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Of sympathy anointed, or a pang
Of honest suffering soothed, or injury
Repeated oft, as oft by love forgiven
Where'er an evil passion was subdued,
Or Virtue's feeble embers fanned; where'er
A sin was heartily abjured and left;
Where'er a pious act was done, or breathed
A pious prayer, or wished a pious wish;
There was a high and holy place, a spot
Of sacred light, a most religious fane,
Where Happiness, descending, sat and smiled.
But these apart. In sacred memory lives
The morn of life, first morn of endless days,
Most joyful morn! Nor yet for nought the joy.
A being of eternal date commenced,

A young immortal then was born! And who
Shall tell what strange variety of bliss

Burst on the infant soul, when first it looked
Abroad on God's creation fair, and saw

The glorious earth and glorious heaven, and face

Of man sublime, and saw all new, and felt

All new! when thought awoke, though never more
To sleep! when first it saw, heard, reasoned, willed,
And triumphed in the warmth of conscious life!
Nor happy only, but the cause of joy,

Which those who never tasted always mourned.
What tongue!-no tongue shall tell what bliss o'erflowed
The mother's tender heart, while round her hung
The offspring of her love, and lisped her name;
As living jewels dropped unstained from heaven,
That made her fairer far, and sweeter seem,
Than every ornament of costliest hue!

And who hath not been ravished, as she passed
With all her playful band of little ones,
Like Luna with her daughters of the sky,
Walking in matron majesty and grace?

All who had hearts here pleasure found: and oft
Have I, when tired with heavy task, for tasks
Were heavy in the world below, relaxed

My weary thoughts among their guiltless sports,
And led them by their little hands a-field,

And watched them run and crop the tempting flower

Which oft, unasked, they brought me, and bestowed
With smiling face, that waited for a look

Of praise and answered curious questions, but

In much simplicity, but ill to solve:

And heard their observations strange and new;
And settled whiles their little quarrels, soon
Ending in peace, and soon forgot in love.
And still I looked upon their loveliness,
And sought through nature for similitudes
Of perfect beauty, innocence, and bliss,
And fairest imagery round me thronged;
Dew-drops at day-spring on a seraph's locks,
Roses that bathe about the well of life,

Young Loves, young Hopes, dancing on Morning's cheek,
Gems leaping in the coronet of Love!

So beautiful, so full of life, they seemed
As made entire of beams of angel's eyes.

Gay, guileless, sportive, lovely little things!
Playing around the den of sorrow, clad

In smiles, believing in their fairy hopes,
And thinking man and woman true! all joy,
Happy all day, and happy all the night!

JAMES MONTGOMERY.

JAMES MONTGOMERY, a religious poet of deservedly high reputation, was borne at Irvine, in Ayrshire, November 4, 1771. His father was a Moravian missionary, who died whilst propagating Christianity in the Island of Tobago. The poet was educated at the Moravian school at Fulneck, near Leeds, but declined being a priest, and was put apprentice to a grocer at Mirfield, near Fulneck. In his sixteenth year, with 3s. 6d. in his pocket, he ran off from Mirfield, and after some suffering, became a shop-boy in the village of Wath, in Yorkshire. He next tried London, carrying with him a collection of his poems, but failed in his efforts to obtain a publisher. In 1791, he obtained a situation as clerk in a newspaper office in Sheffield; and his master failing, Montgomery, with the aid of friends, established the Sheffield Iris,' a weekly journal, which he conducted with marked ability, and in a liberal, conciliatory spirit, up to the year 1825. His course did not always run smooth. In January 1794, amidst the excitement of that agitated period, he was tried on a charge of having printed a ballad, written by a clergyman of Belfast, on the demolition of the Bastille in 1789; which was then interpreted into a seditious libel. The poor poet, notwithstanding the innocence of his intentions, was found guilty, and sentenced to three months' imprisonment in the castle of York, and to pay a fine of £20. In January 1795 he was tried for a second imputed political offence-a paragraph in his paper which reflected on the conduct of a magistrate in quelling a riot at Sheffield. He was again convicted, and sentenced to six months' imprisonment in York Castle, to pay a fine of£30, and to give security to keep the peace for two years. 'All the persons, says the amiable poet, writing in 1840' who were actively concerned in the prosecutions against me in 1794 and 1795, are dead, and, without exception, they died in peace with me. I believe I am quite correct in saying, that from each of them distinctly, in the sequel, I received tokens of good-will, and from several of them substantial proofs of kindness. I mention not this as a plea in extenuation of offences for which I bore the penalty of the law; I rest my justification, in these cases, now on the same grounds, and no other, on which I rested my justification then. I mention the circumstance to the honour of the deceased, and as an evidence that, amidst all the violence of that distracted time, a better spirit was not extinct, but finally prevailed, and by its healing influence did indeed comfort those who had been conscientious sufferers.'

