may he ride them! Like many other men of mark, he has had to fight his way. He was long a wonder unto many. The foolish laughed at, the malignant defamed, the hypercritical underrated him, and from his peers he received little sympathy or support. But, like all the brave, he struggled on, and was rewarded with victory. His popularity, at first excited by the eccentricities, was at last allowed calmly to rest on the excellence of his preaching and character. "Those who came to laugh remained to pray," personal and party prejudice was gradually subdued, his oddities mellowed and softened with time, and we may now as safely as we can conscientiously declare, that the United Presbyterian Church, with all its host of talented men, possesses scarcely one who equals in genius, and very few who surpass in talent, plain, strong, gifted William Ander son. We may just add that Mr Anderson, although not distinguished for pastoral visitation, is most exemplary in waiting on the sick-bed. We heard recently a rather amus ing anecdote of him. Some person called, complaining that he had been eighteen years a member of his congregation and had never been visited by his minister. "You should be very thankful,” replied Mr Anderson. "How that, sir?" rejoined Mr B. "I never visit any but those in whose houses God has entered by affliction. It seems you have been eighteen years without affliction in your family; few are so highly privileged. I trust other eighteen years may elapse ere I be in your house, sir. Good morning, Mr B." So may all querulous Bs or blockheads be treated! * * Mr Anderson is just issuing a volume on " Regeneration," which we expect to be quite worthy of him. LEIGH HUNT. THE present state of poetry is a subject on which a great deal of nonsense has been written, and on which a greater deal still of nonsense is every day spoken. "We have no poets now-a-days," is the chatter at many a tea-table-a chatter which a glance at a few of the present names "flaming on the forehead" of our literary sky, is enough to confute. Beside such veterans as Wordsworth, Wilson, Croly, Montgomery, and our present subject, Leigh Hunt, who are now rather honorary than active members of the corporation of Apollo, there are numerous aspirants of the laurel, of whom high hopes may be entertained. There is especially a little cluster of earnest poets whom we are at all times delighted to honour, and some of whom we may now briefly characterise, as an introduction not inappropriate to a notice of one who long ago, and in days darker than these, set them a good example, and who then stood almost singular in adding the spirit of the martyr to the accomplishments of the muses' son. We may name, then, Longfellow, Emerson, Bailey, Tennyson, and the Brownings, as the Dü Majorum Gentum of this modern class. We name first the American poet, Longfellow. We know nothing whatever of his theoretical creed, but we are not blind to the marks of sincerity and of high-minded aspiration which pervade his poetry. He feels what Foster uniformly forgets or denies, the worth of man. He looks at the ruins of the human soul in a certain rich moonlight which softens many an asperity, fills up many a chasm, symmetrises many a disproportion, and sheds a soft golden film, a gossamer of the night, over the whole. eye, too, is anointed to see innumerable fine and fairy hands His repairing the desolation, as well as beautifying its decay. "It is a little thing to be a man." Yes, comparatively it is; but whence springs the smallness? Surely from the greatness of the height whence we have fallen, and to which we are invited to aspire. Life and man, like the Jura in the presence of Mont Blanc, dwindle before a greater, which greater in this case is the grandeur of man's ideal of himself and of God. It is little to be, it is far less to doubt of man. Spring but this one leak, and what a black flood of scepticism rushes in-death is regarded with the avidity of a suicide, and it is well if the Foster does not darken into the Swift. Hear Longfellow : "Not enjoyment and not sorrow And again: Is our being's destined way; "Life is real, life is earnest, And the grave is not its goal: Such manly lines, rising clear, loud, and bold, like the notes of Chanticleer, dissipate a thousand dismal dreams and terrors of the night. They are not the day, but they are its promise. What we miss in Longfellow is a decided acknowledgment of the realisation which such sentiments as his find in Christianity. His verses are torn from their proper Christian context. Now, a few fresh leaves snapped from the bough may tell that spring has come, but we prefer the full tidings of the round tree itself. In Emerson we find, amid more power, originality, and perhaps equal sincerity, a more palpably vital defect. What the "hope set before" him in his melancholy gospel is we cannot tell. In his " Threnody" he laments most sweetly and plaintively the loss of a favourite son, and hints at some obscure and mystic source of consolation, described in the words, that his child is "Lost in God, in Godhead found." Alas! can he allow his child, with his glorious personality, to slide away into a vague, vast ocean, even as his own dreams among the "blackberry vines" did leave his soul, with no trace behind? Can he part with a son as with a thought? Can he believe that the soul which, as it looked through the "blue summer" of his child's eyes, seemed to "span the mystic gulph 'tween God and man,” is henceforth an unconscious nonentity, somewhere in the eternal spaces, but with no spring of return to him, and no prospect of encounter with him, save in the cold commerce of the waves of the Pantheistic deep? Or if he has, apart from this dreary dream, a principle of hope and comfort, is there no word in the ample tongue of Milton and Coleridge that can express this hope? and if there be, why does he delay to inform us what we are to substitute for the simple declaration, "Them that sleep in Jesus shall the Lord bring with him?" Indeed, over all Emerson's poems, and over those of many of his followers, there hangs a deep gloom. His fun, when he attempts to be humorous, is dull and feeble. It is the drone of the "humble bee," which is quite as melancholy as it is mirthful. He is never so eloquent as when expressing the feelings of one who, from the pursuits of ambition, and the company of men, has sought a sad solace in Nature, which yet without a God can only glare and glitter about his eye and imagiation, but not touch his heart. His personal purity, which is that of a guarded dewdrop-has saved him from many pains and penalties; but we do think that it is the subtlety which so strangely mingles with the simplicity of his nature, like the eye of the basilisk looking out from the silvery plumage of the dove, which has veiled from many the fact that he is not a happy man. No wonder although, according to a CERTAIN rumour, Emerson does not fully sympathise with Bailey of "Festus." How can he? How can a man who manages his misery so artfully that the deep scar looks like a badge of honour upon his bosom-who can regulate, turn, and wind his madness like a watch-sympathise with one who, with the power and precipitation of a thunder-shower, expresses his whole soul to the world in tumultuous verse? How stiff and measured the extravagances (madness prepense) of Emerson look beside Bailey's unpremeditated hallelujahs! In Emerson you hear a man crying "down" to the idea of a personal deity, which is for ever rising in his truly poetical heart; to Bailey the universe is but a reflector for the face of a Saviour and God. In Emerson you find a nature, originally poetic and even devout, chilled and strangled by the frost of an imperfect philosophy (as though an eagle on his way to the sun were killed by the cold of our upper atmosphere); in "Festus" faith is the philosophy, hope is the science, and love the logic of the strain. In Emerson's verse, truth lurks like a guilty thing in single lines, which are rather pinfolds than panoramas; Bailey's broad nature luxuriates in long, interlinked, and magnificent passages, which rise and rise till no wing short of that of imagination can reach and rest upon their summit. Leaving comparisons, we may simply say that, in the two qualities of impulse and earnestness, we have seldom read a work to be compared with "Festus." We care nothing for its theory-admit its many and monstrous faults -are not careful to answer the charge of imitation in its plan-but the vigour of individual thought, the amplitude of general view, and wealth of imagery-the rough strength of language, and, above all, the deep, sparkling, "bloodpower of spirit," so religious and so fervidly sincere, have compelled, like a captive, our at first unwilling admiration. It now resounds in our ears like the Pan-pipe of a belated Titan from his lonely rock, at once bewailing the past, and calling, in no measured strains, for the advent of the future. |