Page images
PDF
EPUB

serve of expression, to the flowery exuberance and strained conceits of youth; overcharged and almost whining pathos has softened into a more chastened, natural, and unobtrusive tenderness; and a spirit of religion, profound and awe-inspiring, yet withal cheerful and consolatory, forming a part of the man himself, pervades and informs all his works till the poet who seemed at one time too likely to prolong the absurdities of the Della Crusca School,' has taken his place not unworthily among the classics of our nation.

[ocr errors]

-

If Mr Montgomery has attained the position of a popular poet, no one has been less indebted for that distinction to the fortunate selection of his subjects; at least, in as far as regards his longer and more elaborate productions. His popularity has in fact been attained, not in consequence, but in spite of his themes. In general these have been most remote from those stirring questions which agitate the general mind ;-borrowing no interest or influence from the fashions and opinions of the time, simple and limited in their form, almost monotonous in incident,-with little movement in the narrative, and that, too, erratic, and broken by those trains of reflection, in which the individual feelings of the author find a vent, whilst his imaginary creations stand still. In the only instance in which he has descended to avail himself of the interest afforded by a modern and popular theme, he has certainly been far from successful. The subject of the 'West Indies,' however well adapted to rhetorical, seems but ill calculated for poetical purposes. A subject which had become antiquated by frequent, minute, and disgusting exposure,which afforded no opportunity to awaken, suspend, and delight curiosity by a subtle and surprising developement of plot; and concerning which, public feeling had been wearied into insensi'bility by the agony of interest which the question excited during 'three-and-twenty years of incessant discussion,' was surely a questionable theme for Mr Montgomery's muse.* The only wonder is, that, appreciating so accurately the difficulties by which it was surrounded, he should after all have adopted it, or adopted it in such a form. A brief lyrical effusion of delight and triumph over the extinction of crime and suffering, and the dawn of brighter days for Africa, would have been an appropriate and acceptable tribute to the new order of things; but a new con troversial pamphlet in verse, on this exhausted subject, containing all the old common-places of bleeding negroes and blood

*Preface to the West Indies.'

thirsty planters, clanking chains and echoing whips,-even though embodied in vigorous and harmonious versification, and relieved by sketches of natural scenery of singular freshness and beauty, was but ill calculated to afford pleasure to the lovers of genuine poetry. For our own part at least, we can say, that whilst we perceived in this poem a great advance and improvement in many respects, a greater vigour and simplicity of taste, and a truth of feeling which could not fail to find an echo in every breast ;its effect upon the whole was to us any thing but agreeable. Few, we suppose, have read the poem twice through, though many may often have turned back to such passages as those which describes the charm with which love of country invests alike the bleakest as well as the richest shore.*

The error of associating poetry with questions of political morality and national policy, Mr Montgomery avoided in his next publication The World before the Flood. In this patriarchal parable the intellect does not clash with the imagination. No questionable views occur to suggest the unpleasant doubt how far poetry and practical experience, pathos and truth, are in accordance. The world (before the Flood) is all before him where to choose and the themes on which he touches are those universal ones, criminal ambition and repentance, piety, love and constancy. Doubtless here too there was a difficulty; for it requires no ordinary skill in a poet to excite and sustain an antediluvian. interest. Even that great argument of man's first disobedience' and its fruits, handled by the muse of Milton, though it fascinates us by the solemnity of its religious interest, and the grandeur of its supernatural pictures, is comparatively deficient in human interest. Save in a pastoral point of view, the simple annals of the patriarchs, as they actually existed, seem scarcely to admit of the details of poetical developement; and the judgment rather revolts at any attempt to excite the interest of curiosity by combining a series of fictitious events with names to which scripture associations have imparted a certain sacredness and inviolability. We certainly think, therefore, that Mr Montgomery essayed a task of needless difficulty in carrying his scene so far back into primeval antiquity, and resting the main interest of his poem on an imaginary contest between the descendants of Cain and Seth, the catastrophe of which is the real assumption of Enoch. Still, the difficulty, though great, has been not unsuccessfully surmounted. Though the interest which his imaginary personages excite is not intense, and the

There is a land, of every land the pride,' &c.