Mr. Montgomery's first volume of poetry-he had previously written occasional pieces in his newspaper-appeared in 1806, and was entitled 'The Wanderer of Switzerland, and other Poems.' It speedily went

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through two editions; and his publishers had just issued a third, when the Edinburgh Review' of January 1807 denounced the unfortunate volume in a style of such authoritative reprobation as no mortal verse could be expected to survive.' The critique, indeed, was insolent and unfeeling-written in the worst style of the 'Review,' when all the sins of its youth were full-blown and unchecked. Among other things. the reviewer predicted that in less than three years nobody would know the name of The Wanderer of Switzerland,' or of any other of the poems in the collection. Within eighteen months from the utterance of this oracle, a fourth impression-1500 copies of the condemned volume was passing through the press whence the Edinburgh Review' itself was issued, and it has now reached_nearly twenty editions. The next work of the poet was 'The West Indies,' a poem in four parts, written in honour of the abolition of the African slave-trade by the British legislature in 1807. The poem is in the heroic couplet, and possesses a vigour and freedom of description, and a power of pathetic painting, much superior to anything in the first volume. Mr. Montgomery afterwards published Prison Amusements,' written during his nine months' confinement in York Castle in 1794 and 1795. In 1813 he came forward with a more elaborate performance, 'The World before the Flood,' a poem in the heroic couplet, and extending to ten short cantos. His pictures of the antediluvian patriarchs in their happy valley, the invasion of Eden by the descendants of Cain, the loves of Javan and Zillah, the translation of Enoch, and the final deliverance of the little band of patriarch families from the hand of the giants, are sweet and touching, and elevated by pure and lofty feeling. Connected with some patriotic individuals in his own neighbourhood in many a plan for lessening the sum of human misery at home and abroad," our author next published Thoughts on Wheels' (1817), directed against state lotteries; and 'The Climbing Boy's Soliloquies,' published about the same time, in a work written by different authors, to aid in effecting the abolition, at length happily accomplished, of the cruel and unnatural practice of employing bovs in sweeping chimneys. In 1819 he published 'Greenland,' a poem in five cantos, containing a sketch of the ancient Moravian Church, its revival in the eighteenth century, and the origin of the missions by that people to Greenland in 1733. The poem, as published, is only a part of the author's original plan, but the beauty of its polar descriptions and episodes recommended it to public favour. The only other long poem by Mr. Montgomery is The Pelican Island,' suggested by a passage in Captain Flinder's voyage to Terra Australis, describing the existence of the ancient haunts of the pelican in the small islands on the coast of New Holland. The work is in blank verse, in nine short cantos, and the narrative is supposed to be delivered by an imaginary being who witnesses the series of events related, after the whole has hap- · pened. The poem abounds in minute and delicate descriptions of

natural phenomena has great felicity of diction and expressionand altogether possesses more of the power and fertility of the master than any other of the author's works.

