Yet God's must I remain,
By death, by wrong, by shame;
I cannot blot out of my heart
That grace wrought in his name.
I cannot set at nought,
Whom I have held so dear;
I cannot make Him seem afar
That is indeed so near.
The following poem, in style almost as simple as a ballad, is at once of the quaintest and truest. Common minds, which must always associate a certain conventional respectability with the forms of religion, will think it irreverent. I judge its reverence profound, and such none the less that it is pervaded by a sweet and delicate tone of holy humour. The very title has a glimmer of the glowing heart of Christianity:
NEW PRINCE, NEW POMP
Behold a silly,69 tender babe,
In freezing winter night,
In homely manger trembling lies;
Alas! a piteous sight.
The inns are full; no man will yield
This little pilgrim bed;
But forced he is with silly beasts
In crib to shroud his head.
Despise him not for lying there;
First what he is inquire:
An orient pearl is often found
In depth of dirty mire.
Weigh not his crib, his wooden dish,
Nor beasts that by him feed;
Weigh not his mother's poor attire,
Nor Joseph's simple weed.
This stable is a prince's court,
The crib his chair of state;
The beasts are parcel of his pomp,
The wooden dish his plate.
The persons in that poor attire
His royal liveries wear;
The Prince himself is come from heaven:
This pomp is praised there.
With joy approach, O Christian wight;
Do homage to thy King;
And highly praise this humble pomp,
Which he from heaven doth bring.
Another, on the same subject, he calls New Heaven, New War. It is fantastic to a degree. One stanza, however, I like much:
This little babe, so few days old,
Is come to rifle Satan's fold;
All hell doth at his presence quake,
Though he himself for cold do shake;
For in this weak, unarmed wise,
The gates of hell he will surprise.
There is profoundest truth in the symbolism of this. Here is the latter half of a poem called St. Peters Remorse:
Did mercy spin the thread
To weave injustice' loom?
Wert then a father to conclude
With dreadful judge's doom?
It is a small relief
To say I was thy child,
If, as an ill-deserving foe,
From grace I am exiled.
I was, I had, I could—
All words importing want;
They are but dust of dead supplies,
Where needful helps are scant.
Once to have been in bliss
That hardly can return,
Doth but bewray from whence I fell,
And wherefore now I mourn.
All thoughts of passed hopes
Increase my present cross;
Like ruins of decayed joys,
They still upbraid my loss.
O mild and mighty Lord!
Amend that is amiss;
My sin my sore, thy love my salve,
Thy cure my comfort is.
Confirm thy former deed;
Reform that is defiled;
I was, I am, I will remain
Thy charge, thy choice, thy child.
Here are some neat stanzas from a poem he calls
CONTENT AND RICH
My conscience is my crown,
Contented thoughts my rest;
My heart is happy in itself,
My bliss is in my breast.
My wishes are but few,
All easy to fulfil;
I make the limits of my power
The bounds unto my will.
Sith sails of largest size
The storm doth soonest tear,
I bear so small and low a sail
As freeth me from fear.
And taught with often proof,
A tempered calm I find
To be most solace to itself,
Best cure for angry mind.
No chance of Fortune's calms
Can cast my comforts down;
When Fortune smiles I smile to think
How quickly she will frown.
And when in froward mood
She proves an angry foe:
Small gain I found to let her come,
Less loss to let her go.
There is just one stanza in a poem of Daniel, who belongs by birth to this group, which I should like to print by itself, if it were only for the love Coleridge had to the last two lines of it. It needs little stretch of scheme to let it show itself amongst religious poems. It occurs in a fine epistle to the Countess of Cumberland. Daniel's writing is full of the practical wisdom of the inner life, and the stanza which I quote has a certain Wordsworthian flavour about it. It will not make a complete sentence, but must yet stand by itself:
Knowing the heart of man is set to be
The centre of this world, about the which
These revolutions of disturbances
Still roll; where all th' aspects of misery
Predominate; whose strong effects are such
As he must bear, being powerless to redress;
And that unless above himself he can
Erect himself, how poor a thing is man!
Later in the decade, comes Sir Henry Wotton. It will be seen that I have arranged my singers with reference to their birth, not to the point of time at which this or that poem was written or published. The poetic influences which work on the shaping fantasy are chiefly felt in youth, and hence the predominant mode of a poet's utterance will be determined by what and where and amongst whom he was during that season. The kinds of the various poems will therefore probably fall into natural sequence rather after the dates of the youth of the writers than after the years in which they were written.
