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When rushing worlds,

The comets of the infinite, shall flash

Loose thro' the gloom, and the last thundering shock
Of Earths and Suns still shout their worshipp'd God.1

"How charming is divine philosophy!" is not the first exclamation that rises to the lips after reading the poems we have been considering. Nor could their authors claim, with Addison, that they "brought philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and in coffeehouses." Many of the pieces are so destitute of real thought that they could have had but little influence, and almost none present their ideas in a way that is attractive or easy to follow. They lack Dryden's rare faculty of reasoning in verse, they are far too abstract, their arguments are not presented simply enough and do not follow naturally from one to another; digressions are numerous and not easily distinguished from the main thought, and too often the ideas are confused by an inflated, involved style and exuberant diction that are entirely unsuited to the purpose. The eighteenth century produced any number of versified treatises on Knowledge, Beauty, Concord, Grace, Distress, Wisdom, Commerce, Poverty, Truth, Money, Gratitude, Humility, Genius, Society, Reason, Benevolence, Conscience, and the like, in which high-sounding language and an ornate, involved style were used as a kind of alembic for converting dull prose into inspired verse. Such themes can be vitalized and poetized only by an unusual writer, and great poets were lacking. Vigorous and acute thinking was no rarity in the days of Berkeley, Hume, Adam Smith, Johnson, and Burke, but it did not get into poetry. The Essay on Man, Night Thoughts, and Pleasures of Imagination are typical of the philosophical poems of the time, which might be shrewd and clever, dull and platitudinous, or vague and rhapsodical, but which were pretty sure not to be well arranged, closely reasoned, or profound.

RELIGIOUS POETRY

Most persons who read poetry to-day think of the rebellion of Satan as a myth and the story of Adam and Eve as an allegory. A large number, to be sure, still believe or profess to believe in the literal truth of the early chapters of Genesis, but they do not hold the events narrated in that part of the Bible as a vital part of their

1 Brown also wrote some blank-verse "Musings during a Night-walk" (see his Wanderer in Norway, 2d ed., 1816, pp. 145–60).

creed. It was not so in the eighteenth century. Then the fall of man, the personality of the devil, the terrors of a real hell-fire, and the joys of heaven not only were believed in but were thought matters of prime importance; they were preached from the pulpit and talked of at the hearth. Particularly was this the case among the dissenters, who proudly counted Milton as one of their number. With the Puritans, and to a less extent with the Methodists, Baptists, and other nonconformists, a large part of whose leisure thinking, talking, and reading was occupied with religious matters, the next world was an ever-present reality.

By this class novels and plays were severely frowned upon and most secular literature was looked at askance, with the result that such religious books as were allowed were eagerly seized upon. Little is said about most of these works in our histories of literature, since, although no popularity is so great as that of the religious book, none is usually so ephemeral. Who has ever heard of Elizabeth Rowe, whom Johnson, Klopstock, and Wieland praised? of her Friendship in Death, which was twice translated into French? or of her Devout Exercises of the Heart, which, after going through editions without number, was turned into blank verse? How many persons know that Isaac Watts wrote a book of poems that was reprinted at least twenty-five times? Who but the student of American beginnings ever heard of Wigglesworth's Day of Doom, the most widely-read book, after the Bible, in colonial New England? Or, turning to our own day, who now reads the thousands of volumes of Spurgeon's or Talmage's sermons, or the millions of copies of Titus, Comrade of the Cross? Second-hand bookstores always have Young's Night Thoughts, Pollok's Course of Time, and Ingraham's Prince of the House of David in stock, but seldom find purchasers for them. Yet these are the books that have gone to the people's hearts, the sources from which the young have derived their ideals and the old received their consolation. They are the works that shaped popular taste to an extent that we do not realize, and, if literary history ever takes account of what is really read, they must receive attention. Of course, they rarely have any esthetic value. Their appeal is, in the main, to uncultivated readers whose taste in all the arts must necessarily be undeveloped; and their success is often due to their very faults, to sentimentality or morbidity, to a declamatory, rhetorical style or a fluent expression of platitudes.