Besides the works we have enumerated, Mr. Montgomery threw off a number of small effusions, published in different periodicals, and short translations from Dante and Petrarch. On his retirement in 1825 from the 'invidious station' of newspaper editor, which he had maintained for more than thirty years, through good report and evil report, his friends and neighbours of Sheffield, of every shade of political and religious distinction invited him to a public entertainment, at which the late Earl Fitzwilliam presided. There the happy and grateful poet ‘ran through the story of his life even from his boyish days,' when he came amongst them, friendless and a stranger, from his retirement at Fulneck among the Moravian brethren, by whom he was educated in all but knowledge of the world. He spoke with pardonable pride of the success which had crowned his labours as an author. Not, indeed,' he said 'with fame and fortune, as these were lavished on my greater contemporaries, in comparison with whose magnificent possessions on the British Parnassus my small plot of ground is no more than Naboth's vineyard to Ahab's kingdom; but it is my own; it is no copyhold; I borrowed it, I leased it from none. Every foot of it I enclosed from the common myself; and I can say that not an inch which I had once gained have I ever lost.' In 1830 and 1831 Mr. Montgomery was selected to deliver a course of lectures at the Royal Institution on Poetry and General Literature, which he prepared for the press, and published in 1833. A pension of £200 per annum was, at the instance of Sir Robert Peel, conferred upon Mr. Montgomery, which he enjoyed till his death in 1854, at the ripe age of eighty-three. A collected edition of his works, with autobiographical and illustrative matter, was issued in 1841 in four volumes, and Memoirs of his Life and Writings have been published by two of his friends, John Holland and James Everett. A tone of generous and enlightened morality pervades all the writings of this poet. He was the enemy of the slave-trade and of every form of oppression, and the warm friend of every scheme of philanthropy and improvement. The pious and devotional feelings displayed in his early effusions colour all his poetry. In description, however, he is not less happy; and in his 'Greenland' and 'Pelican Island' there are passages of great beauty, evincing a refined taste and judgment in the selection of his materials. His late works had more vigour and variety than those by which he first became distinguished. Indeed, his fame was long confined to what is termed the religious world, till he shewed, by his cultivation of different styles of poetry, that his depth and sincerity of feeling, the simplicity of his taste, and the picturesque beauty of his language, were not restricted to purely spiritual themes. His smaller poems enjoy a popularity almost equal to those of Moore, which, though differing widely

in subject, they resemble in their musical flow, and their compendious happy expression and imagery.

Greenland.

"Tis sunset; to the firmament serene
The Atlantic wave reflects a gorgeous scene;
Broad in the cloudless west, a belt of gold
Girds the blue hemisphere; above unrolled
The keen clear air grows palpable to sight,
Embodied in a flush of crimson light,

Through which the evening-star, with milder gleam,
Descends to meet her image in the stream.
Far in the east, what spectacle unknown
Allures the eye to gaze on it alone?

Amidst black rocks, that lift on either hand

Their countless peaks, and mark receding land;
Amidst a tortuous labyrinth of seas,
That shine around the Arctic Cyclades;
Amidst a coast of dreariest continent,
In many a shapeless promontory rent;

O'er rocks, seas, islands, promontories spread,
The ice-blink rears its undulated head, (Î)
On which the sun, beyond the horizon shrined,
Hath left his richest garniture behind;
Piled on a hundred arches, ridge by ridge,
O'er fixed and fluid strides the alpine bridge,
Whose blocks of sapphire seem to mortal eye
Hewn from cerulean quarries in the sky;

With glacier battlements that crowd the spheres,
The slow creation of six thousand years,
Amidst immensity it towers sublime,
Winter's eternal palace, built by Time:

All human structures by his touch are borne

Down to the dust; mountains themselves are worn
With his light footsteps; here for ever grows,
Amid the region of unmelting snows,

A monument; where every flake that falls
Gives adamantine firmness to the walls.
The sun beholds no mirror in his race,
That shews a brighter image of his face:
The stars, in their nocturnal vigils, rest
Like signal-fires on its illumined crest;
The gliding moon around the ramparts wheels,
And all its magic lights and shades reveals:
Beneath, the tide with equal fury raves,

To undermine it through a thousand caves;

Rent from its roof, though thundering fragments oft
Plunge to the gulf, immovable aloft,

From age to age, in air, o'er sea, on land,

Its turrets heighten and its piers expand.

Hark! through the calm and silence of the scene,
Slow, solemn, sweet, with many a pause between,
Celestial music swells along the air!

No! 'tis the evening-hymn of praise and prayer
From yonder deck, where, on the stern retired,

1 The term ice-blink is generally applied by mariners to the nocturnal illumination in the heavens, which denotes to them the proximity of ice-mountains. In this place a description is attempted of the most stupendous accumulation of ice in the known world, which has been long distinguished by this peculiar name by the Danish navigators. MONTGOMERY.

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