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I feel the solemn sound. If heard aright, It is the knell of my departed hours.

Where are they? with the years beyond the flood.
It is the signal that demands dispatch;

How much is to be done? my hopes and fears
Start up alarmed, and o'er life's narrow verge
Look down-on what? a fathomless abyss;
A dread eternity, how surely mine!
And can eternity belong to me,

Poor pensioner on the bounties of an hour?
How poor, how rich, how abject, how august,
How complicate, how wonderful is man?
How passing wonder He, who made him such?
Who centred in our make such strange extremes?
From different natures marvellously mixt,
Connection exquisite of distant worlds!
Distinguished link in being's endless chain!
Midway from nothing to the Deity!
A beam ethereal, sullied, and absorpt!
Though sullied and dishonoured, still divine!
Dim miniature of greatness absolute!
An heir of glory! a frail child of dust!
Helpless immortal! insect infinite!

A worm!-a god!—I tremble at myself,
And in myself am lost! at home a stranger,
Thought wanders up and down, surprised, aghast,
And wond'ring at her own: how reason reels!
O what a miracle to man is man,
Triumphantly distressed! what joy, what dread!
Alternately transported, and alarmed!

What can preserve my life? or what destroy?
An angel's arm can't snatch me from the grave:
Legions of angels can't confine me there.

'Tis past conjecture; all things rise in proof:
While o'er my limbs sleep's soft dominion spread,
What though my Soul fantastic measures trod
O'er fairy fields! or mourned along the gloom
Of pathless woods; or, down the craggy steep
Hurled headlong, swam with pain the mantled pool;
Or scaled the cliff; or danced on hollow winds,
With antic shapes, wild natives of the brain?
Her ceaseless flight, though devious, speaks her nature
Of subtler essence than the trodden clod:
Active, aerial, towering, unconfined,
Unfettered with her gross companion's fall.
Ev'n silent night proclaims my soul immortal:
Ev'n silent night proclaims eternal day:
For human weal Heaven husbands all events;
Dull sleep instructs, nor sport vain dreams in vain.
Why then their loss deplore that are not lost?
Why wanders wretched thought their tombs around,
In infidel distress? Are angels there?
Slumbers, raked up in dust, ethereal fire?
They live! they greatly live a life on earth
Unkindled, unconceived; and from an eye
Of tenderness, let heavenly pity fall

On me, more justly numbered with the dead.
This is the desert, this the solitude:
How populous, how vital, is the grave!
This is creation's melancholy vault,

The vale funereal, the sad cypress gloom;
The land of apparitions, empty shades!

All, all on earth is shadow, all beyond

Is substance. The reverse is folly's creed:

How solid all, where change shall be no more!

All through our lives we look towards a future :

All promise is poor dilatory man,

And that through every stage; when young, indeed,
In full content, we sometimes nobly rest,
Unanxious for ourselves: and only wish,

As duteous sons, our fathers were more wise.

At thirty man suspects himself a fool;

Knows it at forty, and reforms his plan:

At fifty chides his infamous delay,
Pushes his prudent purpose to resolve;
In all the magnanimity of thought
Resolves; and re-resolves: then dies the same.

And why? because he thinks himself immortal:
All men think all men mortal but themselves;
Themselves, when some alarming shock of fate
Strikes through their wounded hearts the sudden dread;
But their hearts wounded, like the wounded air,
Soon close; where passed the shaft no trace is found:
As from the wing no scar the sky retains;
The parted wave no furrow from the keel;
So dies in human hearts the thought of death:
Even with the tender tear which nature sheds
O'er those we love, we drop it in their grave.
Can I forget Philander? That were strange;
-
full heart!-
my
-But should I give it vent,
The longest night, though longer far, would fail,
And the lark listen to my midnight song.

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Oh, ye cold-hearted, frozen formalists!
On such a theme 'tis impious to be calm;
Passion is reason, transport temper, here!
Shall Heaven, which gave us ardour, and has shown
Her own for man so strongly, not disdain
What smooth emollients in theology
Recumbent virtue's downy doctors preach,
That prose of piety, a lukewarm phrase?
Rise odours sweet from incense uninflamed?
Devotion, when lukewarm, is undevout;
But when it glows, its heat is struck to heaven,
To human hearts her golden harps are strung;
High heaven's orchestra chaunts Amen to man.