1 Horae Lyricae (1706). Watts's Hymns (1707) have few readers to-day; yet fifty thousand copies were printed annually one hundred years after their first publication. In America alone his songs for children were published 25 times at Hartford, 64 times at Haverhill, and 97 times at Boston before 1797 (W. M. Stone, Divine and Moral Songs of Isaac Walls, N. Y., privately printed, 1918, pp. 74-81).

It is hard to realize that Paradise Lost could ever have been thought of in the same class as these melancholy moralizings long since forgotten; yet such was unquestionably the position it held in the minds of hundreds of religious persons who were largely indifferent to its esthetic qualities. Even among the educated, the religious aspect of Milton's work gained it no few readers and imitators in a century that laid preponderant stress on the moral and spiritual side of literature. Thus it was that among the earliest uses to which the verse and style of the Christian epic were put was the religious, and that among the writers most ready to follow Milton were dissenting clergymen (like Isaac Watts and his friends), some of whose poems enjoyed great popularity and probably had considerable influence.2 As blank verse came to be more generally adopted, those who employed it for religious poetry naturally became more numerous; yet for a long time they confined most of their efforts to short pieces, principally to paraphrases of chapters in the Bible. About the middle of the century their number was considerably augmented through the bequest of the Rev. Thomas Seaton, who in 1741 left his estate to the University of Cambridge on condition that the income should be given annually to the master of arts who wrote the best poem on "the Perfections or Attributes of the Supreme Being," or some similar subject. It was further stipulated that the successful piece should be printed.

The prize was first won in 1750 by the erratic and unfortunate Christopher Smart, whose poem On the Eternity of the Supreme Being begins thus:

Hail, wond'rous Being, who in pow'r supreme
Exists from everlasting, whose great name
Deep in the human heart, and every atom
The Air, the Earth or azure Main contains
In undecypher'd characters is wrote -
INCOMPREHENSIBLE! — O what can words,
The weak interpreters of mortal thoughts,

Or what can thoughts (tho' wild of wing they rove
Thro' the vast concave of th' aetherial round). . . .

As Smart received the prize the three following years, and again in 1755, and as his poems are all in the same style as the first, he not only pointed out the path which the winners of Seatonian laurels should take but gave them a good start on it. His example was sedulously followed; for of the forty-six successful poems published

1 See pp. 33-6 above.

2 See pp. 102-4, 109-12, above.

3 I have noticed nineteen paraphrases, mainly of Psalms, from 1712 to 1751. • For Smart's other poems, see pp. 365-6 above.

between 1750 and 1806 all but seven copy Paradise Lost in their verse and style,1 many of them keeping closer to it than Smart does, besides often borrowing its words, phrases, and ideas. These thirtynine poetical exercises by no means represent all the verse of the kind that was written in the competition, for some of the efforts published by unsuccessful aspirants are quite as Miltonic as those which won the prize.2

These Seaton pieces, which were very numerous and fairly regular in their appearance, must have had not a little influence upon the religious verse of the time. One unrimed religious poem of some length had, however, been written several years before the prize was awarded, Thomas Hobson's Christianity the Light of the Moral World, an attempt to prove that morality needs the light of revealed religion. Hobson copies the verse of Paradise Lost in this fashion:

The palpable obscure

Of antient Chaos and her Sister-Night

Confounded fled. All nature smil'd serene. . . .

At thy approach, if philosophic minds
Conjecture truth, the vegetable race

Spontaneous kindled into fragrant life.

The versified sermons, like many other eighteenth-century publications, were often issued without the names of their authors, — an indication, it may be hoped, of some doubt in the writers' minds as to their inspiration. Such self-distrust would certainly have been

1 All but those for 1760, 1761, 1762 (these three by the same man), 1781, 1783, 1785, 1790. Some years the prize seems not to have been awarded, for the Cambridge Prize Poems (2 vols., 1808), which professes to be complete to 1806, gives but forty-six in fifty-seven years; and occasionally, as in 1775, two prizes were given in the same year. One of the pieces that does not employ Milton's blank verse, the poem for 1762, is clearly influenced by his octosyllabics.

