THERE WAS A TIME WHEN I WAS VERY LITTLE

HERE was a time, when I, an urchin slender,

THE

Could hardly boast of having any height.

Oft I recall those days with feelings tender:

With smiles, and yet the tear-drops dim my sight.

Within my tender mother's arms I sported,

I played at horse upon my grandsire's knee; Sorrow and care and anger, ill-reported,

As little known as gold or Greek, to me.

The world was little to my childish thinking,
And innocent of sin and sinful things;
I saw the stars above me flashing, winking -
To fly and catch them, how longed for wings!

I saw the moon behind the hills declining,

And thought, O were I on yon lofty ground, I'd learn the truth; for here there's no divining How large it is, how beautiful, how round!

In wonder, too, I saw God's sun pursuing

His westward course, to ocean's lap of gold; And yet at morn the East he was renewing

With wide-spread, rosy tints, this artist old.

Then turned my thoughts to God the Father gracious,
Who fashioned me and that great orb on high,
And the night's jewels, decking heaven spacious;
From pole to pole its arch to glorify.

With childish piety my lips repeated

The prayer learned at my pious mother's knee:

Help me remember, Jesus, I entreated,

That I must grow up good and true to Thee!

Then for the household did I make petition,

For kindred, friends, and for the town's folk, last;
The unknown King, the outcast, whose condition
Darkened my childish joy, as he slunk past.

All lost, all vanished, childhood's days so eager!
My peace, my joy with them have fled away;
I've only memory left: possession meagre;

Oh, never may that leave me, Lord, I pray.

PHILIP JAMES BAILEY

(1816-1902)

N BAILEY we have a striking instance of the man whose reputation is made suddenly by a single work, which obtains an amazing popularity, and which is presently almost forgotten except as a name. When in 1839 the long poem 'Festus' appeared, its author was an unknown youth, who had hardly reached his majority. Within a few months he was a celebrity. That so dignified and suggestive a performance should have come from so young a poet was considered a marvel of precocity by the literary world, both English and American.

The author of Festus was born at Basford, Nottinghamshire, England, April 22d, 1816. Educated at the public schools of Nottingham, and at Glasgow University, he studied law, and at nineteen entered Lincoln's Inn. In 1840 he was admitted to the bar. But his vocation in life appears to have been metaphysical and spiritual rather than legal.

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PHILIP JAMES BAILEY

His 'Festus: a Poem,' containing fiftyfive episodes or successive scenes, thirty-five thousand lines, was begun in his twentieth year. Three years later it was in the hands of the English reading public. Like Goethe's 'Faust' in pursuing the course of a human soul through influences emanating from the Supreme Good and the Supreme Evil; in having Heaven and the World as its scene; in its inclusion of God and the Devil, the Archangels and Angels, the Powers of Perdition, and withal many earthly types in its action, it is by no means a mere imitation of the great German. Its plan is wider. It incorporates even more impressive spiritual material than 'Faust' offers. Not only is its mortal hero, Festus, conducted through an amazing pilgrimage, spiritual and redeemed by divine Love, but we have in the poem a conception of close association with Christianity, profound ethical suggestions, a flood of theology and philosophy, metaphysics and science, picturing Good and Evil, love and hate, peace and war, the past, the present, and the future, earth, heaven, and hell, heights and depths, dominions, principalities, and powers, God and man, the whole of being and of not-being,- all

in an effort to unmask the last and greatest secrets of Infinity. And more than all this, 'Festus' strives to portray the sufficiency of Divine Love and of the Divine Atonement to dissipate, even to annihilate, Evil. For even Lucifer and the hosts of darkness are restored to purity and to peace among the Sons of God, the Children of Light! The Love of God is set forth as limitless. We have before us the birth of matter at the Almighty's fiat; and we close the work with the salvation and ecstasy-described as decreed from the Beginning of whatever creature hath been given a spiritual existence, and made a spiritual subject and agency. There is in the doctrine of 'Festus no such thing as the "Son of Perdition" who shall be an ultimate castaway.

Few English poems have attracted more general notice from all intelligent classes of readers than did 'Festus' on its advent. Orthodoxy was not a little aghast at its theologic suggestions. Criticism of it as a literary production was hampered not a little by religious sensitiveness. The London Literary Gazette said of it:-"It is an extraordinary production, out-Heroding Kant in some of its philosophy, and out-Goetheing Goethe in the introduction of the Three Persons of the Trinity as interlocutors in its wild plot. Most objectionable as it is on this account, it yet contains so many exquisite passages of genuine poetry, that our admiration of the author's genius overpowers the feeling of mortification at its being misapplied, and meddling with such dangerous topics." The advance of liberal ideas within the churches has diminished such criticism, but the work is still a stumbling-block to the less speculative of sectaries.