Wotton was better known in his day as a politician than as a poet, and chiefly in ours as the subject of one of Izaak Walton's biographies. Something of artistic instinct, rather than finish, is evident in his verses. Here is the best and the best-known of the few poems recognized as his:
THE CHARACTER OF A HAPPY LIFE
How happy is he born and taught,
That serveth not another's will;
Whose armour is his honest thought,
And silly truth his highest skill;
Whose passions not his masters are;
Whose soul is still prepared for death,
Untiéd to the world with care
Of prince's grace or vulgar breath;
Who hath his life from humours freed;
Whose conscience is his strong retreat;
Whose state can neither flatterers feed,
Nor ruin make accusers great;
Who envieth none whom chance doth raise
Or vice; who never understood
How swords give slighter wounds than praise.
Nor rules of state, but rules of good;
Who God doth late and early pray
More of his grace than gifts to lend;
And entertains the harmless day
With a well-chosen book or friend.
This man is free from servile bands
Of hope to rise, or fear to fall:
Lord of himself, though not of lands
And having nothing, yet hath all.
Some of my readers will observe that in many places I have given a reading different from that in the best-known copy of the poem. I have followed a manuscript in the handwriting of Ben Jonson.70 I cannot tell whether Jonson has put the master's hand to the amateur's work, but in every case I find his reading the best.
Sir John Davies must have been about fifteen years younger than Sir Fulk Grevill. He was born in 1570, was bred a barrister, and rose to high position through the favour of James I.—gained, it is said, by the poem which the author called Nosce Teipsum,71 but which is generally entitled On the Immortality of the Soul, intending by immortality the spiritual nature of the soul, resulting in continuity of existence. It is a wonderful instance of what can be done for metaphysics in verse, and by means of imagination or poetic embodiment generally. Argumentation cannot of course naturally belong to the region of poetry, however well it may comport itself when there naturalized; and consequently, although there are most poetic no less than profound passages in the treatise, a light scruple arises whether its constituent matter can properly be called poetry. At all events, however, certain of the more prosaic measures and stanzas lend themselves readily, and with much favour, to some of the more complex of logical necessities. And it must be remembered that in human speech, as in the human mind, there are no absolute divisions: power shades off into feeling; and the driest logic may find the heroic couplet render it good service.
Sir John Davies's treatise is not only far more poetic in image and utterance than that of Lord Brooke, but is far more clear in argument and firm in expression as well. Here is a fine invocation:
O Light, which mak'st the light which makes the day!
Which sett'st the eye without, and mind within;
Lighten my spirit with one clear heavenly ray,
Which now to view itself doth first begin.
* * * * *
Thou, like the sun, dost, with an equal ray,
Into the palace and the cottage shine;
And show'st the soul both to the clerk and lay, learned and
By the clear lamp of th' oracle divine. [unlearned
He is puzzled enough to get the theology of his time into harmony with his philosophy, and I cannot say that he is always triumphant in the attempt; but here at least is good argument in justification of the freedom of man to sin.
If by His word he had the current stayed
Of Adam's will, which was by nature free,
It had been one as if his word had said,
"I will henceforth that Man no Man shall be."
* * * * *
For what is Man without a moving mind,
Which hath a judging wit, and choosing will?
Now, if God's pow'r should her election bind,
Her motions then would cease, and stand all still.
* * * * *
So that if Man would be unvariable,
He must be God, or like a rock or tree;
For ev'n the perfect angels were not stable,
But had a fall more desperate than we.
The poem contains much excellent argument in mental science as well as in religion and metaphysics; but with that department I have nothing to do.
I shall now give an outlook from the highest peak of the poem—to any who are willing to take the trouble necessary for seeing what another would show them.
The section from which I have gathered the following stanzas is devoted to the more immediate proof of the soul's immortality.
Her only end is never-ending bliss,
Which is the eternal face of God to see,
Who last of ends and first of causes is;
And to do this, she must eternal be.
Again, how can she but immortal be,
When with the motions of both will and wit,
She still aspireth to eternity,
And never rests till she attains to it?
Water in conduit-pipes can rise no higher
Than the well-head from whence it first doth spring;
Then since to eternal God she doth aspire,
She cannot but be an eternal thing.
