"But when I pruned the plant, Then it grew temperate in its vain expense The hand that wisely wounded it. Repine not, O my Son! In wisdom and in mercy heaven inflicts Book VIII. The verse of the Laureate is, indeed, verse only to the eye; but how sweetly would these words have flowed in the majestic metre of Milton, or the simpler harmony of Wordsworth. There is not any stanza in the Castle of Indolence more poetic in conception, or fervent in expression, than that in which Thomson pours out his love for Nature, and his veneration for virtue : "I care not, Fortune, what you me deny ; You cannot rob me of free Nature's grace, Through which Aurora shows her brightening face. The woods and lawns by living streams at eve. Let health my nerves and finer fibres brace, And I their toys to the great children leave: Of fancy, reason, virtue, naught can me bereave." It is curious to mark, in the following burst of christian philosophy, how completely Taylor anticipates the sentiment of the amiable author of the Seasons, and expands it into a noble ode of thanksgiving. He had fallen upon evil tongues, and evil days, and drank the very dregs of sorrow; he had been persecuted, and tossed, and driven to and fro, by the tempests of political agitation; but, amid all the tumult and dissolution of the moral elements of society, he preserves the serenity of his mind unclouded. "I am fallen," he cried, "into the hands of publicans and sequestrators, and they have taken all from me. What now? Let me look about me! They have left me sun and moon, fire and water, a loving wife, and many friends to pity me, and some to relieve; and I can still discourse, and, unless I list, they have not taken away my merry countenance, and my cheerful spirits, and a good conscience; they have still left me the providence of God, and all the promises of the Gospel, and my religion, and my hopes of heaven, and my charity to them too. And still I sleep, and digest, and eat and drink; I read and meditate; I can walk in my neighbour's pleasant fields, and see the varieties of natural beauties, and delight in all that which God delights; that is, in virtue and wisdom, in the whole creation, and in God himself." It is It is very beautiful to behold the poet and the Christian escaping from the surrounding gloom of an adverse fortune into the verdant solitudes, and the cheerful light of nature; and, while gazing upon all the resplendent works of heaven, to hear him exclaim, almost in the words of one who inherited his piety and his sensibility, though not his eloquence, "my Father made them all."* Let it not be imagined that in Taylor the imaginative predominated over the practical. Wisdom, indeed, in his writings, always shines with the raiment of Beauty. But he pleases, only to improve. The Syren sings, not to beguile into error, but into virtue. His description of the christian character, in its maturest comeliness, may be adapted to his own genius. For although these flowers of poetry and the graceful sportings of fancy cannot but gratify his eye and delight his taste, yet he chooses to gather honey, and drink the dew of heaven, and feast his spirit on the manna; not lingering idly among the alluring sweetnesses which dwell at the gates of the intellectual senses, but labouring to extract from them the essence of a healing and a saving balm.† Coleridge affirmed that his works would be more beneficial to an English barrister than those of Demosthenes, Eschines, and Cicero, combined. What, then, ought to be their value to the christian student! Even his controversial writings, with all the defects which the most microscopic investigation can discover, are, perhaps, unrivalled in the entire range of theological literature. No one, before or after him, has concentrated such affluence of learning, or poured out, in so abundant a measure, the wisdom of ages. The obscurest page brightens under his criticism. In particular, his refutation of the doctrine of transubstantiation is a splendid specimen of polemical disputation; full of subtlety, erudition, and the most piercing sagacity; although the spear of the enemy may find some weak joints in the armour. A few interesting, though occasionally shadowy and inconclusive, remarks upon the argument may be read in the third volume of Coleridge's Literary Remains. He has been charged with entertaining too exalted a view of human perfectibility. Read his Considerations upon Christ's Sermon on Humility, where, speaking of our own merits, he expressly pronounces them "nothing but the innumerable sins which we have added to what we have received. For we can call nothing ours, but such things as we are ashamed to own, and such things as are apt to ruin us. Every thing besides is the gift of God; and for a man to exalt himself thereon, is just as if a wall on which the sun reflects should boast itself against another which stands in the shadow." A more convenient season will presently arise for inquiring into the allegations which have been hazarded against the consistency of Taylor; to examine whether he be indeed, and in truth, a rigorist * Cowper. See his sermon-OF GROWTH IN GRACE. Part II. concerning the authority of the Church, but a latitudinarian in the articles of its creed ;* secretly inclining to the heresy of Socinianism on the one hand, and the exaggerated pretensions of Papal domination on the other. These questions, sufficiently bold in themselves, demand a patient and earnest investigation. Meanwhile we will resume the chain of poetical analogies which we have attempted to form from the writings of our early divines. And from none of these can we derive more powerful or convincing testimony than from the antique and massive folios of Donne, a selection from whose works is at length about to appear under the superintendence of a Fellow of Trinity College. To Mr. Coleridge is due the merit of having recalled the learned attention to the extraordinary excellencies of this great and good man, who enjoyed the friendship and admiration of all the eminent individuals of an epoch fruitful in intellect. Day after day, year after year, the press has sent forth its gilded swarm of buzzing authorlings; hour by hour the minute piles of their insectarchitecture have been growing up, interrupting the flow of purer waters, and gradually forcing in a wrong direction the entire current of our literature. The mention of Donne, in the Table Talk, attracted the notice of two or three inquisitive scholars, and his sermons, after sleeping for a century upon the shelves of the University Library at Cambridge, were taken down to gratify a newly awakened curiosity. A similar circumstance happened, we believe, at another great national establishment. We hail with delight the dawn of a better and a more salutary taste. The Roman citizens adorned the vestibules of their dwellings with the images of their ancestors; so that in their in-comings and their out-goings, the faces of the patriot, the warrior, and the philosopher, were ever present, to remind them of their exploits, and to stimulate them to their imitation. The design was crowned with success. The virtue of one generation was transfused, by the magic of example, into several; and heroism was propagated through the commonwealth.