The theme of the Fifth Night is the Relapse into grief :

"Tis vain to seek in men for more than man.
Though proud in promise, big in previous thought,
Experience damps our triumph. I, who late,
Emerging from the shadows of the grave,
Where grief detained me prisoner, mounting high
Threw wide the gates of everlasting day,
And called mankind to glory, shook off pain,
Mortality shook off, in ether pure,
And struck the stars: now feel my spirits fail;
They drop me from the zenith; down I rush,
Like him whom fable fledged with flaxen wings,
In sorrow drowned-but not in sorrow lost.
How wretched is the man who never mourned!
I dive for precious pearl in sorrow's stream:
Not so the thoughtless man that only grieves;
Takes all the torment and rejects the gain,
(Inestimable gain!) and gives Heaven leave
To make him but more wretched, not more wise.

The Sixth and Seventh Nights of the poem dwell in two parts on the nature, proof, and importance of Immortality, under the title of "The Infidel Reclaimed." The poem here rises to the consequences of Man's Immortality; and the Eighth Night has for its theme "Virtue's Apology, or the Man of the World Answered; in which are considered the Love of This Life, the Ambition and Pleasure, with the Wit and Wisdom, of the World:

And has all nature, then, espoused my part?

Have I bribed heaven, and earth, to plead against thee?
And is thy soul immortal?-what remains?
All, all, Lorenzo !-make immortal, blest.
Unblest immortals!--what can shock us more?
And yet, Lorenzo still affects the world;
There stows his treasure; thence his title draws,
Man of the World! (for such wouldst thou be called :)
And art thou proud of that inglorious style?
Proud of reproach? for a reproach it was,
In ancient days, and Christian ;-in an age,
When men were men, and not asham'd of Heav'n,
Fired their ambition, as it crowned their joy.
Sprinkled with dews from the Castalian font,
Fain would I re-baptize thee, and confer
A purer spirit, and a nobler name.

The "Night Thoughts" are, in fact, only another form of the reply to failing faith; and though their tone is not that of a deep enthusiasm, they have a manifest affinity to other forms of the religious reasoning and feeling of their day. Lines like these might express thoughts of Wesley :

No man is happy, till he thinks, on earth
There breathes not a more happy than himself:
Then envy dies, and love o'erflows on all;
And love o'erflowing makes an angel here:

Such angels all, entitled to repose

On Him who governs fate. Though tempest frowns,
Though nature shakes, how soft to lean on Heav'n!
To lean on Him, on whom archangels lean!
With inward eyes, and silent as the grave,
They stand collecting every beam of thought,
Till their hearts kindle with divine delight;
For all their thoughts, like angels, seen of old
In Israel's dream, come from, and go to, heav'n:
Hence, are they studious of sequestered scenes;
While noise and dissipation comfort thee.

Were all men happy, revellings would cease,
That opiate for inquietude within.
Lorenzo! never man was truly blessed,
But it composed, and gave him such a cast
As folly might mistake for want of joy.
A cast unlike the triumph of the proud;
A modest aspect, and a smile at heart.
O for a joy from thy Philander's spring!
A spring perennial, rising in the breast,
And permanent as pure! no turbid stream
Of rapturous exultation swelling high;
Which, like land floods, impetuous pour a while,
Then sink at once, and leave us in the mire.
What does the man, who transient joy prefers ?
What, but prefer the bubbles to the stream?

The Ninth and Last Night, the "Consolation," is

occupied with contemplation of God in the visible heavens, and of man as part of the great harmony :

Amidst my list of blessings infinite,

Stand this the foremost, "That my heart has bled."
"Tis Heaven's last effort of good-will to man;
When pain can't bless, Heaven quits us in despair.
Who fails to grieve, when just occasion calls,
Or grieves too much, deserves not to be blest;
Inhuman, or effeminate, his heart :
Reason absolves the grief, which reason ends.
May Heav'n ne'er trust my friend with happiness,
Till it has taught him how to bear it well,
By previous pain; and make it safe to smile!
Such smiles are mine, and such may they remain;
Nor hazard their extinction, from excess.
My change of heart a change of style demands;
The Consolation cancels the Complaint.
And makes a convert of my guilty song.

