2

He spake, he died. Distain'd with gore,
Beside yon yawning cavern hoar,
See where his livid corse is laid.
The aged pilgrim passing by

Surveys him long with dubious eye;

And muses on his fate and shakes his reverend head.
Just Heav'ns! is thus thy pride imperial gone?

Is this poor heap of dust the king of Babylon?

3

Is this the man whose nod

Made the earth tremble: whose terrific nod
Levell❜d her loftiest cities? Where he trod
Famine pursued and frown'd;

Till nature, groaning round,

Saw her rich realms transform'd to deserts dry;
While at his crowded prison's gate,
Grasping the keys of fate,

Stood stern captivity.

Vain man! behold thy righteous doom;
Behold each neighb'ring monarch's tomb,
The trophied arch, the breathing bust;
The laurel shades their sacred dust;
While thou, vile outcast on this hostile plain,
Moulder'st, a vulgar corse, among the vulgar slain.1

Mason continued to write poetry in his old age.

If it had somewhat lost in vigour, it gained in a deeper tone of serene and thankful piety. The following are the closing lines of his Religio Clerici, written in 1796:

Father, Redeemer, Comforter divine!
This humble offering to Thy equal shrine
Here thy unworthy servant grateful pays,
Of undivided thanks, united praise,

For all those mercies which at birth began,

And ceaseless flowed through life's long lengthen'd span

Propt my frail frame through all the varied scene,

With health enough for many a day serene ;

Enough of science clearly to discern

How few important truths the wisest learn;
Enough of art ingenuous to employ

The vacant hours when graver studies cloy;
Enough of wealth to serve each honest end,
The poor to succour, or assist a friend;

1 Works of W. Mason, ii. 46-8.

Enough of faith in Scripture to descry

That the sure hope of immortality,

Which only can the fear of death remove,

Flows from the fountain of Redeeming Love.1

At the risk of quoting at disproportionate length from the writings of this poet, the sonnet must be added which he wrote on his last birthday, February 23d, 1797, only a few weeks before his death:

Again the year on easy wheels has roll'd,

To bear me to the term of seventy-two.

Yet still my eyes can seize the distant blue
Of yon wild Peak, and still my footsteps bold,
Unpropp'd by staff, support me to behold

How Nature, to her Maker's mandates true,
Calls Spring's impartial heralds to the view,
The snowdrop pale, the crocus spiked with gold ;
And still (thank Heav'n) if I not falsely deem,
My lyre, yet vocal, freely can afford

Strains not discordant to each moral theme
Fair Truth inspires, and aids me to record

(Best of poetic palms !) my faith supreme

In Thee, my God, my Saviour, and my Lord! 2

It has been before observed that Dr. Johnson (17091785) did not believe in the capabilities of devotional verse. For his own part, he possessed few of the more essential qualifications of a poet. His poems are the plain and sensible effusions of a mind never hurried beyond itself, to which the use of rhyme adds no beauty, and from which the use of prose would detract no force.'3 He rests for his fame upon other qualities than those which demand enthusiasm and imaginative power. Nevertheless, the closing lines of his Vanity of Human Wishes, published 1749, are well worthy of being quoted :

Yet when the sense of sacred presence fires,
And strong devotion to the skies aspires,
Pour forth thy fervour for a healthful mind
Obedient passions, and a will resign'd ;

1 Works of W. Mason, 450.

2 Id. ii. 131.

2 Anderson's Life of Johnson, British Poets, vol. xi. p. 822.

For love, which scarce collective man can fill ;
For faith, that, panting for a happier seat,
Counts death kind nature's signal of retreat :
These goods for man the laws of heav'n ordain,
These goods He grants, who grants the power to gain ;
With these celestial Wisdom calms the mind,

And makes the happiness she does not find.1

Oliver Goldsmith (1729-1774) was not a writer of sacred poetry. But the pure religious tone that runs through the Deserted Village, and the graceful picture it contains of simple unassuming piety place it on the same high level with Gray's Elegy. Poems such as

these could scarcely fail to have a purifying and elevating influence upon the taste of those who read and appreciated them. William Shenstone's Schoolmistress, published in 1751, is a work of somewhat the same order, although its author was so afraid of the subject not being considered dignified enough for poetry, that he has a little disguised, under a certain air of caricature, its genuine simplicity and pathos. A few lines from it are quoted in a preceding page.2