2 See Bibl. I, 1757 (Bally), 1804 (Wrangham), and perhaps 1771 (Roberts). The Redemption, a Monody, by James Scott, which failed to receive the prize in 1763 but is printed in the Cambridge Prize Poems volumes (i. 323-32), is modelled on Lycidas. 3 Hobson's work, published in 1745, was composed "above eight years" earlier (see p. 15).

Page 22 ("the palpable obscure" is from P. L., ii. 406). A few of the other phrases borrowed directly from Milton are: "darkness spread Her black pavilion" (p. 18, cf. P. L., ii. 960); “sin-born Death” (p. 34, cf. P..L., x. 596); "orient beam" (p. 34, cf. P. L., iv. 644, of the sun in each case); "universal frame" (p. 37, cf. P. L., v. 154, of the universe in each case); "optic tube" (p. 46, cf. P. L., iii. 590, of the telescope in each case); "self-balanc'd... hangs" (p. 56, cf. P. L., vii. 242);

Whate'er is dark

Illuminates, whate'er is low, exalts . . .
Enlightens all the ways of God to man

(pp. 50-51, cf. P. L., i. 22-6). Between the title and the first line of the poem a passage from Paradise Lost is quoted.

warranted in the case of four long religious poems that appeared anonymously during the first two decades after Thomas Seaton endowed the religious muse. The first of these, The Great Shepherd, a Sacred Pastoral (1757), consists of three dialogues that relate to the creation of man, his fall, and his restoration through the coming of Christ. Presumably it is under some debt to Paradise Lost for its subject-matter, as it certainly is for its style in expressions like "rocks th' astonish'd earth" and "descending dreadful to the dark abyss." 1

The Great Shepherd was termed by the Monthly Review a "sublime pastoral," an "uncommon and elegant poem"; but most religious verse did not fare so well. The author of the Visitations of the Almighty, Part the First (1759), seems, indeed, to have received so little encouragement that the visitations ceased. This first part employs Miltonic blank verse to portray famines and pestilences; the three subsequent ones were to present a veritable orgy of disasters, "Insurrections, War, Land-Hurricanes, Sea-Storms, Inundations, fiery Eruptions from Volcanoes, Earthquakes and Conflagrations"!? Is it any wonder that reviewers of the first book of the anonymous Messiah (1763) shuddered, "Another sacred poem! dear good religious gentlemen, why must we so often repeat to you, that poetry and Christianity will never mingle properly together?" The "good and pious sentiments" of the author, continued the critic, if "thrown into honest prose, might furnish... a tolerable. . . sermon, though, as a poem, it is altogether contemptible." As to the justice of this opinion, and as to the model after which the unknown author patterned his style, the reader may judge for himself:

In being frail,

To Adam, justly, we impute the cause;
But for Damnation, thine, not Adam's guilt,
Incurs the punishment, and gives a hell.
Offended wrath, cease, therefore, to arraign.

If these lines are not a sufficient illustration of the dearth of literary feeling and power in most of the religious bards, one has

1 Mo. Rev., xvi. 400-402. I have not seen the poem. Another anonymous piece, Wisdom, which was published six years earlier (1751), consists of some 250 lines of tumid Miltonic blank verse devoted to religious platitudes.

2 Mo. Rev., xx. 17-20. I have not seen the piece. Of James Ogden's poem, On the Crucifixion and Resurrection (1762), I know nothing except that it is unrimed and that it did not impress the Critical Review (xiii. 363-4).

3 Crit. Rev., xvii. 318. The poem, which I have not seen, consists of four parts, published separately, The Nativity, The Temptation, The Crucifixion, and The Resurrection (ib. 318-20, 472, and xviii. 320).

• Ib. xvii. 319.

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