As when o'er-laboured, and inclined to breathe,
A panting traveller, some rising ground,
Some small ascent, has gained, he turns him round,
And measures with his eye the various vale,
The fields, woods, meads, and rivers he has past;
And, satiate of his journey, thinks of home,
Endeared by distance, nor affects more toil;
Thus I, though small, indeed, is that ascent
The Muse has gained, review the paths she trod;
Various, extensive, beaten but by few;
And, conscious of her prudence in repose,
Pause; and with pleasure meditate an end,
Though still remote; so fruitful is my theme.
Through many a field of moral, and divine,
The Muse has strayed; and much of sorrow seen
In human ways; and much of false and vain;
Which none, who travel this bad road, can miss
O'er friends deceased full heartily she wept;
Of love divine the wonders she displayed;
Proved man immortal; showed the source of joy;
The grand tribunal raised; assigned the bounds
Of human grief: in few, to close the whole,
The moral muse has shadowed out a sketch,
Though not in form, nor with a Raphael stroke,
Of most our weakness needs believe, or do,
In this our land of travel, and of hope,

For peace on earth, or prospect of the skies.

What then remains?-Much, much! a mighty deb To be discharged: these thoughts, O Night! are thine From thee they came, like lovers' secret sighs, While others slept. So, Cynthia (poets feign) In shadows veiled, soft-sliding from her sphere, Her shepherd cheered; of her enamoured less, Than I of thee.-And art thou still unsung, Beneath whose brow, and by whose aid, I sing? Immortal silence!-Where shall I begin? Where end? or how steal music from the spheres, To soothe their goddess?

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Her gloomy flight. But what avails the flight Of fancy, when our hearts remain below? Virtue abounds in flatterers, and foes?

'Tis pride to praise her; penance to perform.

To more than words, to more than worth of tongue,
Lorenzo rise, at this auspicious hour;

An hour, when Heaven's most intimate with man;
When, like a falling star, the ray divine
Glides swift into the bosom of the just;
And just are all, determined to reclaim;
Which sets that title high, within thy reach.
Awake, then; thy Philander calls awake!
Thou, who shalt wake, when the creation sleeps;
When, like a taper, all these suns expire;
When time, like him of Gaza, in his wrath,
Plucking the pillars that support the world,
In nature's ample ruins lies entombed;

And midnight, universal midnight, reigns.

Its

A poem on "The Grave," by Robert Blair, cousin of Hugh Blair, who wrote upon Rhetoric, was produced at the same time as the "Night Thoughts," with like purpose, and published in 1743. author was minister of Athelstaneford, in East Lothian, and was succeeded in that ministry by John Home, author of the play of "Douglas." Blair's "Grave" was as popular as the " Night Thoughts," and went in a few years through eight editions. Those dead forms of the time, which provoked many an effort to revive the soul within them, or to sweep them away and replace them with a young vigorous life, produced a gloom, often passing into sickness of mind, that is manifest in life and literature during the half century before the French Revolution. There was an appetite for sombre thought, and among Englishmen of genius more of insanity, or of a state of mind that bordered on insanity, than at any time before or since. Young failed to describe in cheerful notes religious cheerfulness; and Blair, however healthy his desire to paint death as the gate of life, is very conscious of the churchyard gloom, although he may not share the instinct he thus paints:

The wind is up. Hark, how it howls! Methinks
Till now I never heard a sound so dreary:
Doors creak and windows clap, and night's foul bird,
Rocked in the spire, screams loud.

Quite round the pile a row of reverend elms,
Coeval near with that, all ragged show,
Long lashed by the rude winds; some rift half down
Their branchless trunks: others so thin at top
That scarce two crows can lodge in the same tree.
Strange things, the neighbours say, have happened here:
Wild shrieks have issued from the hollow tombs;
Dead men have come again and walked about;
And the great bell has tolled, unrung, untouched.
Oft in the lone churchyard at night I've seen,

By glimpse of moonshine chequering through the trees,
The schoolboy, with his satchel in his hand,
Whistling aloud to bear his courage up,
And lightly tripping o'er the long flat stones,
With nettles skirted and with moss o'ergrown,
That tell in homely phrase who lie below.

