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MEMOIR OF JAMES MONTGOMERY, ESQ. Author of "The West Indies,"- "The Wanderer of Switzerland,”—“ The World before the Flood," &c. &c.

(WITH A PORTRAIT.)

." Still thro' all his strains would flow

A tone of uncomplaining woe,
Kind as the tear in Pity's eye,
Soft as the slumbering infant's sigh-
So sweetly, innocently mild-
It spoke the muse of Sorrow's child."

IT is natural to wish to know something of an author whose writings have given birth to mental pleasure, and expanded the vision of the soul. Stimulated by grateful curiosity, we look from the history to the historian, from the poetry to the poet. But this curiosity is not always to be gratified; for, during the life of an author, there is more difficulty in collecting materials for a biographical sketch, than if he was an object of public interest belonging to any other class. Much of the life of a statesman may be found in the history of the times in which he lives; and of a soldier in the records of the battles in which he has been engaged: but the life of a poet is the history of his heart, of his feelings, of his secret soul; and nothing less will fully gratify the curiosity of his admirers. But such a history, even if a biographer could be found, who would exercise his talents in recording, with impartiality, the result of the closest intimacy, ought not to be written whilst the poet lives, lest that sensibility should be wounded which has breathed with magie effect, thoughts which have found responding chords of the truest harmony in kindred hearts. Still, whilst he continues to witness the delight he has given, by what he already has written, and to generate hope, anticipation, and expectancy, in the wishes of his admirers, surely a faithful outline of the man may be given, though the more delicate tints of praise, the deeper marking shadows of character, and the concentrating light be withheld. If the picture cannot be completely finished during the life-time of the subject, the pencil-sketch may afford some gratification. Such sketches are sure to be taken of characters so interesting as popular living poets; and if the objects of our admiration do not sit to first-rate artists, the mere pentographical outline of their minds will be eagerly sought for by the world; for a poet is not only a public character, in which his cotemporaries have a present NEW MONTHLY MAG.-No. $0.

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ears,

That spirit's voice in every tone he hears;
"Tis his the magic meaning to rehearse,
To utter oracles in glowing verse,
Heroic themes from age to age prolong,
And make the dead in nature, live in song.
Though 'graven rocks the warrior's deeds
proclaim,

And mountains hewn to statues wear his
name;

Though shrined in adamant his relics lie
Beneath a pyramid that scales the sky,
All that the hand has fashioned shall decay,
All that the eye admires shall pass away;
The mouldering rocks, the hero's hope
shall fail,
Earthquakes shall heave the mountain to
the vale;

The shrine of adamant betray its trust,
The lyre, alone, immortal fame secures,
And the proud pyramid resolve to dust;
For song, alone, through nature's change
endures;

Transfus'd, like life, from breast to breast
it glows,

From sire to son by sure succession flows; Speeds its increasing flight from clime to clime,

A

Outstripping Death upon the wings of

Time."

Mr. MONTGOMERY was the eldest son of a Moravian minister; he was born November 4, 1771, at Irvine, a small sea-port in Ayrshire, North Britain. He was not, however, fated, for any length of time, to inhale the same air as his countryman, Robert Burns; for at four years of age he accompanied his parents to Ireland, where for a short period they resided at Gracehill, in the county of Antrim. In the course of VOL. X, 3 U

514

Memoir of James Montgomery, Esq.

the following year he was brought over to England, and placed, for the purpose of Education, us deprived in his infancy of a father's care and a mother's tenderness,) at Fulnick, a Moravian seminary, in Yorkshire, in order, as it appears, to enable his mother to accompany his father, about to preach the gospel to the poor benighted negroes in the West Indies, where they both fell sacrifices to the malignity of the climate, (the one in the island of Barbadoes, and the other in Tobago,) leaving three infant, orphan children to the protection of the God to whose service their lives had been devoted. To the place of his birth, and the sacrifice to faith and duty which his parents made, Montgomery has thus alluded in his " Departed Days:"

The loud Atlantic Ocean

On Scotland's rugged breast
Rocks with harmonious motion

His weary waves to rest;

And gleaming round her emerald isles,
In all the pomp of sunset smiles :-
On that romantic shore

My parents hailed their first-born boy:
A mother's pangs my mother bore,
My father felt a father's joy:-
My father!-mother!-parents! - are no

more !

Beneath the Lion star, they sleep
Beyond the western deep;

And when the Sun's noon glory crests the

waves,

He shines without a shadow on their graves."

In the peaceful walls of Fulnick, he passed the following ten years. During that period he was instructed in Latin, Greek, German, and French; and (like the rest of his schoolfellows) was as carefully secluded from all commerce with the world, as if he had been immured in a cloister; and perhaps he never once conversed for ten minutes with any person whatever, except his schoolmates and masters, or occasional Moravian visitors! To a mind so exquisitely tender as that Montgomery possesses from nature, a life so monastic and monotonous was dangerous; and it is not at all unlikely that the peculiar views which these good people take of the Christian revelation, have added much to the indulged melancholy of his imagination. Of the domestic econo my of the seminary, of the exercise and amusements in which the children were indulged, or the plan pursued in giving them scholastic information, it is not necessary to enlarge; but the keynote to which the muse of Montgomery has adapted her harmony may be found

[Jan, 1,

in the religious tone and peculiar_expression of the days he spent at Fulnick; for there, every thing that he did, he was instructed to do for the love of Jesus Christ, the second person in the Trinity, whom the Moravians always address as if he were the first: offering up their prayers to, and not through him, whose sufferings in the flesh are their constant and everlasting theme, and whom the pupils are taught to regard in the amiable and endearing light of a friend and a brother.

