Whose leaves shall heal the nations; moderneath
Whose holy shade a reftige shall be found
From pain and want, and all the ils that wait
On monal life from sin and death for ever?

Thomas Campbell (1777-1844) published his Pleasures of Hope in the last year of the eighteenth century, when he was scarcely twenty-two years old. He too, although a mere boy at the time, had been infected with the same revolutionary enthusiasm which filled the minds of most young men of talent. The executions and massacres that took place in Paris had indeed sickened and disgusted him; but he also deplored them as signal calamities to the cause of peace and liberty in England.1 In all the principal poetry of the last years of the century, religious and political hopes were more or less blended. It was so with Campbell. The Pleasures of Hope, though not in any direct way either a political or a religious poem, is to some extent both one and the other. Hopes of a nobler liberty and hopes of immortality alike enter into it.

There were other Scotchmen in the eighteenth century who contributed to the store of sacred poetry, of whom mention must be made. The greatest poetical genius produced by Scotland during that period was of course Robert Burns (1759-1796). Notwithstanding the sensuous element which too much predominates in his poems, many of his verses show that he could both reverence a deeper religious life in others, and that he was not without knowledge of it in his own experience. The beautiful picture of household piety in ‘The Cottar's Saturday Night' is a familiar example. His Prayer for a Family' may be added, concluding with the verse—

When soon or late they reach that coast,

O'er life's rough ocean driven,

May they rejoice, no wanderer lost,
A family in heaven!

1 Poetical Works of Charles Lamb, 71.

2 W. Beattie's Life and Letters of T. Campbell, i. 86.

Also his prayer for God's forgiveness, beginning, ‘O Thou, unknown, Almighty Cause of all my hope and fear! We are told that in his later days 'he had the Bible with him, and read it almost continually. . His sceptical doubts no longer troubled him, and he had at last the faith of a confiding Christian.'1

There are a few graceful stanzas upon life and eternity, and our hope beyond the grave, in James Beattie's Minstrel (1771), and in his Hermit (1767).2

James Grahame (1765-1811), a barrister who afterwards took orders, is best known-though not so well known as he deserves to be-by his poem entitled The Sabbath. A thoroughly good man, of refined poetical temperament, and (as is shown by his Birds of Scotland) an observant naturalist, his poems breathe a characteristic spirit of tranquil piety, and a hearty relish for the sights and sounds of quiet country life. They abound in delightful passages. The very opening lines of his principal poem may be instanced :

:

How still the morning of the hallow'd day!
Mute is the voice of rural labour, hush'd
The ploughboy's whistle and the milkmaid's song.
The scythe lies glittering in the dewy wreath
Of tedded grass, mingled with fading flowers
That yester-morn bloom'd waving in the breeze :
Sounds the most faint attract the ear-the hum
Of early bee, the trickling of the dew,
The distant bleating, midway up the hill.
Calmness sits throned on yon unmoving cloud.
To him who wanders o'er the upland leas,

The blackbird's note comes mellower from the dale;
And sweeter from the sky the gladsome lark
Warbles his heaven-tuned song; the lulling brook
Murmurs more gently down the deep-worn glen ;
While from yon lowly roof, whose curling smoke
O'ermounts the mist, is heard, at intervals,

The voice of psalms, the simple song of praise.3

1 Saunders's Evenings with the Sacred Poets, 361.

2 Beattie's Poems: The Minstrel, 27, and last stanzas of The Hermit, 93.

3 Poems by James Grahame, 1807, i. 3 The Sabbath.

452 Religious Thought in Old English Verse

inevitable-when the foundations of society were in a state of upheaval and commotion, and all questions, divine and human, were being boldly canvassed-when great virtues and great wickedness came into strong collision-when brilliant promises were rudely checked, and when it seemed to others that glorious light might rise up suddenly out of utter darkness-at such a time it was not possible that great ideas should lose their strength through mere inactivity and torpor. To the partisans of the new, conceptions of Christian freedom, Christian brotherhood, and the like, had become pregnant with meanings they had never dreamt of before. The partisans of the old learnt to treasure with a greater love blessings which, through familiar use, they had thought little of before—to appreciate the advantages they possessed, to overlook their deficiencies -to cling to all noble traditions of the past with a tenacity proportioned to their newly-awakened fears. It was a time for revived enthusiasm and increased intensity of thought. The period of acute suspense passed quickly away, and caused very little outward change in England. Ancient feeling and established ideas, both in religion and in politics, were confirmed rather than shaken by the dangers which had so closely threatened them. But in religion, as in politics, a real change had taken place-more sensible in its after results than in its immediate issues. The eighteenth century had practically expired before its years had arrived at their natural term. Its latest portion belongs more to the present than to the past: in nothing more so than in its poetry. Poetry, by virtue of that imaginative faculty which is closely akin to prediction, may often lay claim to advance in the van of human

movement.

INDEX