Sudden he starts; and hears, or thinks he hears,
The sound of something passing at his heels.

Full fast he flies, and dares not look behind him
Till, out of breath, he overtakes his fellows,
Who gather round and wonder at the tale
Of horrid apparition.

William Collins, who died insane in 1759, pub lished his Odes in 1747, at the age of six-and-twenty. When, in April, 1746, the rising of '45 in Scotland for the young Pretender was crushed on Culloden Moor, and cruel executions for rebellion followed, with the disembowelling of victims and the burning of their hearts, Collins expressed sympathy for the fellow-countrymen fallen in battle, and desire for mercy to the vanquished, in two of his Odes.

ODE,

Written in the beginning of the year 1746.
How sleep the brave who sink to rest
By all their country's wishes bless'd?
When Spring with dewy fingers cold
Returns to deck their hallow'd mould,
She there shall dress a sweeter sod
Than Fancy's feet have ever trod.

By fairy hands their knell is rung ;
By forms unseen their dirge is sung;
There Honour comes, a pilgrim gray,
To bless the turf that wraps their clay;
And Freedom shall awhile repair,
To dwell, a weeping hermit, there!

ODE TO MERCY. Strophe.

O thou, who sit'st a smiling bride
By Valour's armed and awful side,
Gentlest of sky-born forms, and best adored;

Who oft with songs, divine to hear,

Winn'st from his fatal grasp the spear,

And hid'st in wreaths of flowers his bloodless sword!
Thou who, amidst the deathful field,
By god-like chiefs alone beheld,

Oft with thy bosom bare art found,

Pleading for him, the youth, who sinks to ground:
See, Mercy, see, with pure and loaded hands,
Before thy shrine my country's genius stands,
And decks thy altar still, though pierced with many a

wound.

Antistrophe.

When he whom even our joys provoke,

The fiend of nature joined his yoke,

And rushed in wrath to make our isle his prey;
Thy form, from out thy sweet abode,
O'ertook him on his blasted road,

And stopped his wheels, and looked his rage away.
I see recoil his sable steeds,

That bore him swift to salvage deeds,

Thy tender melting eyes they own;

O Maid, for all thy love to Britain shown,
Where Justice bars her iron tower

To thee we build a roseate bower; [throne! Thou, thou shalt rule, our Queen, and share our monarch's

Samuel Johnson, after publishing, in 1749, "The

Vanity of Human Wishes," began, on the 20th of March, 1750, the Rambler, a series of essays in the form established by the Tatler and Spectator, but in spirit and substance all his own. It was continued every Tuesday and Saturday until the 17th of March, 1752, when the approaching death of his wife disabled him for work. She died eleven days afterwards. The English of the Rambler represents that earlier manner of his in which Johnson developed to its utmost the theory of style then dominant. He was not the founder of the custom of employing long words, Latin in origin, constructing periods and balanced sentences, avoiding the familiarities of speech as low. That writers should do so was the doctrine of the day, established by the ascendancy of a French criticism born in artificial times. In the Rambler Johnson only pushed the current doctrine as to style to its legitimate conclusion. As the times changed he grew with them, and the prose of Johnson's "Lives of the Poets," written late in life, was as distinctly prose of 1780 as the Rambler was the prose of a date thirty years earlier. But at no period of Samuel Johnson's life was his sincerity affected by the part of the vocabulary from which he drew his language: whether long or short as to their syllables, his words as to their meaning were measured to his thought with a conscientious desire

SAMUEL JOHNSON. (From a Portrait by Reynolds, 1756.)

for truth. He prayed before writing; and although so unlike Milton in tendencies of thought that he failed in an endeavour thoroughly to understand him, there is perhaps not another man in literature of whom it is so evident that, like Milton, he endeavoured to "do all as in his great Taskmaster's eye." This was Johnson's prayer before he began the Rambler :

PRAYER ON THE "RAMBLER."

Almighty God, the giver of all good things, without whose help all labour is ineffectual, and without whose grace all

1 See "Shorter English Poems," pages 375-8.

wisdom is folly; grant, I beseech Thee, that in this my undertaking, thy Holy Spirit may not be withheld from me. but that I may promote thy glory, and the salvation both of myself and others; grant this, O Lord, for the sake of Jesta Christ. Amen.