Samuel Boyse (1708-1749) was one of those unhappy men in whom good impulses, joined to a weak and illregulated disposition, makes life a sad alternation of better purposes, relapse, and poignant repentance. He lived in want, and died a pauper. In 1741 he published a poem upon the Attributes of Deity, which Fielding has called 'a very noble one,' of which Pope said that it contained lines which he would willingly have owned, and which James Hervey spoke of in the warmest terms of admiration. This poem passed through a third edition in 1752. Its tone is devotional; its language an easyflowing imitation of the Essay on Man. But, notwithstanding contemporary praise, it certainly does not rise above a very ordinary level, and whatever there is of 'noble' in it is owing simply to the intrinsic grandeur of its subject, and not to any special thought or capacity on the part of its author.

1 British Poets, vol. xi. p. 843.

2 Ante, p. 340.

William Thompson, Rector of Hampton Poyle, published in 1746 a religious poem in five books on Sickness. It is found in the Collection of English Poets, but is not very noteworthy.

Christopher Smart (1722-1771)1 was a writer of very considerable genius. At Cambridge, where he held a fellowship at Pembroke Hall, he five times took the Seatonian prize for a poetical essay upon a sacred subject, and his poems are among the best of that series. There is a want of carefulness and accuracy about them, but much talent, and the glow of warm religious feeling. After Smart had left Cambridge, where he had become very embarrassed in his circumstances, he gained a precarious living in London by literary work, and gained there the friendship and pity of Johnson, Goldsmith, Garrick, and other distinguished men. A strong predisposition to insanity will excuse the fits of reckless extravagance to which he was apt to give way. He composed what was generally considered his finest poem, The Song of David, whilst under confinement as a lunatic, indenting the lines with a key upon the wainscot. He sung of God, the mighty source Of all things, the stupendous force On which all things depend :

From whose right arm, beneath whose eyes,
All period, power, and enterprise

Commence, and reign, and end.

The world, the clustering spheres He made,
The glorious light, the soothing shade,

Dale, champaign, grove, and hill;

The multitudinous abyss

Where Secrecy remains in bliss,
And Wisdom hides her skill.

Tell them 'I am,' Jehovah said
To Moses, while Earth heard in dread,
And smitten to the heart,

At once above, beneath, around,
All nature, without voice or sound,
Replied, 'O Lord, Thou art.' 2

1 British Poets, vol. xi.

etc.

2 The poem, published in pamphlet form, is now scarce, but may be read in full in Palgrave's Golden Treasury.

Amid all his failings, to whatever extent he was responsible for them, he was always keenly sensitive to the emotions whether of friendship or religion. He would often entreat his friends to pray with him and for him, and his religious poems were often written upon his knees. The following verses are from the closing part of his hymn on recovery from illness, a poem full of earnestness, and containing many beautiful lines:

Ye strengthened feet, forth to his altar move;

Quicken, ye new-strung nerves, th' enraptured lyre;
Ye heaven-directed eyes, o'erflow with love;

Glow, glow, my soul, with pure seraphic fire ;

Deeds, thoughts, and words, no more his mandate break,
But to his endless glory work, conceive, and speak.
O penitence! to virtue near allied,

Thou canst new joys e'en to the blest impart ;
The listening angels lay their harps aside

To hear the music of thy contrite heart;

And heaven itself wears a more radiant face,

When Charity presents thee to the throne of grace.

John Byrom1 (1691-1763), was an able man, a Fellow of the Royal Society, a Jacobite in politics, warmly attached to the Church of England, yet not so as to be blind to her deficiencies. He had many sympathies in common with the Methodists; but found teaching far more entirely congenial to his mind in the writings of William Law and the French and German mystics. The doctrines most completely repugnant to him were those of Calvinism, and views such as were held by James Hervey and others on justification and imputed merit. For the rest, he was an earnest, truth-loving man, who thought much for himself on all matters connected with religion, and had little in common with the most prevalent phases of theological thought. As a versifier, he has embodied many sound and suggestive reflections in wretched doggerel, using rhyme as a mere convenience of form. When, however, he set himself to write poetry instead of metrical essays, he showed a

1 Chalmers's English Poets, vol. xv.