CHAPTER VII THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY1 2 'THE Revolution,' remarks Hallam, 'did nothing for poetry. William's reign, always excepting Dryden, is our nadir in works of imagination.' It must have seemed to many as if English poetry had almost died with the death of Dryden in 1701. Yet the very first year as we should commonly reckon it, of the eighteenth century was distinguished by a very notable accession to the treasures of sacred verse. Bishop Ken (1637-1711) first published his Morning, Evening, and Midnight Hymns in 1700, in the seventh edition of his Manual of Prayer for Winchester Scholars. All three are beautiful, but the Midnight Hymn-excluded by its nature from all congregational hymn-books, and therefore not so popularly known-is perhaps the most beautiful of them all. The good bishop himself used daily, immediately upon rising, to sing to his lute his Morning Hymn. He was accustomed, it appears, to adapt the words to his own tunes, for he was skilled in music, and his compositions were grave and solemn. The melody, however, to which the three hymns were originally printed, and which suffered in the course of time corruptions which changed its very structure, was Ravenscroft's version of Tallis's eighth tune. It will be found in the first appendix to the Life of Ken, by a Layman (Lond. 1853). Ken's devotional poems were very numerous. Το make and sing them was his recreation and chief 1 The greater part of this Chapter is a revised reprint of an Essay in the 1st ed. of Abbey and Overton's English Church in the Eighteenth Century. 2 Hallam's Literature of Europe, vol. vi. p. 440. Religious Thought in Old English Verse 309 ་ 2 delight; his anodyne1 in seasons of wearying pain ; his comfort through many a sleepless night. The nightingale warbling in the darkness troubles itself well-nigh as little about what listening men may think of its song, as Ken of the impression which his hymns might leave upon the ears of critics. His poems,' as Keble truly says, ' are not popular, nor probably ever will be. . . The narrative is often cumbrous, and the lyric verse not seldom languid and redundant.' That simpler style, in which all his best verses are written, is constantly interrupted by a strained and artificial diction, in which he imitated Cowley, with none of Cowley's brilliancy. Ken himself was not blind to their faults. More than once he says he was inclined to burn them, and only refrained from doing so in the thought that verses which reflected the glow and raptures of his own soul might kindle other hearts also. There can be no object in quoting from the more prosaic or inharmonious verses which he often wrote. Many, however, of his lines are very beautiful. From Hymns on the Festivals :— God sweetly calls us every day, Why should we then our bliss delay? Why should we love the night? Should we one call but duly heed, It would to joys eternal lead.3 From God's Attributes or Perfections: God's children love all human race The greater love they gain : Saints in whom love is most express'd 1 See his very beautiful verses under the title An Anodyne quoted in Professor Palgrave's Treasury of Sacred Song. 2 Quarterly Review, vol. xxxii. p. 230. 3 Ken's Works, i. 383. The poem from which the stanza is taken has been adapted by Bishop W. Walsham How into an admirable hymn for St. Matthew's Day. 4 Id. ii. 89. From Psyche:- My God, Thou only art Able to know, keep, rule the heart; Which I myself to keep despair. No rebels then will garrison my breast, Beneath Almighty wings my heart will live at rest` Ken thus expresses his idea of a Christian pastor, in the first lines of his poem under that head: Give me the priest these graces doth possess ; A teacher's knowledge, and a Saviour's love. The following is a couplet which Mr. Godfrey Thring has inserted in his Church of England HymnBook: : Submit yourself to God, and you shall find The works of three accomplished women may next claim notice. Lady Chudleigh, authoress of essays which obtained some repute, died in 1710. Her poems were published in 1703, and a third edition of them in 1722. In that entitled The Resolve, we may trace the spirit of an age in which religion was commonly arrayed, and sometimes disguised, under the sober garb of contemplations upon reason and virtue. A miscellany of poems published anonymously by the Countess of Winchelsea in 1713, would scarcely call for remark on the mere account of the two or three sacred pieces interspersed among its fables, moral 1 Ken's Works, iv. 201. 2 Appendix, Hymns for Private Use, 43. 3 Quoted in Al. Dyce's Specimens of British Poetesses, 129. 4 Miscellany Poems on several Occasions, written by a Lady, 1713. apologues, pastorals and Pindaric odes. It contains the story not unfrequently found in selections, and put a second time into verse by Hannah More, of the atheist and the acorn. There is a paraphrase of the 148th Psalm,2 written with much spirit, and appended to a poem on the famous hurricane-unparalleled in our latitudes of 1703. But her special title to notice rests almost entirely upon a poem which has only an indirect bearing, though not an unimportant one, upon that class of sacred poetry which finds its chief material in the more spiritual aspects of outward nature. Wordsworth observes of her Nocturnal Reverie that, with the exception of a passage or two in the Windsor Forest of Pope, it is the only poetry of the period intervening between the publication of the Paradise Lost and The Seasons, in which external phenomena were contemplated with any originality or genuine imagination.3 The name of Elizabeth Rowe (1676-1737) stands high among the writers of sacred poetry in the eighteenth century. She was daughter of a Mr. Singer, a Dissenting minister of good family and competent fortune, who once suffered imprisonment for Nonconformity, and was living in William III.'s reign at Ilchester. Her earlier poems were published in 1696 under the title of Philomela: a name which soon became familiar, if not to the general throng 4 which haunted the literary coffee-houses, at least to all lovers of high-toned religious poetry. Both in her poetical and devotional writings. there is a fervour which sometimes almost transgresses the bounds of sober piety, and which, in an age abhorrent of 'enthusiasm,' was looked upon with much suspicion even by those who most admired her talents. 'Some of her expressions,' says Watts, who edited, very soon 3 Wordsworth's 'Essay Supplementary to Preface,' Poet. Works, v. 213. 4 Meets Philomela in the town Her due proportion of renown?' Lady Winchelsea's Poems. 'The Miser and the Poet,' Miscellany, 148. after her death, her Devout Exercises of the Heart, 'are a little too rapturous and too near akin to the language of the mystical writers.'1 'The reader will here find a spirit dwelling in flesh elevated into divine transports congenial to those of angels and unbodied minds.' 2 3 Her character appears to have been one of much beauty. Her letters convey the idea of a bright and happy temperament. Half her property was dedicated to beneficent purposes, and her poorer neighbours always found in her a most kindly friend; while her amiable disposition and accomplished mind rendered her society courted in the best circles.4 Her piety, wholly free from Puritan moroseness, was controlled and kept in balance without losing any of its impassioned ardour. It is interesting, too, to see in her the intimate friend of two good men so widely different from one another as Bishop Ken and Dr. Watts. Perhaps the poem which, both in its beauties and defects, is most characteristic of this author, is A Hymn in imitation of Canticles V-VII. Southey has on this account selected it for quotation in his book on the Later English Poets. It should be remembered that a hundred and fifty years ago, as in the preceding periods, the religious significance of the Book of Canticles was far more frequently dwelt upon in sermons and in religious works generally than has been the case in later years. Ye pure inhabitants of light, Ye virgin minds above, By all your boundless joys, by all I charge you to instruct me where My absent Lord to find. 1 Devout Exercises of the Heart, by Mrs. Rowe, ed. by Dr. Isaac Watts, second ed., 1737, Dedication. 2 Id. Preface by Watts, xiii. 3 Works in Prose and Verse, etc., i. lxxvii. 4 Watts' Preface to Devout Exercises, xviii. 5 Southey's Later English Poets, i. 349. |