† May we behold a corresponding veneration for our mighty ancestors in the faith! Let us consult the Oracular Dead for an answer to our difficulties; let us descend into the sepulchres of these holy teachers of the truth; and whatever may be the weakness of our mental frame, whatever the organic debility of our imagination, we shall, like him who was cast into the tomb of Elisha, be revived and strengthened, and made to stand upright. Donne is, in the broadest, truest, and most comprehensive signification of the name, an evangelical preacher. Robert Hall dwells earnestly upon the want of unction in the great divines of the preceding centuries: he admits the copiousness, the purity, the exactness of their moral instruction, and the general propriety and accuracy of their *See THE FRIEND, Vol. II. p. 108. 2 Kings xiii. 20, 21. decisions; he admires the splendour of their genius, the illumination of their learning, the exuberance of their invention; but he complains of their viewing moral duties too much apart from the light of revelation, of their omission to inculcate the great and pressing truth, that by the deeds of the Law no flesh living shall be justified. The agency of the Spirit he considers to be insufficiently honoured or acknowledged; the doctrine of the atonement too negligently and weakly enforced. Hence he arrives at the conclusion, from the general character of their works, that they deemed a belief in the evidences of revealed religion, united to a correct deportment in social life, a satisfactory fulfilment of the demands of Christianity; and, as a natural and irresistible corollary of the proposition he has constructed, he pronounces them to be unsafe guides in matters of faith.* We entertain the hope of reversing this decision upon the theological and scriptural merits of the illustrious writers whose cause we are advocating. But however strongly, for the sake of argument, we may admit these objections to bear upon his contemporaries or successors, they are totally inapplicable to Donne, of whom we suspect the able critic just quoted to have known very little. Whether or not the Cross of Christ be dimly seen through the exhortations of the Bishop of Down and Connor, its shadow lies broad and deep upon every page of the Dean of St. Paul's; the agony of Gethsemane is always present to his remembrance; the darkness of the Crucifixion breathes a solemn gloom over his feelings; JESUS is the name before which he delights to prostrate his genius. The extension of these remarks will only allow us to adduce two instances of the imaginative manner in which an obvious thought presented itself to his apprehension. The first is a simile:-"But as a thoughtful man, a pensive, a considerate man, that stands still for a while, with his eyes fixed upon the ground before his feet, when he casts up his head, hath presently, instantly, the sun, the heavens for his object; he sees not a tree, nor a house, nor a steeple by the way, but as soon as his eye is departed from the earth where it was long fixed, the next thing he sees is the sun in the heavens; so, when Moses had fixed himself long upon the consideration of his own insufficiency for this service, when he took his eye from that low piece of ground, himself,—considered as he then was,he fell upon no tree, no house, no steeple, no such consideration as this. God may endow me, improve me, exalt me, enable me, qualify me with faculties fit for this service; but his first object was that which presented an infallibility with it," &c. &c. The second is a metaphor:-" The ashes of an oak in the chimney are no epitaph of that oak, to tell me how high or how large that * Remarks upon Gisborne's Sermons. Works, ed. Gregory. Vol. IV. p. 137. was. It tells me not what flocks it sheltered while it stood, nor what men it hurt when it fell. The dust of great persons' graves is speechless too, it says nothing, it distinguishes nothing. As soon the dust of a wretch whom thou wouldst not, as of a prince, whom thou couldst not look upon, will trouble thine eyes if the wind blow it thither; and when a whirlwind hath blown the dust of a churchyard into the church, and the man sweeps out the dust of the church into the churchyard, who will undertake to sift those dusts again, and to pronounce, This is the patricianthis is the noble flour; and this the yeomanly-this the plebeian bran?" Coleridge adds a brief and expressive "very beautiful, indeed!" to the passage; and his editor compares it with Hamlet, Act V. Sc. 1. The sermon was preached March 8, 1628-9. Even writers, gifted by nature with no general poetical apprehension of objects, were often imbued with this pervading principle. Mark the picturesque grace of the following passage, from an author of very great talents, extent of knowledge, and logical acuteness-Bishop Hacket. "By this it appears how suitably a beam of admirable light did concur in the angels' message, to set out the majesty of the Son of God: and I beseech you observe-all you that would keep a good Christmas as you ought that the glory of God is the best celebration of his Son's nativity; and all your pastimes and mirth (which I disallow not, but rather commend in moderate use) must so be managed without riot, without surfeiting, without excessive gaming, without pride, and vain pomp; in harmlessness, in sobriety, as if the glory of the Lord were round about us. Christ was born to save them that were lost; but frequently you abuse his nativity with so many vices, such disordered outrages, that you make this happy time an occasion for your loss, rather than for your salvation. Praise him in the congregation of the people! praise him in your inward heart! praise him with the sanctity of your life! praise him in your charity to them that need and are in want! This is the glory of God shining round, and the most christian solemnizing of the birth of Jesus." The sermons of Hacket present much that is objectionable, both in sentiment and language. They abound, as it has been affectedly, but not unjustly, observed, in a humour for points, quirks, and quiddities, and a sort of religious gossip, neither consistent with the nature of the subject, nor the dignity of the priesthood; while at the same time, an innocency of heart, and a security of faith are manifested, even in the overflow of wit, and the play of fancy. How few modern preachers could have invested so familiar a subject with so beautiful and novel an illustration. When Boswell requested Johnson to point out to him the best specimens of English Pulpit eloquence, the Doctor replied, "We have no sermons addressed to the passions, if you mean that kind of eloquence." We shall presently examine the justness of this |