The concern of the Rambler is with the true wisdom of life. Its essays reproduce, with a grave kindliness and scholarly variety of thought, the essentials of Christian duty. All that he saw in the world concerned Johnson only as it touched the life of man. Two Christmas Days occurred during the issue of this series of essays. The first fell on a Tuesday, one of his publishing days, and the theme of that essay was a practical discussion of Christ's doctrine, "Whatsoever you would that men should do unto you, even so do unto them." "Of the divine Author of our religion," he said in that essay, "it is impossible to peruse the evangelical historie without observing how little he favoured the vanity of inquisitiveness, how much more rarely he condescended to satisfy curiosity than to relieve distress, and how much he desired that his followers shoul rather excel in goodness than in knowledge."

In the following year his Tuesday Rambler ap peared on the day before Christmas Day, and his topic then was

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THE FORGIVENESS OF INJURIES.

No vicious dispositions of the mind more obstinately res both the counsels of philosophy and the injunctions of gion, than those which are complicated with an opinioa dignity; and which we cannot dismiss without leaving in t hands of opposition some advantage iniquitously obtained, or suffering from our own prejudices some imputation of pas lanimity.

For this reason scarcely any law of our Redeemer is mr openly transgressed, or more industriously evaded, than t by which He commands His followers to forgive injuries prohibits, under the sanction of eternal misery, the gratit tion of the desire which every man feels to return pain up: him that inflicts it. Many who could have conquered th anger, are unable to combat pride, and pursue offences: extremity of vengeance, lest they should be insulted by: triumph of an enemy.

But certainly no precept could better become Hin whose birth peace was proclaimed to the earth. For would so soon destroy all the order of society, and der life with violence and ravage, as a permission to every judge his own cause, and to apportion his own recumpare for imagined injuries?

It is difficult for a man of the strictest justice not to f himself too much in the calmest moments of solitary tion. Every one wishes for the distinctions for which thos are wishing at the same time, in their own opinion, better claims. He that, when his reason operate in its: force, can thus, by the mere prevalence of self-love, pre: himself to his fellow-beings, is very unlikely to judge 4ably when his passions are agitated by a sense of wrong, his attention wholly engrossed by pain, interest, or date? Whoever arrogates to himself the right of vengeance & how little he is qualified to decide his own claims, sr certainly demands what he would think unfit to be grant to another.

Nothing is more apparent than that, however interhowever provoked, some must at last be contented to fur

For it can never be hoped that he who first commits an injury will contentedly acquiesce in the penalty required: the same haughtiness of contempt or vehemence of desire that prompt the act of injustice, will more strongly incite its justification; and resentment can never so exactly balance the punishment with the fault, but there will remain an overplus of vengeance which even he who condemns his first action will think himself entitled to retaliate. What then can ensue but a continual exacerbation of hatred, an unextinguishable feud, an incessant reciprocation of mischief, a mutual vigilance to entrap, and eagerness to destroy?

Since, then, the imaginary right of vengeance must be at last remitted, because it is impossible to live in perpetual hostility, and equally impossible that, of two enemies, either should first think himself obliged by justice to submission, it is surely eligible to forgive early. Every passion is more easily subdued before it has been long accustomed to possession of the heart; every idea is obliterated with less difficulty, as it has been more slightly impressed, and less frequently renewed. He who has often brooded over his wrongs, pleased himself with schemes of malignity, and glutted his pride with the fancied supplications of humbled enmity, will not easily open his bosom to amity and reconciliation, or indulge the gentle sentiments of benevolence and peace.

It is easiest to forgive while there is yet little to be forgiven. A single injury may be soon dismissed from the memory; but a long succession of ill offices by degrees associates itself with every idea: a long contest involves so many circumstances, that every place and action will recall it to the mind, and fresh remembrance of vexation must still enkindle rage and irritate revenge.

