POPE'S ESSAY ON MAN.

Soul of those mighty spheres

Whose changeless path thro' heavens deep silence lies;
Soul of that smallest being,

The dwelling of whose life
Is one faint April sun-gleam ;-
Man, like these passive things,
Thy will unconsciously fulfilleth :
Like theirs, his age of endless peace,
Which time is fast maturing,
Will swiftly, surely come;

And the unbounded frame, which thou prevadest,
Will be without a flaw

Marring its perfect symmetry.

Nature's soul

That formed the earth so beautiful, and spread
Earth's lap with plenty, and life's smallest chord
Strung to unchanging unison, that gave
The happy birds their dwelling in the grove;
That yielded to the wanderers of the deep

The lovely silence of the unfathomed main,

And filled the meanest worm that crawls the earth,
With spirit, thought, and love.

305

Pope's Essay on Man is said to have been written to advocate the doctrines of Leibnitz, as they were made known to Pope by Bolingbroke and Shaftesbury. In what Pope says of natural laws and the perfection of the universe as a divinely constituted machine, there is much of Leibnitz, but Leibnitz would not have sanctioned

nor this,

All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
Whose body nature is, and God the soul;

That, changed through all, and yet in all the same;
Great in the earth, as in the ethereal frame;

Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze,

Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees,

Lives through all life, extends through all extent,
Spreads undivided, operates unspent ;

Breathes in our soul, informs our mortal part,
As full, as perfect, in a hair as heart;
As full, as perfect, in vile man that mourns,
As the rapt seraph, that adores and burns:
To Him no high, no low, no great, no small;
He fills, He bounds, connects, and equals all,

One all-extending, all-preserving Soul
Connects each being, greatest with the least;
Made beast in aid of man, and man of beast;
All served, all serving; nothing stands alone;
The chain holds on, and where it ends, unknown.

An immanent, ever-present, all-extending soul in nature was just what Leibnitz emphatically refused to admit.

306

THOMSON AND COWPER.

Thomson, in his Hymn on the Seasons, has beautifully blended the impersonality and the personality of God,

These, as they change, Almighty Father! these
Are but the varied God. The rolling year
Is full of Thee. Forth in the pleasing Spring
Thy beauty walks, thy tenderness and love.
Wide flush the fields; the softening air is balm ;
Echo the mountains round; the forest smiles;
And every sense, and every heart, is joy.
Then comes Thy glory in the Summer months,
With light and heat refulgent. Then Thy sun
Shoots full perfection thro' the swelling year;
And oft Thy voice in dreadful thunder speaks;
And oft at dawn, deep noon, or falling eve,
By brooks and groves, in hollow-whispering gales.
Thy bounty shines in Autumn unconfin'd,
And spreads a common feast for all that lives.
In Winter awful Thou! with clouds and storms
Around Thee thrown! tempest o'er tempest roll,
Majestic darkness! On the whirlwind's wings,
Riding sublime, Thou bidst the world adore,
And humblest Nature with thy northern blast.

In the conclusion of this hymn, the poet rises to a sublime expression of all for the best.

Should fate command me to the farthest verge
Of the green earth, to distant barbarous climes,
Rivers unknown to song, where first the sun
Gilds Indian mountains, or his setting beam
Flames on th' Atlantic isles, 'tis nought to me;
Since God is ever present, ever felt,

In the void waste as in the city full!
And where He vital breathes there must be joy.
When e'en at last the solemn hour shall come,
And wing my mystic flight to future worlds,
I cheerful will obey; there with new powers
Will rising wonders sing. I cannot go
Where Universal Love not smiles around,
Sustaining all yon orbs, and all their suns,
From seeing evil still educing good,
And better thence again, and better still,
In infinite progression. But I lose

Myself in Him, in Light Ineffable :

Come then, expressive Silence! muse His praise.

Cowper did not mean to be a Pantheist when he wrote

There lives and works

A soul in all things, and that soul is God.