West Indies, part iii.

movement of his story has little that produces suspense or curiosity, the characters are natural, the pictures of life and human feeling with which it abounds, touching and solemn; and such passages as those which describe the first view of his native valley, which opens to the repentant and returning Javan,-the interview with her whom he had forsaken, but could not forget,the death of Adam,-the effect of Jubal's music on the distracted Cain, might have been claimed without injury to their fame by the most distinguished among our poets.

In Greenland, Mr Montgomery appears, for the first time, to have found a theme at once calculated to be popular, from the richness and variety of the poetical developement of which it was susceptible, and from being perfectly in unison with his own strongly devotional cast of mind;-one in which enthusiasm might walk hand in hand with truth, and the most striking features of external nature be associated with a moral beauty and grandeur still more commanding and attractive :-the desolate grandeur of snowy plains, dim-gliding across whose far horizon is seen the sledge of the solitary traveller,-the ice-covered seas that heave and crackle with the ground swell of the storm beneath, -the magnificence of gigantic icebergs, glittering with all the colours of the rainbow, and announcing their coming by the iceblink with which they illumine the sky,-the shooting corruscations of the north, sun and moon, now shining with strangely redoubled orb, now obscured in dim eclipse,-fogs that may be felt, the darkness of the long night, the bright icy sunshine of the returning day,-nature, in short, in all her gloomiest and most awful aspects;-and peopling these scenes, lending a moral interest to this snowy desert, stand the forms of those simple-hearted patriarchs, who visited its shores, inspired by a spirit of enterprise, purer and nobler than any which animated the breasts of Gama and Columbus, anxious only for a moral conquest;-encountering perils, hardships, and death, with out the world's sympathy or applause, on a theatre the most bleak and barren under the sun, with no spectator but the unseen eye, no prompter but the inward voice of duty and conscience. The genius of Mr Montgomery expands, with peculiar delight, over the unshrinking courage of the Moravians, the primitive simplicity of their manners, and the recollection of all the awful vicissitudes to which the self-devoted colony has been subjected ;-the sepa ration from Europe by the ever-increasing barrier of thick-ribbed ice, which, in the fifteenth century, made commerce forsake the unvoyageable seas;'-the destruction of settlements by the sudden disruption of that frozen wall, and the advance of the remorse ss ocean;-and the still more general and sweeping

[ocr errors]

desolation which pestilence, as if wearied with the slower operations of nature, came to supply. We should pity the man who could peruse these annals of Christian fortitude and philanthropy, without feeling his spirit stirred within him, and his warmest sympathy and admiration bestowed on those who, through faith and hope, could find tranquillity among such scenes; make 'a sunshine in the shady place;' and spread comfort and consolation over a waste and howling wilderness.

6

The descriptions are animated by the same spirit of reality and truth which dictated the idea of the poem. The vagueness which pervades the sketches of scenery in the Wanderer of 'Switzerland' has vanished. Every line is expressive, every feature is clear and sharply defined, as the objects themselves against the wintry sky. How graphic, is this description of a frost-fog at sea during the voyage of the Missionaries!

The sun retires

Not as he wont, with clear and golden fires;
Bewildered in a labyrinth of haze,

His orb redoubled, with discoloured rays,
Struggles and vanishes;-along the deep,
With slow array, expanding vapours creep,
Whose folds, in twilight's yellow glare uncurled,
Present the dreams of an unreal world;
Islands in air suspended; marching ghosts.
Of armies, shapes of castles, winding coasts,
Navies at anchor, mountains, woods, and streams,
Where all is strange, and nothing what it seems;
Till deep involving gloom, without a spark
Of star, moon, meteor, desolately dark,
Seals up the vision then, the pilot's fears
Slacken his arm; a doubtful course he steers,
Till morning comes, but comes not clad in light;
Uprisen day is but a paler night,

Revealing not a glimpse of sea or sky;

The ship's circumference bounds the sailor's eye.
So cold and dense th' impervious fog extends,

He might have touched the point where being ends—
His bark is all the universe.'

Equally picturesque, and still more majestic and beautiful, is this picture of an Arctic evening.

'Tis sunset; to the firmament serene,
Th' 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 *
On which the sun, beyond the horizon shrined,
Hath left his richest garniture behind;
Piled on a hundred arches, ridge by ridge,
O'er fix'd 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 shows 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.'

We could accumulate many of these splendid winter-pieces, did our limits permit; but we have yet a word to say on Mr Montgomery's other works, before coming to the volume before us.

*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.'

« PreviousContinue »