The poem is far too long, and its scope too vast for even a genius of much higher and riper gifts than Bailey's. It is turgid, untechnical in verse, wordy, and involved. Had Bailey written at fifty instead of at twenty, it might have shown a necessary balance and felicity of style. But, with all these shortcomings, it is not to be relegated to the library of things not worth the time to know, to the list of bulky poetic failures. Its author blossomed and fruited marvelously early; so early and with such unlooked-for fruit that the unthinking world, which first received him with exaggerated honor, presently assailed him with undue dispraise. 'Festus' is not mere solemn and verbose commonplace. Here and there it has passages of great force and even of high beauty. The author's whole heart and brain were poured into it, and neither was a common one. With all its ill-based daring and manifest crudities, it was such a tour de force for a lad of twenty as the world seldom sees. Its sluggish current bears along remarkable knowledge, great reflection, and the imagination of a fertile as well as a precocious brain.

Bailey's death, which took place at Nottingham on September 6th, 1902, reawakened to some extent the interest taken in his work, and (Festus) was the subject of a careful article by Edmund Gosse in the Fortnightly Review of the following November. Next year saw a new

edition of the poem, but the liberal ideas at which orthodoxy stood aghast in mid nineteenth century attracted little attention in the early twentieth. The length of the poem also makes against its chances of perusal in a busier age, in spite of the fine things it undoubtedly contains.

FROM FESTUS'

LIFE

F

ESTUS

Men's callings all

Are mean and vain; their wishes more so: oft
The man is bettered by his part or place.
How slight a chance may raise or sink a soul!

Lucifer-What men call accident is God's own part.

He lets ye work your will-it is his own:

But that ye mean not, know not, do not, he doth.
Festus- What is life worth without a heart to feel
The great and lovely harmonies which time
And nature change responsive, all writ out
By preconcertive hand which swells the strain
To divine fulness; feel the poetry,

The soothing rhythm of life's fore-ordered lay;
The sacredness of things?-for all things are
Sacred so far, -the worst of them, as seen
By the eye of God, they in the aspect bide
Of holiness: nor shall outlaw sin be slain,
Though rebel banned, within the sceptre's length;
But privileged even for service.

Oh! to stand

Soul-raptured, on some lofty mountain-thought,

And feel the spirit expand into a view

Millennial, life-exalting, of a day

When earth shall have all leisure for high ends

Of social culture; ends a liberal law

And common peace of nations, blent with charge
Divine, shall win for man, were joy indeed:

Nor greatly less, to know what might be now,

Worked will for good with power, for one brief hour.
But look at these, these individual souls:

How sadly men show out of joint with man!

There are millions never think a noble thought;

But with brute hate of brightness bay a mind
Which drives the darkness out of them, like hounds.
Throw but a false glare round them, and in shoals
They rush upon perdition: that's the race.

What charm is in this world-scene to such minds?
Blinded by dust? What can they do in heaven,
A state of spiritual means and ends?

Thus must I doubt perpetually doubt.

Lucifer-Who never doubted never half believed. Where doubt, there truth is 'tis her shadow. I Declare unto thee that the past is not.

I have looked over all life, yet never seen

The age that had been. Why then fear or dream
About the future? Nothing but what is, is;
Else God were not the Maker that he seems,

As constant in creating as in being.

Embrace the present. Let the future pass.
Plague not thyself about a future.

That

Only which comes direct from God, his spirit,
Is deathless. Nature gravitates without
Effort; and so all mortal natures fall
Deathwards. All aspiration is a toil;
But inspiration cometh from above,

And is no labor. The earth's inborn strength
Could never lift her up to yon stars, whence
She fell; nor human soul, by native worth,
Claim heaven as birthright, more than man may call
Cloudland his home. The soul's inheritance,

Its birth-place, and its death-place, is of earth;
Until God maketh earth and soul anew;

The one like heaven, the other like himself.
So shall the new creation come at once;

Sin, the dead branch upon the tree of life,

Shall be cut off forever; and all souls

Concluded in God's boundless amnesty.

Festus-Thou windest and unwindest faith at will. What am I to believe?

Perhaps.

LuciferFestus-Man hath a knowledge of a time to come His most important knowledge: the weight lies