Lo! if the golden links ye sever, But, children of our Britain, ye The wheels of rapid circling years, IDOLS How weak the gods of this world areAnd weaker yet their worship made me! I have been an idolater Of three-and three times they betrayed me! Mine oldest worshipping was given But natural Beauty shuts her bosom Then left I earthly sights, to wander And Moloch Fame hath reared a shrine. Not green, but black, is that reflection; Last, human Love, thy Lares greeting, Aye, they may burn-though thou be frozen By death, and changes wint'ring on! Fame!-Beauty!-idols madly chosen Were yet of gold; but thou art STONE! Crumble like stone! my voice no longer Shall wail their names, who silent be: There is a voice that soundeth stronger'My daughter, give thine heart to Me.' Lord! take mine heart! O first and fairest, Whom all creation's ends shall hear; Who deathless love in death declarest ! None else is beauteous-famousdear 1 HYMN Lord, I cry unto Thee, make haste unto me. The Lord is nigh unto all them that call upon SINCE Without Thee we do no good, And with Thee do no ill, Abide with us in weal and woe,- In weal,-that while our lips confess The Lord who 'gives,' we may Remember, with an humble thought, The Lord who 'takes away.' In woe,-that while to drowning tears By hours of day,—that when our feet O'er hill and valley run, We still may think the light of truth More welcome than the sun. By hours of night,—that when the air We still may hear the voice of God Oh! then sleep comes on us like death, Abide with us, abide with us, While flesh and soul agree; And when our flesh is only dust, Abide our souls with Thee. WEARINESS MINE eyes are weary of surveying For me, can earth refuse to fade? And o'er mine heart a stone be pressed— Oh, for dove's wings, thou dwelling blest, THE SERAPHIM Some to sing, and some to say, Some to weep, and some to praye.-SKELTON. PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION, 1838 It is natural for every writer who has not published frequently to revert, at least in thought, to his last work, in risking the publication of a new one. To me this is most natural, the subject of the principal poem in the present collection having suggested itself to me, though very faintly and imperfectly, when I was engaged upon my translation of the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus. I thought that, had Aeschylus lived after the incarnation and crucifixion of our Lord Jesus Christ, he might have turned, if not in moral and intellectual yet in poetic faith, from the solitude of Caucasus to the deeper desertness of that crowded Jerusalem where none had any pity; from the 'faded white flower' of the Titanic brow, to the ' withered grass' of a heart trampled on by its own beloved; from the glorying of him who gloried that he could not die, to the sublimer meekness of the Taster of death for every man; from the taunt stung into being by the torment, to His more awful silence, when the agony stood dumb before the love! And I thought how, 'from the height of this great argument,' the scenery of the Prometheus would have dwarfed itself even in the eyes of its poet,-how the fissures of his rocks and the innumerous smiles of his ocean would have closed and waned into blankness, and his demigod stood confessed so human a conception as to fall below the aspiration of his own humanity. He would have turned from such to the rent rocks and darkened sun-rent and darkened by a sympathy thrilling through nature but leaving man's heart untouched -to the multitudes whose victim was their Saviour: to the Victim, whose sustaining thought beneath an unexampled agony was not the Titanic 'I can revenge,' but the celestial 'I can forgive!' The subjects of my two books lie side by side. The Prometheus of Aeschylus is avowedly one of the very noblest of human imaginations; and when we measure it with the eternal counsel we know at once and for ever how wide is the difference between man's ideal and God's divine! The great tragic soul, though untaught directly of Deity, brooded over His creation with exhaustless faculties, until it gave back to her a thought-vast, melancholy, beneficent, malign-the Titan on the rock, the reflected image of her own fallen immortality; rejoicing in bounty, agonizing in wrong, and triumphant in revenge. This was all. Then,' said He, 'Lo I come!' and we knew love, in that He laid down His life for us. By this we know love 1'-love in its intense meaning. 'The splendour in the grass and fragrance in the flower' are the splendour and fragrance of a love beyond them. 'All thoughts, all passions, all delights,' are 'ministers' of a love around us. All citizenship, all brotherhood, all things, for which men bless us, saying, 'Surely this is good,'are manifestations of a love within us. All exaltations of our inward nature, in which we bless ourselves, saying, 'Surely this is great,'- -are yearnings to a love above us. And thus, among the fragments of our fallen state, we may guess at love even as Plato guessed at God: but by this, and this only, can we know it-that Christ laid down His life for us. Has not love a deeper mystery than wisdom, and a more ineffable lustre than power? I believe it has. I venture to believe those beautiful and often quoted words 'God is love,' to be even less an expression of condescension towards the finite, than an of God which appears in our version is not in Ep. John i. 5. The modifying expression the Greek. assertion of essential dignity in Him who is infinite. passion; in order to contrast with such the voluntary debasement of Him who became lower than the angels, and touched in His own sinless being sin and sorrow and death. In my attempted production of such a contrast I have been true to at least my own idea of angelic excellence, as well as to that of His perfection. For one holiness differs from another holiness in glory. To recoil from evil is according to the stature of an angel; to subdue it is according to the infinitude of a God. But if my dream be true that Aeschylus might have turned to the subject before us in poetic instinct; and if in such a caseand here is no dream-its terror and its pathos would have shattered into weakness the strong Greek tongue, and caused the conscious chorus to tremble round the thymele, how much more may I turn from it in the instinct of incompetence! In a manner I have done so. I have worn no shoes upon this holy ground: I have Of the poems which succeed The Serastood there, but have not walked. I have phim, two ballads have been published in drawn no copy of the statue of this Great The New Monthly Magazine; one, the Pan, but have caught its shadow,- Romance of the Ganges, was written for shortened in the dawn of my imperfect the illustration of Finden's Tableaux, knowledge, and