At first her mother-earth she holdeth dear,
And doth embrace the world and worldly things;
She flies close by the ground, and hovers here,
And mounts not up with her celestial wings.
Yet under heaven she cannot light on ought
That with her heavenly nature doth agree
She cannot rest, she cannot fix her thought,
She cannot in this world contented be.
For who did ever yet, in honour, wealth,
Or pleasure of the sense, contentment find?
Whoever ceased to wish, when he had health
Or having wisdom, was not vexed in mind
Then as a bee, which among weeds doth fall,
Which seem sweet flowers, with lustre fresh and gay—
She lights on that, and this, and tasteth all,
But, pleased with none, doth rise, and soar away;
So, when the soul finds here no true content,
And, like Noah's dove, can no sure footing take,
She doth return from whence she first was sent,
And flies to him that first her wings did make.
Wit, seeking truth, from cause to cause ascends,
And never rests till it the first attain;
Will, seeking good, finds many middle ends,
But never stays till it the last do gain.
Now God the truth, and first of causes is;
God is the last good end, which lasteth still;
Being Alpha and Omega named for this:
Alpha to wit, Omega to the will.
Since then her heavenly kind she doth display
In that to God she doth directly move,
And on no mortal thing can make her stay,
She cannot be from hence, but from above.
One passage more, the conclusion and practical summing up of the whole:
O ignorant poor man! what dost thou bear,
Locked up within the casket of thy breast?
What jewels and what riches hast thou there!
What heavenly treasure in so weak a chest!
Think of her worth, and think that God did mean
This worthy mind should worthy things embrace:
Blot not her beauties with thy thoughts unclean,
Nor her dishonour with thy passion base.
Kill not her quickening power with surfeitings;
Mar not her sense with sensuality;
Cast not her serious wit on idle things;
Make not her free-will slave to vanity.
And when thou think'st of her eternity,
Think not that death against our nature is;
Think it a birth; and when thou go'st to die,
Sing like a swan, as if thou went'st to bliss.
And if thou, like a child, didst fear before,
Being in the dark where thou didst nothing see;
Now I have brought thee torch-light, fear no more;
Now when thou diest thou canst not hood-wink'd be.
And thou, my soul, which turn'st with curious eye
To view the beams of thine own form divine,
Know, that thou canst know nothing perfectly,
While thou art clouded with this flesh of mine.
Take heed of over-weening, and compare
Thy peacock's feet with thy gay peacock's train:
Study the best and highest things that are,
But of thyself an humble thought retain.
Cast down thyself, and only strive to raise
The story of thy Maker's sacred name:
Use all thy powers that blessed Power to praise,
Which gives the power to be, and use the same.
In looking back over our path from the point we have now reached, the first thought that suggests itself is—How much the reflective has supplanted the emotional! I do not mean for a moment that the earliest poems were without thought, or that the latest are without emotion; but in the former there is more of the skin, as it were—in the latter, more of the bones of worship; not that in the one the worship is but skin-deep, or that in the other the bones are dry.
To look at the change a little more closely: we find in the earliest time, feeling working on historic fact and on what was received as such, and the result simple aspiration after goodness. The next stage is good doctrine—I use the word, as St. Paul uses it, for instruction in righteousness—chiefly by means of allegory, all attempts at analysis being made through personification of qualities. Here the general form is frequently more poetic than the matter. After this we have a period principally of imitation, sometimes good, sometimes indifferent. Next, with the Reformation and the revival of literature together, come more of art and more of philosophy, to the detriment of the lyrical expression. People cannot think and sing: they can only feel and sing. But the philosophy goes farther in this direction, even to the putting in abeyance of that from which song takes its rise,—namely, feeling itself. As to the former, amongst the verse of the period I have given, there is hardly anything to be called song but Sir Philip Sidney's Psalms, and for them we are more indebted to King David than to Sir Philip. As to the latter, even in the case of that most mournful poem of the Countess of Pembroke, it is, to quite an unhealthy degree, occupied with the attempt to work upon her own feelings by the contemplation of them, instead of with the utterance of those aroused by the contemplation of truth. In her case the metaphysics have begun to prey upon and consume the emotions. Besides, that age was essentially a dramatic age, as even its command of language, especially as shown in the pranks it plays with it, would almost indicate; and the dramatic impulse is less favourable, though not at all opposed, to lyrical utterance. In the cases of Sir Fulk Grevill and Sir John Davies, the feeling is assuredly profound; but in form and expression the philosophy has quite the upper hand.
