcely hoped for other auditors but his own heart, and the simple dwellers of the hamlet. He wrote not to please or surprise others, but in his own delight; and even after he discovered the power of his talent to kindle the sparks of nature wherever they slumbered, the effect to be produced seems never to have been considered by him,-informed, as he was, by the spirit within him, that his poetry was sure to produce that passion in the hearts of other men from which it boiled over in his own. Whatever, therefore, be the faults, or defects, or deficiences, of the poetry of Burns-and no doubt it has many-it has, beyond all the poetry that ever was written, this greatest of all merits intense, passionate, life-pervading, and life-breathing truth. Wordsworth, on the other hand, is a man of high intellect and profound sensibility, meditating in solitude on the phenomena of human nature. He sometimes seems to our imagination like a man contemplating from the shore the terrors of the sea, not surely with apathy, but with a solemn and almost unimpassioned sense of the awful mysteries of Providence. This seeming self-abstraction from the turmoil of life gives to his highest poetry a still and religious character that is truly sublime-though, at the same time, it often leads to a sort of mysticism, and carries the poet out of those sympathies which are engendered in human hearts by a sense of our common imperfections. Perhaps it would not be wrong to say, that his creed is sometimes too austere, and that it deals, almost unmercifully, with misguided sensibilities and perverted passions. Such, at least, is a feeling that occasionally steals upon us from the loftiest passages of the Excursion, in which the poet, desirous of soaring to heaven, forgets that he is a frail child of earth, and would in vain free his human nature from those essential passions, which, in the pride of intellect, he seems unduly to despise! But the sentiment which we have now very imperfectly expressed, refers The natural disposition of his mind inclines him to dwell rather on the mild, gentle, and benignant affections, than on the more agitating passions. Indeed, in almost all cases, the passions of his agents subside into affections -and a feeling of tranquillity and repose is breathed from his saddest pictures of human sorrow. It seems to be part of his creed, that neither vice nor misery should be allowed in the representations of the poet, to stand prominently and permanently forward, and that poetry should give a true but a beautiful reflection of life. Certain it is, that of all the poets of this age, or perhaps any age, Wordsworth holds the most cheering and consolatory faith-and that we at all times rise from his poetry, not only with an abatement of those fears and perplexities which the dark aspect of the world often flings over our hearts, but almost with a scorn of the impotence of grief, and certainly with a confiding trust in the perfect goodness of the Deity. We would appeal, for the truth of these remarks, to all who have studied the Two Books of the Excursion, entitled, The Church-Yard among the Mountains. There, in narrating the history of the humble dead, Wordsworth does not fear to speak of their frailties, their errors, and their woes. It is indeed beautifully characteristic of the benignant wisdom of VOL. V. the man, that when he undertakes the task of laying open the hearts of his fellow mortals, he prefers the dead to the living, because he is willing that erring humanity should enjoy the privilege of the grave, and that his own soul should be filled with that charity which is breathed from the silence of the house of God. It is needless to say with what profound pathos the poet speaks of life thus surrounded with the images of death-how more beautiful beauty rises from the gravehow more quietly innocence seems there to slumber-and how awful is the rest of guilt. General and indeed vague as is this account of the genius of Wordsworth, perhaps it may serve, by the power of contrast, to bring into more prominent view the peculiar genius of Crabbe. He delights to look over society with a keen, scrutinising, and somewhat stern eye, as if resolved that the human heart should not be suffered to conceal one single secret from his inquisitorial authority. He has evidently an intense satisfaction in moral anatomy; and in the course of his dissections, he lays bare, with an unshrinking hand, the very arteries of the heart. It will, we believe, be found, that he has always a humane purpose,-though conscious of our own frailties, as we all are, we cannot help sometimes accusing him of unrelenting severity. When he finds a wound, he never fails to probe it to the bottom. Of all men of this age, he is the best portrait-painter. He is never contented with a single flowing sketch of a character-they must all be drawn full-length-to the very life-and with all their most minute and characteristic features even of dress and manners. He seems to have known them all personally; and when he describes them, he does so as if he