This system must have had peculiar charms to an ardent and feeling mind like that of Montgomery: and as the seeds of poesy which nature had sown, began to germinate, it is no wonder that the hymns peculiarly used by the Moravians, so full of warm and animated expressions, of tender complaints, of unbounded love, and such lofty aspirations should be his delight; or that, as soon as his preceptors had taught him to write and to spell, he should try to imitate them; and indeed, such was the effect produced by these overbearing causes, that before he was ten years of age he had filled a little volume with sacred poems of his own composing.

That these juvenile verses were similar in style and construction to the hymns he daily read and heard, may be well imagined, when it is considered, that, at the time he wrote them, he was unacquainted with any of the great English poets for so careful were the teachers to preserve the minds of their pupils from any possible contagion, that on the father of one of the boys sending a volume of poems, selected as the choicest, for their moral and religious sentiments, from Milton, Thomson, and Young, the book was carefully examined by one of the masters, and pruned of its unprofitable passages. When the paternal present came to the boy's hand, he had the mortification to find it mutilated and imperfect, many leaves clipt out, and many more in a mangled state! Notwithstanding this extreme care, our youthful Tyro contrived, by degrees, by secretly borrowing, and reading books by stealth, to add to his stock of poetical ideas: for before he was twelve years old, he had filled two more volumes with his verses; and before he was fourteen, he had composed a mock-heroic poem, in three books, which contained more than a thousand lines in imitation of Homer's Frogs and Mice.

The praises which his efforts called forth from those of his friends to whom he shewed the effusions of his muse

1819.]

Memoir of James Montgomery, Esq.

fired his imagination. He saw in its perspective the banner of fame which posterity would willingly wave over his memory; and he planned and began many an epic poem, in which his youthful fancy, whilst he was employed in writing its exordium, would discern immortality. These, however, in their turn, were all discarded for newly presented and more perfect subjects. At length he stumbled upon one which he thought worthy of all the energies of his sanguine mind, at fifteen years of age-the wars in the reign of ALFRED THE GREAT. His ambition, and the temerity of childhood, (for with all his aspirations after fame, he was a child in years, and still more in simplicity of manners and ignorance of the world,) prevented the mighty subject from appalling him; and his want of experience producing temerity, he determined upon quitting the beaten track of heroic poetry, and pursuing his discovery of a new and original path. The books of his poem were to consist of Pindaric odes, in which the story was to be conveyed; conceiving it possible to unite all the magnificene and sublimity of the epic with the glowing enthusiasm of the Pindaric. This was truly boyish daring; but it was the daring of a boy of genius.

However, like many of the preceding plans which had floated in the fertile brain of the nestling poet, Alfred was never matured, though he persevered in it till he had completed two books, which contained about twenty Pindaric odes. It is not probable that any of

them are now in existence. The ma

tured taste of their author, has, in all probability, long ago consigned them to oblivion: but the spirit which imagined

them will command admiration from

515

ney, disguised as a peasant, and the
first ode opened with a description of
the Almighty seated upon his throne
looking down and commiserating the
ruins of England, when a host of the
spirits of Englishmen, who had just pe-
rished in a battle with the Danes, ap-
peared in his presence to receive their
eternal doom! These spirits described
the state of their country, and implored
the Sovereign of the Universe to inter-
pose and deliver it from despotism.
Such was the opening of the juvenile
epic! It was a fearless flight! And
though it fell abortive, the boldness of
the conception must have convinced the
conductors of the Fulnick Academy, that
their pupil was of no common fashion;
and that the "Heaven-born flights" of
his imagination, would, at some future
period, when it was tempered by judge-
ment, reflect no little lustre on the cha-
racter of a Christian minister of their
peculiar faith, for which, at that time,
he was designed: but, like his own Javan,
in the "World before the Flood,"
"Meanwhile, excursive fancy long'd to view
The world, which yet by fame alone he
knew;
The joys of freedom were his daily themes,
Glory the secret of his midnight dreams;-
That dream he told not, tho' his heart would

ache:"

For, like the Spartan boy, who having stolen a fox, and hidden it under his cloak, rather chose to let the animal tear out his bowels, than discover his theft,

he kept his anxious aspirations after fame a secret, till the change which became visible in his health and disposition betrayed it. In vain the worthy superiors strove to bring back their pupil to mind most proper for a divinity student. the train of thought, and placidity of every one capable of entering with recol- Every mean was tried to bring him back to that serious sense which would best lected feelings into the conceptions of a youthful enthusiast. The first scintil- resist the love of fame, and repress his lations of genius are valuable to those incessant longings after the world; of best able to estimate the gem, when it which, at this time, (to use his own has attained the polish of experience; words, when, many years afterwards, and even the still-born progeny of such he was speaking on this subject) he an intellect as that of Montgomery, of the mysteries beyond the grave. was "almost as ignorant as he was, which were conceived before his strength Yet his thoughts were constantly fixed, was able to bring them to maturity, must be interesting. To prove that upon the picture which his imagination they were so, the writer of this brief had drawn; and except in contemplat memoir feels happy in recollecting what ing the air-built castles which he was he was once told, on undoubted autho continually erecting in his mind, rity, was the subject of the first and second odes of the contemplated poem already mentioned. It commenced. whilst Alfred was in the Isle of Athel

...." No delight the minstrel's bosom knew,

None, save the tones that from his harp he drew,

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