He had felt the blessing of faith and prayer amid the terrors of a great storm. The hymn that follows'How are Thy servants blessed, O Lord,' 'made by a gentleman at the conclusion of his travels,' was the expression of his own devout gratitude on the occasion when he narrowly escaped from shipwreck off the Coast of Liguria. The last1 of the five papers, in which Addison clothed a part of his meditations in sacred verse, is shaped in the form of a letter from the worthy clergyman who had been represented as one of that circle of intimate friends of which the 'Spectator' himself, Sir Roger de Coverley, and Will Honeycomb were principal members. He has been, he says, and still is seriously ill, and his thoughts are often employed in meditating on the great change to which he feels that he may be drawing near. He quotes, at length, a striking passage from Sherlock's Treatise on Death; and then, dwelling in a few impressive words on his Christian faith being his one only support, he adds the hymn which he had composed during his sickness, 'When rising from the bed of death.' It will be readily understood that the effect and popularity of Addison's hymns were immensely enhanced by the manner in which they appeared. Dr. Drake, in his edition of The English Essayists of the Last Century, quotes the remark of a contemporary writer, that all the pulpit discourses of a year scarce. produced half the good as flowed from the Spectator of one day.' Extreme as this over-statement is—as the suppression of all preaching for a few months would have quickly shown-no doubt there was much truth in it, so far as regarded a very great number of the readers of the Spectator. We are told by Budgell that 20,000 numbers were sometimes sold in one day; and as each paper passed on an average through several hands, the circulation must be considered as something wholly un 1 Spectator, No. 513. paralleled in that age. Thoughts upon religion as well as upon morality, treated in a popular and attractive form, were brought into the homes and to the hearts of thousands who had long been comparative strangers to such reflections. There cannot be the least doubt that Addison's hymns, introduced as they were so aptly, and in terms so well fitted to appeal to the deeper feelings of Englishmen, clung to the memory of admiring readers to a greater extent than could have been expected from their intrinsic merit. That merit, however, is by no means inconsiderable. They were never meant for congregational singing, and though some of them are often found in collections intended for this purpose, they are, with an exception,1 out of place there. But there is none the less a deep vein in them of pure and devout piety. Mr. George Macdonald, while acknowledging the charm which he finds in that hymn, especially of 'The spacious firmament on high,' fancies nevertheless that he sees in it 'a sign of the poetic times: a flatness of spirit, arising from the evanishment of the mystical element, begins to result in a worship of power.' The hymn, he adds, is good, yet 'like the loveliness of the red and lowering west, it gives sign of a grey and cheerless dawn, under whose dreariness the child will first doubt if his father loves him, and next doubt if he has a father at all, and is not a mere foundling that nature has lifted from her path.'2 There would have been more force in these remarks, suggestive as they are, if Addison had written no other hymns than that which Mr. Macdonald has mainly in his mind. It is true that in all his writings there is a certain sobriety and reserve in his treatment of devotional subjects which not unfrequently gives almost an appearance of frigidity. Thus, God is nearly always spoken of as 'the Supreme Being.' This was owing 1 Some verses from When all Thy mercies' make an excellent hymn, which may yet become quite popular in public worship. 2 England's Antiphon, 279. 2 partly to the general character of the papers among which they appeared, but in great measure also to the tone of Addison's mind. And yet it is perfectly clear that he was as strongly persuaded of the reality of that immediate intuition of God on the part of the believer, which is the root principle of all mysticism, and of a direct Divine influence upon the soul, as those who have expressed the same belief in the most rapturous terms of enthusiasm. The poetical motto, which is intended to sound the keynote of the Essay in which the last of his hymns is introduced, is the line from Virgil Afflata est numine quando Jam propiore Dei, with Dryden's translation of it, When all the god came rushing on her soul. Nor could the sense of a direct contact of the spirit of man with Deity be more earnestly expressed than in those two fine lines in which he called to mind his communion with a higher Power in an hour of great peril:Whilst in the confidence of prayer, My soul took hold on Thee. A passing reference is due to the famous soliloquy in Cato. It may rank with sacred poetry, as worthily as the comparative purification of the stage which Addison's influence effected is worthy to be classed among his best deeds as a Christian moralist. 2 Alexander Pope (1688-1744) was only to a very limited extent a writer of sacred poetry in the stricter meaning of the expression. 'Vital spark of heavenly flame,' the ambition of village choirs in old days, was written in 1712. He had commented in a letter to Steele on the well-known Animula, vagula, etc., of Hadrian, and was requested in return to compose an ode upon them, in two or three stanzas, which might 1 Cp. Al. Knox, Remains, iii. 343. 3 2 C. B. Pearson in Oxford Essays (1858), p. 161. Spectator, No. 532. be set to music.1 Pope complied, borrowing largely from the Thought of Death, by Flatman, a barrister, poet, and painter, who had died in 1688, the year Pope was born.2 The verses from which the original idea was taken had been curiously characteristic of the dying emperor, the conflicting elements in whose varied character 'his earnestness and his levity, his zeal for knowledge and frivolity in appreciating it, his patient endurance and restless excitability' are all reflected in the lines with which he beguiled the later moments of a painful and lingering malady. Pope's ode cannot be called even a free paraphrase of the words by which it was suggested; it is simply a rendering of the general idea in a Christian sense. Yet it retains a good deal of the artificial tone which was perhaps almost inevitable in transferring, even with great alterations, to a Christian, in his most solemn hour, words so deeply stamped with the thought and special character of the dying Roman. It is, however, by no means unworthy of the repute it gained. The sacred eclogue, entitled the Messiah, appeared first in the Spectator for May 14, 1712. More authors than one have remarked upon what has been aptly called its 'flamboyant' style, by which it contrasts most unfavourably with the sublime simplicity of Isaiah. Wordsworth refers to it as a special example of 'what is usually called poetic diction,' as compared with the genuine language of poetry.5 Pope's rendering of St. Francis Xavier's prayer comes with a sort of incongruity in the middle of his poems. It is as follows: Thou art my God, sole object of my love- 1 Miller's On Hymns, quoted in F. Saunders's Evenings with the Sacred Poets, 290. 2 Id. 3 C. Merivale's Hist. of the Romans under the Empire (1862), vii. 490. F. Saunders's Evenings, etc., 291; G. Macdonald's England's Antiphon, 285. 5 W. Wordsworth, Appendix to Poems on Poetic Diction, v. 193, Not for the fear of endless pains below, He appears to have had the first verse of it in mind when he wrote in The Universal Prayer— What conscience dictates to be done, Or warns me not to do This, teach me more than hell to shun, The verse and the sentiment which it contains is a Pope wrote little sacred verse; but his special aim was to be a writer of ethical poetry,1 with an ethical system based upon the strongest foundations of religion. The design of the Essay on Man approached very nearly to that of a sacred poem. Milton, in the solemn prelude to his great work, implores the illumining aid of the Holy Spirit That to the height of this great argument I may assert eternal Providence, And justify the ways of God to men.2 1 'Pope's predilection for ethical poetry grew on him. . . . In his last illness he compared himself to Socrates, dispensing his morality among his friends just as he was dying.'-J. Conington (on the poetry of Pope), Oxford Essays (1858), p. 47. Paradise Lost, i. 24. |