The vaulted cells where martyr'd seers of old,
Far in the rocky walls of Sion sleep.'

The Biblical scenery is treated graphically as real scenery, the Biblical history and poetry as real history and poetry: the wall of partition between things sacred and things secular is broken down ; the dogmatist, the allegorist, have disappeared; the critic and the poet have stepped into their place.

'O for a sculptor's hand,

That thou might'st take thy stand,

Thy wild hair floating on the Eastern breeze.'

This is the true poetic fire of Gray's ‘Bard,' not the language of convention.

The moist pearls now bestrewing
Thymy slope and rushy vale;
Comrades-what our sires have told us,
Watch and wait, for it will come;

Not by manna showers at morning
Shall our wants be then supplied;

But a strange pale gold adorning
Many a tufted mountain side.'

This is the tone, not of the mystical commentator, but of the creative poet.

In doctrine too, whether in points distinctive of high Anglicanism or in those common to Christian controversialists in general, it is noticeable how the view of the poet transcends the view of the theologian. The beautiful poem of the 'Waterfall' in the Lyra Innocentium is a direct contradiction to the rigid opinions of its author, in his theological writings, on the hope expressed by Origen and Tillotson of the final restoration of lost souls. He speaks of the ancient world as Zwinglius or Spinoza regarded it, not as the scholastic divines spoke of it :

'Now of Thy love we deem,

As of an ocean vast,

Mounting in tides against the stream
Of ages gone and past.'

'That warning still and deep,

At which high spirits of old would start
Even from their pagan sleep.'

In direct opposition to the spirit which would make not moral excellence but technical forms of belief the test of safety he writes such verses as these

In one blaze of charity

Care and remorse are lost, like motes in light divine;
Whole years of folly we outlive

In His unerring sight, who measures Life by Love.'

6.66 'Lord, and what shall this man do?"
Ask'st thou, Christian, for thy friend?

If his love for Christ be true,

Christ hath told thee of his end:
This is he whom God approves,
This is he whom Jesus loves.'

'Wouldst thou the life of souls discern?
Nor human wisdom nor divine

Helps thee by aught beside to learn;
Love is life's only sign.'

Again, the doubts and difficulties, which in the rude conflict of theological controversy are usually ascribed to corrupt motives and the like, are treated in his Ode on St. Thomas's Day with a tenderness worthy of the most advanced of modern thinkers :

'Is there on earth a spirit frail,
Who fears to take their word;
Scarce daring through the twilight pale
To think he sees the Lord?
With eyes too tremblingly awake

To bear with dimness for His sake?
Read and confess the Hand Divine

That drew thy likeness here so true in every line.'

:

And the beautiful analysis of the character and position of Barnabas, which is one of the masterpieces of Renan's work on the Apostles, is all but anticipated in the lines on that saint in the Christian Year:

'Never so blest as when in Jesus' roll,

They write some hero-soul,

More pleased upon his brightening road

To wait, than if their own with all his radiance glow'd.'

Such a keen discrimination of the gifts and relations of the Apostles belongs to the true modern element of theology, not to the conventional theories of former days.

And with regard to the more special peculiarities of the High Church school, it is remarkable how at every turn he broke away from them in his poetry. It is enough to refer to the justification of marriage as against celibacy in the Ode on the Wednesday in Passion Week; the glorification of the religion of common against conventual life in his Morning Hymn, and in his Ode on St. Matthew's Day. The contending polemic schools have themselves called attention to the well-known lines on the Eucharist in the poem on Gunpowder Treason. It is clear that, whatever may have been the subtle theological dogma which he may have held on the subject, the whole drift of that passage, which no verbal alteration can obliterate, is to exalt the moral and spiritual elements of that ordinance above those physical and local attributes on which later developments of his school have so exclusively dwelt. These instances might be multiplied to any extent. It would, of course, be preposterous to press each line of poetry into an argument. But the whole result is to show how far nobler, purer, and loftier was what may be called the natural element of the poet's mind, than the artificial distinctions in which he became involved as a partisan and as a controversialist. This is no rare phenomenon. Who has not felt it hard to recognise the author of the Paradise Lost and of the Penseroso in the polemical treatises on Divorce and on the Execution of Charles I? Who does not know the immeasurable contrast between Wordsworth the poet of nature and of the human heart, and Wordsworth the narrow Tory and High Churchman of his later years? In all these cases it is the poet who is the real man—the theologian and politician only the temporary mask and phase.

A. P. STANLEY.

[From The Christian Year.]

THIRD SUNDAY IN LENT.

(The Christian Inheritance.)

See Lucifer like lightning fall,
Dashed from his throne of pride;
While, answering Thy victorious call,

The Saints his spoils divide;

This world of Thine, by him usurped too long, Now opening all her stores to heal Thy servants' wrong.

So when the first-born of Thy foes

Dead in the darkness lay,

When Thy redeemed at midnight rose

And cast their bonds away,

The orphaned realm threw wide her gates, and told Into freed Israel's lap her jewels and her gold.

And when their wondrous march was o'er,
And they had won their homes,
Where Abraham fed his flock of yore,

Among their fathers' tombs ;

A land that drinks the rain of Heaven at will, Whose waters kiss the feet of many a vine-clad hill ;

Oft as they watched, at thoughtful eve,

A gale from bowers of balm

Sweep o'er the billowy corn, and heave

The tresses of the palm,

Just as the lingering Sun had touched with gold, Far o'er the cedar shade, some tower of giants old;

It was a fearful joy, I ween,

To trace the Heathen's toil,

The limpid wells, the orchards green,
Left ready for the spoil,

The household stores untouched, the roses bright

Wreathed o'er the cottage walls in garlands of delight.

And now another Canaan yields
To Thine all-conquering ark ;-
Fly from the 'old poetic' fields1,
Ye Paynim shadows dark!
Immortal Greece, dear land of glorious lays,

Lo! here the 'unknown God' of thy unconscious praise!
The olive-wreath, the ivied wand,
'The sword in myrtles drest,'
Each legend of the shadowy strand
Now wakes a vision blest;

As little children lisp, and tell of Heaven,

So thoughts beyond their thought to those high Bards

were given.

And these are ours: Thy partial grace

The tempting treasure lends :

These relics of a guilty race

Are forfeit to Thy friends;

What seemed an idol hymn, now breathes of Thee, Tuned by Faith's ear to some celestial melody.

There's not a strain to Memory dear 2,

Nor flower in classic grove,

There's not a sweet note warbled here,
But minds us of Thy Love,

O Lord, our Lord, and spoiler of our foes,

There is no light but Thine: with Thee all beauty glows.

SECOND SUNDAY AFTER EASTER.

(Balaam's Prophecy.)

O for a sculptor's hand,

That thou might'st take thy stand, Thy wild hair floating on the eastern breeze,

Thy tranced yet open gaze

Fixed on the desert haze,

As one who deep in heaven some airy pageant sees.

1

Where each old poetic mountain

Inspiration breathed around. Gray.

2 See Burns's Works, i. 293. Dr. Currie's edition.