thought that he would be guilty of a kind of falsehood, in omitting the description of a single peculiarity. Accordingly, to make the picture in all things a perfect likeness, he very often enters into details that weary, nay, even disgust-and not unfrequently a character is forced, obtruded as it were, on our acquaintance, of whose disagreeable existence we were before happily ignorant. His observation of men and manners has been so extensive and so minute, that his power of raising up 30 living characters is wholly without limitation; and Mr Crabbe has thrown open a gallery, in which single portraits and groupes of figures follow each other in endless procession, habited in all the varieties of dress that distinguish the professions, orders, and occupations of the whole of human society. Perhaps the very highest poetical enthusiasm is not compatible with such exquisite acuteness of discernment, or if it be, the continual exercise of that faculty must at least serve to abate it. Accordingly, the views which Mr Crabbe does in general take of human life, are not of a very lofty kind; and he rarely, if ever, either in principle or feeling, exhibits the idealism of nature. Accustomed thus to look on men as they exist and act, he not only does not fear, but he absolutely loves to view their vices and their miseries; and hence has his poetry been accused, and perhaps with some reason, of giving too dark a picture of life. But, at the same time, we must remember, what those haunts of life are into which his spirit has wandered. Throughout a great part of his poetry, he has chosen to describe certain kinds of society and people, of which no other poet we know could have made any thing at all. The power is almost miraculous with which he has stirred up human nature from its very dregs, and shewn working in them the common spirit of humanity. Human life becomes more various and wonderful in his hands, pregnant with passion as it seems to be, throughout the lowest debasement of profligacy and ignorance. He lays before us scenes and characters from which in real life we would turn our eyes with intolerant disgust; and yet he forces us to own, that on such scenes and by such characters much the same kind of part is played that ourselves, and others like us, play on another stage. He leaves it to other poets to carry us into the company of shepherds and dalesmen, in the heart of pastoral peace; and sets us down in crowds of fierce and sullen men, contending against each other, in lawful or in lawless life, with all the energies of exasperated passion. Mr Hazlitt, in his Lectures on English Poets, has said, that in Crabbe we find the still life of tragedy. To us it appears, on the other hand, that till Crabbe wrote, we knew not what direful tragedies are for ever steeping in tears or in blood the footsteps of the humblest of our race; and that he has opened, as it were, a theatre on which the homely actors that pass before us assume no disguise-on which every catastrophe borrows its terror from truth, and every scene seems shifted by the very hands of nature. In all the poetry of this extraordinary man, we see a constant display of the passions as they are excited and exacerbated by the customs, and laws, and institutions of society. Love, anger, hatred, melancholy, despair, and remorse, in all their infinite modifications, as exhibited by different natures and under different circumstances, are rife throughout all his works; and a perpetual conflict is seen carried on among all the feelings and principles of our nature, that can render that nature happy or miserable. We see love breaking through in desperation, but never with impunity, the barriers of human laws; or in hopelessness dying beneath them, with or without its victim. The stream of life flows over a rugged and precipitous channel in the poetry of Crabbe, and we are rarely indeed allowed to sail down it in a reverie or a dream. The pleasure he excites is almost always a troubled pleasure, and accompanied with tears and sighs, or with the profounder agitation of a sorrow that springs out of the conviction forced upon us of the most imperfect nature, and therefore the most imperfect happiness of man. Now, if all this were done in the mere pride of genius and power, we should look on Mr Crabbe in any other light than as the benefactor of his species. But in the midst of all his skill-all his art -we see often-indeed always-the tenderness of the man's heart; and we hear him, with a broken and melancholy voice, mourning over the woe and wickedness whose picture he has so faithfully drawn. Never in any one instance (and he claims this most boldly in his preface) has he sought to veil or to varnish vice-to confuse our notions of right and wrong-to depreciate moral worth, or exaggerate the value of worldly accomplishments-to cheat us out of our highest sympathies due to defeated or victorious virtue, or to induce us, in blindfolded folly, to bestow them on splendid guilt and dazzling crime. It is his to read aloud to us the records of our own hearts |