A wise man will make haste to forgive, because he knows the true value of time, and will not suffer it to pass away in unnecessary pain. He that willingly suffers the corrosions of inveterate hatred, and gives up his days and nights to the gloom of malice and perturbations of stratagem, cannot surely be said to consult his ease. Resentment is a union of sorrow with malignity, a combination of a passion which all endeavour to avoid with a passion which all concur to detest. The man who retires to meditate mischief, and to exasperate his own rage; whose thoughts are employed only on means of distress and contrivances of ruin; whose mind never pauses from the remembrance of his own sufferings, but to indulge some hope of enjoying the calamities of nother, may justly be numbered among the most miserable of human beings, among those who are guilty without reward, who have neither the gladness of prosperity nor the calm of innocence.

Whoever considers the weakness both of himself and others will not long want persuasives to forgiveness. We know not to what degree of malignity any injury is to be imputed; or how much its guilt, if we were to inspect the mind of him that committed it, would be extenuated by mistake, precipitance, or negligence. We cannot be certain how much more we feel than was intended to be inflicted, or how much we increase the mischief to ourselves by voluntary aggravations. We may charge to design the effects of accident; we may think the blow violent only because we have made ourselves delicate and tender; we are on every side in danger of error and of guilt, which we are certain to avoid only by speedy forgiveness.

From this pacific and harmless temper, thus propitious to others and ourselves, to domestic tranquillity and to social happiness, no man is withheld but by pride, by the fear of being insulted by his adversary, or despised by the world.

It may be laid down as an unfailing and universal axiom, that "all pride is abject and mean." It is always an igno

rant, lazy, or cowardly acquiescence in a false appearance of excellence, and proceeds not from consciousness of our attainments, but from insensibility of our wants.

Nothing can be great which is not right. Nothing which reason condemns can be suitable to the dignity of the human mind. To be driven by external motives fom the path which our own heart approves, to give way to anything but conviction, to suffer the opinion of others to rule our choice or overpower our resolves, is to submit tamely to the lowest and most ignominious slavery, and to resign the right of directing our own lives.

The utmost excellence at which humanity can arrive is a constant and determinate pursuit of virtue, without regard to present dangers or advantage; a continual reference of every action to the Divine will; an habitual appeal to everlasting justice; and an unvaried elevation of the intellectual eye to the reward which perseverance only can obtain. But that pride which many, who presume to boast of generous sentiments, allow to regulate their measures, has nothing nobler in view than the approbation of men, of beings whose superiority we are under no obligation to acknowledge, and who, when we have courted them with the utmost assiduity, can confer no valuable or permanent reward; of beings who ignorantly judge of what they do not understand, or partially determine what they never have examined; and whose sentence is therefore of no weight till it has received the ratification of our own conscience.

He that can descend to bribe suffrages like these at the price of his innocence; he that can suffer the delight of such acclamations to withhold his attention from the commands of the universal Sovereign, has little reason to congratulate himself upon the greatness of his mind. Whenever he awakes to seriousness and reflection, he must become despicable in his own eyes, and shrink with shame from the remembrance of his cowardice and folly.

Of him that hopes to be forgiven it is indispensably required that he forgive. It is therefore superfluous to urge any other motive. On this great duty eternity is suspended, and to him that refuses to practise it the throne of mercy is inaccessible, and the Saviour of the world has been born in vain.

These are three prayers by Johnson :

ON THE DEATH OF MY WIFE.

April 24, 1752. Almighty and most merciful Father, who lovest those whom Thou punishest, and turnest away thy anger from the penitent, look down with pity upon my sorrows, and grant that the affliction which it has pleased Thee to bring upon me may awaken my conscience, enforce my resolutions of a better life, and impress upon me such conviction of thy power and goodness, that I may place in Thee my only felicity, and endeavour to please Thee in all my thoughts, words, and actions. Grant, O Lord, that I may not languish in fruitless and unavailing sorrow, but that I may consider from whose hand all good and evil is received, and may remember that I am punished for my sins, and hope for comfort only by repentance. Grant, O merciful God, that by the assistance of thy Holy Spirit I may repent, and be comforted, obtain that peace which the world cannot give, pass the residue of my life in humble resignation and cheerful obedience; and when it shall please Thee to call me from this mortal state, resign myself into Thy hands with faith and confidence, and finally obtain mercy and everlasting happiness, for the sake of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

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