We must not therefore suppose, however, that the cause of religious poetry has been a losing one. The last wave must sink that the next may rise, and the whole tide flow shorewards. The man must awake through all his soul, all his strength, all his mind, that he may worship God in unity, in the one harmonious utterance of his being: his heart must be united to fear his name. And for this final perfection of the individual the race must awake. At this season and that season, this power or that power must be chiefly developed in her elect; and for its sake the growth of others must for a season be delayed. But the next generation will inherit all that has gone before; and its elect, if they be themselves pure in heart, and individual, that is original, in mind, will, more or less thoroughly, embody the result, in subservience to some new development, essential in its turn to further progress. Even the fallow times, which we are so ready to call barren, must have their share in working the one needful work. They may be to the nation that which sickness so often is to the man—a time of refreshing from the Lord. A nation's life does not lie in its utterance any more than in the things which it possesses: it lies in its action. The utterance is a result, and therefore a sign, of life; but there may be life without any such sign. To do justice, to love mercy, to walk humbly with God, is the highest life of a nation as of an individual; and when the time for speech comes, it will be such life alone that causes the speech to be strong at once and harmonious. When at last there are not ten righteous men in Sodom, Sodom can neither think, act, nor say, and her destruction is at hand.
While the wave of the dramatic was sinking, the wave of the lyric was growing in force and rising in height. Especially as regards religious poetry we are as yet only approaching the lyrical jubilee. Fact and faith, self-consciousness and metaphysics, all are needful to the lyric of love. Modesty and art find their grandest, simplest labour in rightly subordinating each of those to the others. How could we have a George Herbert without metaphysics? In those poems I have just given, the way of metaphysics was prepared for him. That which overcolours one age to the injury of its harmony, will, in the next or the next, fall into its own place in the seven-chorded rainbow of truth.
CHAPTER VII
DR. DONNE.
We now come to Dr. John Donne, a man of justly great respect and authority, who, born in the year 1573, the fifteenth of Queen Elizabeth, died Dean of St. Paul's in the year 1636. But, although even Ben Jonson addresses him as "the delight of Phoebus and each Muse," we are too far beyond the power of his social presence and the influence of his public utterances to feel that admiration of his poems which was so largely expressed during his lifetime. Of many of those that were written in his youth, Izaak Walton says Dr. Donne "wished that his own eyes had witnessed their funerals." Faulty as they are, however, they are not the less the work of a great and earnest man.
Bred to the law, but never having practised it, he lost his secretaryship to the Lord Chancellor Ellesmere through the revenge of Sir George More, whose daughter Donne had married in secret because of her father's opposition. Dependent thereafter for years on the generous kindness of unrelated friends, he yet for conscience' sake refused to take orders when a good living was offered him; and it was only after prolonged thought that he yielded to the importunity of King James, who was so convinced of his surpassing fitness for the church that he would speed him towards no other goal. When at length he dared hope that God might have called him to the high office, never man gave himself to its duties with more of whole-heartedness and devotion, and none have proved themselves more clean of the sacrilege of serving at the altar for the sake of the things offered thereon.
He is represented by Dr. Johnson as one of the chief examples of that school of poets called by himself the metaphysical, an epithet which, as a definition, is almost false. True it is that Donne and his followers were always ready to deal with metaphysical subjects, but it was from their mode, and not their subjects, that Dr. Johnson classed them. What this mode was we shall see presently, for I shall be justified in setting forth its strangeness, even absurdity, by the fact that Dr. Donne was the dear friend of George Herbert, and had much to do with the formation of his poetic habits. Just twenty years older than Herbert, and the valued and intimate friend of his mother, Donne was in precisely that relation of age and circumstance to influence the other in the highest degree.
