JOSEPH ADDISON. I turn to the accomplished Joseph Addison. 277 He was born in 1672. His religious poems are so well known, and are for the greater part so ordinary in everything but their simplicity of composition, that I should hardly have cared to choose one, had it not been that we owe him much gratitude for what he did, in the reigns of Anne and George I., to purify the moral taste of the English people at a time when the influence of the clergy was not for elevation, and to teach the love of a higher literature when Milton was little known and less esteemed. Especially are we indebted to him for his modest and admirable criticism of the Paradise Lost in the Spectator. Of those few poems to which I have referred, I choose the best known, because it is the best. It has to me a charm for which I can hardly account. Yet I imagine I see in it a sign of the poetic times: a flatness of spirit, arising from the evanishment of the mystical element, begins to result in a worship of power. Neither power nor wisdom, though infinite both, could constitute a God worthy of the worship of a human soul; and the worship of such a God must sink to the level of that fancied divinity. Small wonder is it then that the lyric should now droop its wings and moult the feathers of its praise. I do not say that God's more glorious attributes are already forgotten, but that the tendency of the Christian lyric is now to laudation of power-and knowledge, a form of the same-as the essential of Godhead. This indicates no recalling of metaphysical questions, such as we have met in foregoing verse, but a decline towards system; a rising passion-if anything so cold may be called a passion-for the reduction of all things to the forms of the understanding, a declension which has prepared the way for the present worship of science, and its refusal, if not denial, of all that cannot be proved in forms of the intellect. The hymn which has led to these remarks is still good, although, like the loveliness of the red and lowering west, it gives sign of a gray and cheerless dawn, under whose dreariness the child will first doubt if his father loves him, and next doubt if he has a father at all, and is not a mere foundling that Nature has lifted from her path. The spacious firmament on high, And spangled heavens, a shining frame, Their great Original proclaim. The unwearied sun from day to day Does his Creator's power display; And publishes to every land The work of an almighty hand. Soon as the evening shades prevail, The moon takes up the wondrous tale; Repeats the story of her birth; Whilst all the stars that round her burn, Confirm the tidings as they roll, And spread the truth from pole to pole. What though in solemn silence all REVELATION IN NATURE. 279 In reason's ear they all rejoice, "The hand that made us is divine." The very use of the words spangled and frame seems to my fancy only, it may be-to indicate a tendency towards the unworthy and theatrical. Yet the second stanza is lovely beyond a doubt; and the whole is most artistic, although after a tame fashion. Whether indeed the heavenly bodies teach what he says, or whether we should read divinity worthy of the name in them at all, without the human revelation which healed men, I doubt much. That divinity is there- Yes; that we could read it there without having seen the face of the Son of Man first, I think -No. I do not therefore dare imagine that no revelation dimly leading towards such result glimmered in the hearts of God's chosen amongst Jews and Gentiles before he came. What I say is, that power and order, although of God, and preparing the way for him, are not his revealers unto men. No doubt King David compares the perfection of God's law to the glory of the heavens, but he did not learn that perfection from the heavens, but from the law itself, revealed in his own heart through the life-teaching of God. When he had learned it he saw that the heavens were like it. To unveil God, only manhood like our own will serve. And he has taken the form of man that he might reveal the manhood in him from awful eternity. CHAPTER XIX. THE PLAIN. BUT Addison's tameness is wonderfully lovely beside the fervours of a man of honoured name,— Dr. Isaac Watts, born in 1674. The result must be dreadful where fervour will poetize without the aidful restraints of art and modesty. If any man would look upon absurdity in the garb of sobriety, let him search Dryden's Annus Mirabilis: Dr. Watts's Lyrics are as bad; they are fantastic to utter folly. An admiration of "the incomparable Mr. Cowley" did the sense of them more injury than the imitation of his rough-cantering ode could do their rhythm. The sentimentalities of Roman Catholic writers towards our Lord and his mother, are not half so offensive as the courtier-like flatteries Dr. Watts offers to the Most High. To say nothing of the irreverence, the vulgarity is offensive. He affords another instance amongst thousands how little the form in which feeling is expressed has to do with the feeling itself. In him the thought is true, the form of its utterance false; the feeling lovely, the word, often to a degree, repulsive. The ugly web is DR. WATTS: HAPPY FRAILTY. 281 crossed now and then by a fine line, and even damasked with an occasional good poem: I have found two, and only two, in the whole of his seventy-five Lyrics sacred to Devotion. His objectivity and boldness of thought, and his freedom of utterance, cause us ever and anon to lament that he had not the humility and faith of an artist as well as of a Christian. Almost all his symbols indicate a worship of power and of outward show. I give the best of the two good poems I have mentioned, and very good it is. HAPPY FRAILTY. "How meanly dwells the immortal mind! How vile these bodies are! Why was a clod of earth designed To enclose a heavenly star? "Weak cottage where our souls reside! This flesh a tottering wall! With frightful breaches gaping wide, The building bends to fall. "All round it storms of trouble blow, And waves of sorrow roll; Cold waves and winter storms beat through, "Alas, how frail our state!" said I, And thus went mourning on; Till sudden from the cleaving sky A gleam of glory shone. My soul all felt the glory come, And breathed her native air ; Then she remembered heaven her home, |