England's Antiphon Part 11

Christ! health of fevered soul, heaven of the mind, Force of the feeble, nurse of infant loves, Guide to the wandering foot, light to the blind, Whom weeping wins, repentant sorrow moves!

Father in care, mother in tender heart, Revive and save me, slain with sinful dart!

If King Mana.s.seh, sunk in depth of sin, With plaints and tears recovered grace and crown, A worthless worm some mild regard may win, And lowly creep where flying threw it down.

A poor desire I have to mend my ill; I should, I would, I dare not say I will.

I dare not say I will, but wish I may; My pride is checked: high words the speaker spilt.

My good, O Lord, thy gift--thy strength, my stay-- Give what thou bidst, and then bid what thou wilt.

Work with me what of me thou dost request; Then will I dare the worst and love the best.

Here, from another poem, are two little stanzas worth preserving:

Yet G.o.d's must I remain, By death, by wrong, by shame; I cannot blot out of my heart That grace wrought in his name.

I cannot set at nought, Whom I have held so dear; I cannot make Him seem afar That is indeed so near.

The following poem, in style almost as simple as a ballad, is at once of the quaintest and truest. Common minds, which must always a.s.sociate a certain conventional respectability with the forms of religion, will think it irreverent. I judge its reverence profound, and such none the less that it is pervaded by a sweet and delicate tone of holy humour. The very t.i.tle has a glimmer of the glowing heart of Christianity:

NEW PRINCE, NEW POMP.

Behold a silly,[69] tender babe, In freezing winter night, In homely manger trembling lies; Alas! a piteous sight.

The inns are full; no man will yield This little pilgrim bed; But forced he is with silly beasts In crib to shroud his head.

Despise him not for lying there; First what he is inquire: An orient pearl is often found In depth of dirty mire.

Weigh not his crib, his wooden dish, Nor beasts that by him feed; Weigh not his mother's poor attire, Nor Joseph's simple weed.

This stable is a prince's court, The crib his chair of state; The beasts are parcel of his pomp, The wooden dish his plate.

The persons in that poor attire His royal liveries wear; The Prince himself is come from heaven: This pomp is praised there.

With joy approach, O Christian wight; Do homage to thy King; And highly praise this humble pomp, Which he from heaven doth bring.

Another, on the same subject, he calls _New Heaven, New War_. It is fantastic to a degree. One stanza, however, I like much:

This little babe, so few days old, Is come to rifle Satan's fold; All h.e.l.l doth at his presence quake, Though he himself for cold do shake; For in this weak, unarmed wise, The gates of h.e.l.l he will surprise.

There is profoundest truth in the symbolism of this. Here is the latter half of a poem called _St. Peters Remorse_:

Did mercy spin the thread To weave injustice' loom?

Wert then a father to conclude With dreadful judge's doom?

It is a small relief To say I was thy child, If, as an ill-deserving foe, From grace I am exiled.

I was, I had, I could-- All words importing want; They are but dust of dead supplies, Where needful helps are scant.

Once to have been in bliss That hardly can return, Doth but bewray from whence I fell, And wherefore now I mourn.

All thoughts of pa.s.sed hopes Increase my present cross; Like ruins of decayed joys, They still upbraid my loss.

O mild and mighty Lord!

Amend that is amiss; My sin my sore, thy love my salve, Thy cure my comfort is.

Confirm thy former deed; Reform that is defiled; I was, I am, I will remain Thy charge, thy choice, thy child.

Here are some neat stanzas from a poem he calls

CONTENT AND RICH.

My conscience is my crown, Contented thoughts my rest; My heart is happy in itself, My bliss is in my breast.

My wishes are but few, All easy to fulfil; I make the limits of my power The bounds unto my will.

Sith sails of largest size The storm doth soonest tear, I bear so small and low a sail As freeth me from fear.

And taught with often proof, A tempered calm I find To be most solace to itself, Best cure for angry mind.

No chance of Fortune's calms Can cast my comforts down; When Fortune smiles I smile to think How quickly she will frown.

And when in froward mood She proves an angry foe: Small gain I found to let her come, Less loss to let her go.

There is just one stanza in a poem of Daniel, who belongs by birth to this group, which I should like to print by itself, if it were only for the love Coleridge had to the last two lines of it. It needs little stretch of scheme to let it show itself amongst religious poems. It occurs in a fine epistle to the Countess of c.u.mberland. Daniel's writing is full of the practical wisdom of the inner life, and the stanza which I quote has a certain Wordsworthian flavour about it. It will not make a complete sentence, but must yet stand by itself:

Knowing the heart of man is set to be The centre of this world, about the which These revolutions of disturbances Still roll; where all th' aspects of misery Predominate; whose strong effects are such As he must bear, being powerless to redress; And that unless above himself he can Erect himself, how poor a thing is man!

Later in the decade, comes Sir Henry Wotton. It will be seen that I have arranged my singers with reference to their birth, not to the point of time at which this or that poem was written or published. The poetic influences which work on the shaping fantasy are chiefly felt in youth, and hence the predominant mode of a poet's utterance will be determined by what and where and amongst whom he was during that season. The kinds of the various poems will therefore probably fall into natural sequence rather after the dates of the youth of the writers than after the years in which they were written.

Wotton was better known in his day as a politician than as a poet, and chiefly in ours as the subject of one of Izaak Walton's biographies.

Something of artistic instinct, rather than finish, is evident in his verses. Here is the best and the best-known of the few poems recognized as his:

THE CHARACTER OF A HAPPY LIFE.

How happy is he born and taught, That serveth not another's will; Whose armour is his honest thought, And silly truth his highest skill;

Whose pa.s.sions not his masters are; Whose soul is still prepared for death, Untied to the world with care Of prince's grace or vulgar breath;

Who hath his life from humours freed; Whose conscience is his strong retreat; Whose state can neither flatterers feed, Nor ruin make accusers great;

Who envieth none whom chance doth raise Or vice; who never understood How swords give slighter wounds than praise.

Nor rules of state, but rules of good;

Who G.o.d doth late and early pray More of his grace than gifts to lend; And entertains the harmless day With a well-chosen book or friend.