Thou, who houseless, sole, forlorn, Long hast borne the proud world's scorn, Ye who, tossed on beds of pain, Ye, by fiercer anguish torn, In strong remorse for guilt who mourn; A wounded spirit who can bear! Sinner, come! for here is found Rest eternal, sacred, sure.1 Among her general poems there are several of a sacred character, as the address to the Deity, beginning 'God of my life, and author of my days!' The earlier publications of George Crabbe (1756-1832) belong wholly to the eighteenth century. The 'Candidate,' the 'Library,' the Village,' and the 'Newspaper,' appeared between 1780 and 1785. After that date, as if contented with the praise and popularity he had won, he retired into the seclusion of domestic and parochial life, so that when his 'Village Register' was published twenty-two years afterwards, in 1807, he was welcomed almost as a new writer. In the character, also, as well as in the date of his poetry, he is a link between two periods. The influence of Pope, the grand model of eighteenth-century poets, upon his style of thought and versification is constantly visible and frequently acknowledged, especially in his earlier works. In simplicity, on the other hand, in minuteness of observation, in his love of Nature, and in thorough sympathy with the poor, he belonged rather to that newer school of poetry of which there were few traces until the last century was drawing near its close. Crabbe's title to be ranked among authors of sacred poetry rests chiefly upon the beautiful Pilgrim's Song, 'Pil Works, i. 334. grim, burdened with thy sin,' &c.,' in 'Sir Eustace Grey,' a poem written in 1804. He gained his literary successes as the Christian moralist, the keen-eyed but kindly censor of humble life. While he was yet a young medical practitioner struggling against adverse circumstances at Aldborough, his native place, he formed his purpose, and steadfastly kept to it. Be it my boast to please and to improve, To warm the soul to virtue and to love; And gild the moral with the charm of verse.2 Among the fragments of sacred poetry which occur in his early note-books, and which were published by his son among his other works, there is one dated 1778, upon the Resurrection, suggested by early spring flowers, and the following short aspiration, as he wandered in the late evening along the 'samphire banks' of the Suffolk coast: 3 The sober stillness of the night And all that breathes along the shore, Invite to solemn prayer. Vouchsafe to me that spirit, Lord, Which points the sacred way, Some incidental mention has been made of William Blake (1757-1827), in another of these chapters. To the majority of his contemporaries, his poetry was as unintelligible as his painting. He was simply pitied as a madman, or scorned as a visionary mystic. His admirers in a later age have done him ample justice. He was a poet,' writes one of his editors, 'who in his best things has hardly fallen short of the large utterances of the Elizabethan dramatists, the pastoral simplicity of Wordsworth, the subtlety and fire of Shelley, and the 1 G. Crabbe's Poetical Works, with his Letters, &c., by his Son, ii. 275. 2 'The Wish,' id. ii. 310. Id. i. II. • Id. ii. 313. lyrical tenderness of Tennyson.' His simpler poems are many of them delightful. And the reader who will bear patiently with great faults-wild fancies of a disordered imagination, obscurities, enigmas, paradoxes, eccentricities of religious and mòral belief, extravagances of expression, metrical irregularities, and sometimes grammatical carelessness-will often find himself rewarded by a strain of poetry which in depth and sweetness may be said to exceed any that the eighteenth century has elsewhere produced. As a writer of sacred poetry he had capacities of no ordinary kind. His words I am in God's presence night and day- were to him the expression of a reality as vividly impressed upon his conception as any outward object of sense could be to an ordinary mind. No one can read his poems without feeling convinced of this. He died in a very rapture of joy, composing and uttering almost to the very last songs to his Maker so sweetly, to the ears of his wife, that when she stood to hear him, he, looking upon her most affectionately, said "My beloved, they are not mine, no, they are not mine."'3 None could be more persuaded than he was that death is in very truth the 'golden door' of life, re-opening inlets of spiritual perception among which the outward senses are the least and the most imperfect. In one of his poems he writes : 4 The door of death is made of gold, One of the most beautiful of his 'Songs of Innocence,' published in 1789, is that entitled, 'On another's sorrow.' Part of it runs thus : 1 Preface to W. Blake's Poetical Sketches, ed. by R. H., p. xiv. 2 From a MS. poem, quoted in Al. Gilchrist's Life of Blake, p. 310. • Id. 361. 4 Cf. A. C. Swinburne's Life of Blake, p. 242. Can I see another's woe, And not seek for kind relief? Can I see a falling tear, And not feel my sorrow's share? Can a mother sit and hear He doth give His joy to all; Think not thou canst sigh a sigh, And thy Maker is not by ; Think not thou canst weep a tear, And thy Maker is not near.1 His own heart was one that overflowed with wide sympathy; but most of all was he full of tenderness towards little children. The following, entitled 'The Lamb,' may be quoted as an example :— Little lamb, who made thee? Dost thou know who made thee? Little lamb, who made thee? Dost thou know who made thee? Little lamb, I'll tell thee; Little lamb, I'll tell thee. 1 W. Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience, p. 34. He is called by thy name; For He calls himself a Lamb: Little lamb, God bless thee. Little lamb, God bless thee !! Samuel Coleridge, although only born in 1772, was, chronologically, an eighteenth-century poet. 1797 has been very properly called his great poetical year; and most of his noblest verses, including many that were not published till 1816, were composed before the close of the century. There could scarcely be a stronger illustration of the development of thought during the ninety years preceding than the contrast between the poetry of Coleridge and that which flourished in the reign of Anne. Coleridge's verse is deeply penetrated with religious feeling, though he rarely wrote upon what are commonly called sacred subjects. It was so even at the time of his greatest speculative perplexities, when (to use his own words) 'I found myself all afloat: doubts rushed in; broke upon me "from the fountains of the great deep," and "fell from the windows of heaven." The fontal truths of natural and revealed religion alike contributed to the flood; and it was long ere my ark touched on an Ararat and rested.' 2 His was a mind that could not be satisfied without probing to the foundations of religion and morals; and metaphysical difficulties, such as those which attended his meditations on personality in God as reconciled with infinity, sorely perplexed him. But, as he often has said, his difficulties were intellectual; in feeling he never lost his hold on faith and goodness. 'My head was with Spinoza, though my whole heart remained with Paul and John.' He passed through a phase of zealous Unitarianism, but did not find what he wanted in it; and gradually, as he exchanged Hartley's philosophy for views more nearly approaching those of Kant, and discerned more clearly the properties and limitations of the human 1 W. Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience, p. 8. 2 Life of S. T. Coleridge, by Jas. Gillman, i. 87. • Id. |