John Sterling was once in a company where the conversation turned on poets and which of them were Christian. One gentleman was claiming Wordsworth as a Christian poet. said John Sterling, emphatically, 'Wordsworth is not a Chris

No!'

tian. He is nothing but a Church-of-England Pantheist.' That Wordsworth should have been Pantheistic is the more remarkable in that he avowedly belonged to that party in the church whose tendency is to localize the Deity; to consecrate temples and cathedrals for His special dwelling place. Wordsworth's Pantheism is found in some passages in the Excursion,' but especially in the lines on Tintern Abbey.

I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts, a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky and in the mind of man
A motion and a spirit, which impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought
And rolls through all things.

His Platonism, or belief in the pre-existence of souls, is found in the well-known lines,

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting

And cometh from afar ;
Not in entire forgetfulness
And not in utter nakedness

But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home,

Bailey's Festus has some Pantheistic lines.

Our religious poetry—that is, our hymn literature, is peculiarly destitute of the Pantheistic sentiment. This verse in Wesley's Hymns approaches the raptures of the mystic.

Ah! give me this to know,
With all Thy saints below;
Swells my soul to compass Thee;
Gasps in Thee to live and move;
Fill'd with all the Deity,

All immersed and lost in love!

The following is more to our purpose :

In Thee we move :-all things of Thee

Are full, thou Source and Life of all;
Thou vast unfathomable Sea !

(Fall prostrate. lost in wonder, fall
Ye sons of men, for God is man!)
All may we lose, so Thee we gain,

This hymn seems to be a translation of Tersteegen's hymn on the Presence of God. The corresponding verse in German

is

Luft, die Alles füllet!

Drinn wir immer schweben;

Aller Dinge Grund und Leben!
Meer ohn' Grund und Ende,
Wunder aller Wunder!

Ich senk' mich in dich hinunter:
Ich in dir,

Du in mir,

Lass mich ganz verschwinden,
Dich nur sehn und finden.
Air, which filleth all
Wherein we always move;
Ground and life of all things!
Sea without bottom or shore,
Wonder of all wonders,
I sink myself in Thee,

I in Thee,

Thou in me.

Let me vanish

To see and find only Thee.

It was impossible for Wesley to translate this literally to be sung by English congregations. For air which filleth all,' he wrote, In Thee we move.' This had the sanction of S. Paul; but, the next words, All things of Thee are full,' is the most familiar sentiment of the Greek and Roman poets.* If the third line is to be interpreted by the original, the 'God is man' is not more true and marvellous than the converse, 'man is God' I in Thee' and Thou in me.' With the next verse, Wesley changed the sense and ended the translation. German is this

The

* See the verse of Aratus from which S. Paul quoted, page 53, and also the

lines from Virgil, page 55.

Wesley's translation or paraphrase is,

As flowers their op'ning leaves display,

And glad drink in the solar fire,

So may we catch Thy every ray,

So may Thy influence us inspire;

Thou Beam of the eternal Beam,

Thou purging Fire, Thou quick'ning Flame.

Bryant, the American poet, is as little Pantheistic as Cowper, yet he writes

Thou art in the soft winds

That run along the summit of these trees
In music, Thou art in the cooler breath

That in the inmost darkness of this place

Comes scarcely felt-the barky trunks, the ground
The moist fresh ground are all instinct with Thee.
That forest flower,

With scented breath and look so like a smile,
Seems, as it issues from the shapeless mould,
An emanation of the indwelling Life,

A visible token of upholding Love,

That are the soul of this wide universe.*

He describes creation as

The boundless visible smile of Him,

To the veil of whose brow our lamps grow dim.

The following lines are in Emerson's Wood Notes. The pine tree sings—

Hearken! once more;

I will tell thee mundane lore;
Older am I than thy numbers wot,
Changes I may but I pass not.
Hitherto all things fast abide,
Safe anchored, in the tempest ridc.
Trendrant time returns to hurry
All to yean and all to bury.
All the forms are fugitive,

But the substances survive,

*It appears that John Wesley was the first English Theologian who introduced German Theology into England.