distorted and broken by edited by Miss Mitford; and a few misthe unevenness of our earthly ground. Icellaneous verses have appeared in the have written no work, but a suggestion. Athenaeum1. Nor has even so little been attempted without as deep a consciousness of weakness as the severest critic and the humblest Christian could desire to impress upon me. I have felt in the midst of my own thoughts upon my own theme, like Homer's 'children in a battle.' Lest in any of these poems a dreaminess be observed upon, while a lawlessness is imputed to their writer, she is anxious to assure whatever reader may think it worth while to listen to her defence, that none of them were written with a lawless purpose. For instance, The Poet's Vow was intended to enforce a truth-that the creature cannot be isolated from the creature; and The Romaunt of Margret, a corresponding one, that the creature cannot be sustained by the creature. And if, indeed, the faintest character of poetry be granted to these compositions, it must be granted to them besides, that they contain a certain verity. For there is no greater fiction than that poetry is fiction. Poetry is essentially truthfulness; and the very incoherences of poetic dreaming are but the struggle and the strife to reach the True in the Unknown. 'If you please to call it but a dream,' says Cowley, I shall not take it ill; because the father of poets tells us, even dreams, too, are from God 2., The agents in this poem of imperfect form-a dramatic lyric, rather than a lyrical drama-are those mystic beings who are designated in Scripture the Seraphim. The subject has thus assumed a character of exaggerated difficulty, the full sense of which I have tried to express in my Epilogue. But my desire was, to gather some vision of the supreme spectacle under a less usual aspect-to glance at it, as dilated in seraphic eyes, and darkened and deepened by the near association with blessedness and Heaven. Are we not too apt to measure the depth of the Saviour's humiliation from the common estate of man, instead of from His own peculiar and primaeval one? To avoid which error I have endeavoured to count some steps of the ladder at Bethel-a very few steps, and as seen between the clouds. And thus I have endeavoured to mark in my two Seraphic personages, distinctly and predominantly, that shrinking from, and repugnance to, evil, which in my weaker Seraph is expressed by fear, and 2 Discourse by way of vision, concerning in my stronger one by a more complex | the government of Oliver Cromwell. It was subsequent to my writing the poem called The Virgin Mary to the Child Jesus that I read in a selection of religious poetry, made by Mr. James These poems are printed in this edition under the heading 'Poems, 1838-50.' Montgomery, a lyric of the sixteenth century upon the same subject', together with an observation of the editor, that no living poet would be daring enough to approach it. As it has here been approached and attempted by the weak'st of many,' I would prove by this explanation, that consciously to impugn an opinion of Mr.Montgomery's, and to enter into rivalship with the bold simplicity of an ancient ballad, made no part of the daringness of which I confess myself guilty. Nothing more is left to me to explain in relation to any particular poem of this collection. I need not defend them for being religious in their general character. The generation of such as held the doctrine of that critic who was not Longinus, and believed in the inadmissibility of religion into poetry, may have seen the end of vanity. That 'contemplative piety, or the intercourse between God and the human soul, cannot be poetical,' is true if it be true that the human soul having such intercourse is parted from its humanity, or if it be true that poetry is not expressive of that humanity's most exalted state. The first supposition is contradicted by man's own experience, and the latter by the testimony of Him who knoweth what is in man. For otherwise David's 'glory' would have awakened with no 'harp and lute'; and Isaiah's poetry of diction would have fallen in ashes from his lips, beneath the fire which cleansed them. To any less reverent objection I would not willingly reply. 'An irreligious poet,' said Burns, meaning an undevotional one, 'is a monster.' An irreligious poet, he might have said, is no poet at all. The gravitation of poetry is upwards. The poetic wing, if it move, ascends. What did even the heathen Greeks-Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Pindar? Sublimely, because born poets, darkly, because born of Adam and unrenewed in Christ, their spirits wandered like the rushing chariots and winged horses, black and white, of their brother-poet Plato', through the The coincidence consists merely of the choice of subject; the mode of treating it being wholly different. 2 See his Phaedrus. universe of Deity, seeking if haply they might find Him: and as that universe closed around the seekers, not with the transparency in which it flowed first from His hand, but opaquely, as double-dyed with the transgression of its sons,-they felt though they could not discern the God beyond, and used the gesture though ignorant of the language of worshipping. The blind eagle missed the sun, but soared towards its sphere. Shall the blind eagle soar-and the seeing eagle peck chaff? Surely it should be the gladness and the gratitude of such as are poets among us, that in turning towards the beautiful, they may behold the true face of God. The disparaging speeches of prefaces are not proverbial for their real humility. I remember smiling over a preface of Pomfret, which intimates that he might hope for readers, as even Quarles and Wither found them! He does not add in words,-perhaps he did in thought, Fortunati nimium!' Without disparaging speeches, and yet with a self-distrust amounting to emotion, I offer to the public, and for the first time in my own name, these pocms, which were not written because there is a public, but because they were thought and felt, and perhaps under some of the constraint referred to by Wither himself—for he has readers! Those that only sip, Or but even their fingers dip In that sacred fount (poor elves!) Of that brood will show themselves: Yea, in hope to get them fame, They will speake though to their shame. May the omen be averted! I assume no power of art, except that power of love towards it which has remained with me from my childhood until now. In the power of such a love, and in the event of my life being prolonged, I would fain hope to write hereafter better verses; but I never can feel more intensely than at this moment-nor can it be needful that any should-the sublime uses of poetry, and the solemn responsibilities of the poet. LONDON, 1838. |