The central thought of Dr. Donne is nearly sure to be just: the subordinate thoughts by means of which he unfolds it are often grotesque, and so wildly associated as to remind one of the lawlessness of a dream, wherein mere suggestion without choice or fitness rules the sequence. As some of the writers of whom I have last spoken would play with words, Dr. Donne would sport with ideas, and with the visual images or embodiments of them. Certainly in his case much knowledge reveals itself in the association of his ideas, and great facility in the management and utterance of them. True likewise, he says nothing unrelated to the main idea of the poem; but not the less certainly does the whole resemble the speech of a child of active imagination, to whom judgment as to the character of his suggestions is impossible, his taste being equally gratified with a lovely image and a brilliant absurdity: a butterfly and a shining potsherd are to him similarly desirable. Whatever wild thing starts from the thicket of thought, all is worthy game to the hunting intellect of Dr. Donne, and is followed without question of tone, keeping, or harmony. In his play with words, Sir Philip Sidney kept good heed that even that should serve the end in view; in his play with ideas, Dr. John Donne, so far from serving the end, sometimes obscures it almost hopelessly: the hart escapes while he follows the squirrels and weasels and bats. It is not surprising that, their author being so inartistic with regard to their object, his verses themselves should be harsh and unmusical beyond the worst that one would imagine fit to be called verse. He enjoys the unenviable distinction of having no rival in ruggedness of metric movement and associated sounds. This is clearly the result of indifference; an indifference, however, which grows very strange to us when we find that he can write a lovely verse and even an exquisite stanza.
Greatly for its own sake, partly for the sake of illustration, I quote a poem containing at once his best and his worst, the result being such an incongruity that we wonder whether it might not be called his best and his worst, because we cannot determine which. He calls it Hymn to God, my God, in my Sickness. The first stanza is worthy of George Herbert in his best mood.
Since I am coming to that holy room,
Where with the choir of saints for evermore
I shall be made thy music, as I come
I tune the instrument here at the door,
And what I must do then, think here before.
To recognize its beauty, leaving aside the depth and truth of the phrase, "Where I shall be made thy music," we must recall the custom of those days to send out for "a noise of musicians." Hence he imagines that he has been summoned as one of a band already gone in to play before the king of "The High Countries:" he is now at the door, where he is listening to catch the tone, that he may have his instrument tuned and ready before he enters. But with what a jar the next stanza breaks on heart, mind, and ear!
Whilst my physicians by their love are grown
Cosmographers, and I72 their map, who lie
Flat on this bed, that by them may be shown
That this is my south-west discovery,
Per fretum febris—by these straits to die;—
Here, in the midst of comparing himself to a map, and his physicians to cosmographers consulting the map, he changes without warning into a navigator whom they are trying to follow upon the map as he passes through certain straits—namely, those of the fever—towards his south-west discovery, Death. Grotesque as this is, the absurdity deepens in the end of the next stanza by a return to the former idea. He is alternately a map and a man sailing on the map of himself. But the first half of the stanza is lovely: my reader must remember that the region of the West was at that time the Land of Promise to England.
I joy that in these straits I see my West;
For though those currents yield return to none,
What shall my West hurt me? As west and east
In all flat maps (and I am one) are one,
So death doth touch the resurrection.
It is hardly worth while, except for the strangeness of the phenomenon, to spend any time in elucidating this. Once more a map, he is that of the two hemispheres, in which the east of the one touches the west of the other. Could anything be much more unmusical than the line, "In all flat maps (and I am one) are one"? But the next stanza is worse.
Is the Pacific sea my home? Or are
The eastern riches? Is Jerusalem?
Anvan, and Magellan, and Gibraltar?
All straits, and none but straits are ways to them,
Whether where Japhet dwelt, or Cham, or Sem.
The meaning of the stanza is this: there is no earthly home: all these places are only straits that lead home, just as they themselves cannot be reached but through straits.
Let my reader now forget all but the first stanza, and take it along with the following, the last two:
We think that Paradise and Calvary,
Christ's cross and Adam's tree, stood in one place:
Look, Lord, and find both Adams met in me;
As the first Adam's sweat surrounds my face,
May the last Adam's blood my soul embrace.
So, in his purple wrapped, receive me, Lord;
By these his thorns give me his other crown;
And as to others' souls I preached thy word,
Be this my text, my sermon to mine own:
Therefore, that he may raise, the Lord throws down.
Surely these are very fine, especially the middle verse of the former and the first verse of the latter stanza. The three stanzas together make us lovingly regret that Dr. Donne should have ridden his Pegasus over quarry and housetop, instead of teaching him his paces.
The next I quote is artistic throughout. Perhaps the fact, of which we are informed by Izaak Walton, "that he caused it to be set to a grave and solemn tune, and to be often sung to the organ by the choristers of St. Paul's church in his own hearing, especially at the evening service," may have something to do with its degree of perfection. There is no sign of his usual haste about it. It is even elaborately rhymed after Norman fashion, the rhymes in each stanza being consonant with the rhymes in every stanza.