The Poems of Felicia Hemans
character of God, or contemplates as he ought the invisible world, will
turn to but few pages of the _Paradise Lost_, with the hope of finding
expressions correspondent to his thoughts and emotions. We feel with
pain the inappreciable contrast between the genius displayed in the
poetical execution of the work, and the absurdity of its prose story.
It is the opposition which this story presents to the most ennobling
truths, even more than ‘the want of human interest,’ on which Johnson
remarks, that gives to the poem the unattractive character of which he
speaks, and which we believe is felt by almost all its readers.
“Doubtless pure religious sentiment breaks out in this and in the other
poems of Milton. The concluding line of his Sonnet on his Blindness--
‘They also serve who only stand and wait,’
and numerous other passages of similar beauty, have, we may believe,
found an answering feeling in many hearts. But in speaking of those
causes which have given a new character to the poetry of later times,
it is not our purpose to trace their influence historically. Going back
to the days of Grecian and Roman civilisation, we shall take only a few
illustrations that may serve to show more clearly the contrast produced
by their absence on one hand, or their operation on the other.
“In proportion as we contemplate the world from the height to which
true religion conducts us, we perceive the circle of moral action
widening indefinitely. Our duties toward the inferior animals are few
and low, compared with those which we lie under to our fellow-men;
and our duties toward our fellow-men become far more extensive, and
assume a more solemn character, when we regard them not as born to
perish upon earth, but as commencing here an unending existence. Our
obligations to others correspond to our means of serving them; and we
are introduced to a higher class of virtues, as soon as we recognise
in those around us beings forming characters for a different mode of
existence, to whom the highest service that can be rendered is to
assist their progress in virtue, and to whom some influence, good or
evil, is continually flowing out from us, and diverging into channels
of which we cannot see the termination. All interest in the spiritual
and imperishable good of our fellow-men must depend upon our regarding
them as spiritual and imperishable. It is only under a sense of our
true nature, that man is capable of reaching the sublime thought of
assimilating himself to God, by devoting his powers to the moral
welfare of his fellow-men.
‘Yet, yet sustain me, Holiest!--I am vow’d
To solemn service high;
And shall the spirit, for thy tasks endow’d,
Sink on the threshold of the sanctuary,
Fainting beneath the burden of the day,
Because no human tone
Unto the altar-stone
Of that pure spousal fane inviolate,
Where it should make eternal truth its mate,
May cheer the sacred solitary way?
‘Oh! be the whisper of thy voice within
Enough to strengthen! Be the hope to win
A more deep-seeing homage for thy name
Far, far beyond the burning dream of fame!
Make me thine only! Let me add but one
To those refulgent steps all undefiled,
Which glorious minds have piled
Through bright self-offering, earnest, child-like, lone,
For mounting to thy throne;
And let my soul, upborne
On wings of inner morn,
Find, in illumined secresy, the sense
Of that blest work, its own high recompense.’
“But there is more to be considered. The conduct which would be wise
and right for man if immortal, would not be wise and right for him if
viewed as a perishing animal. It is true that moral good is always
good, and moral evil always evil; but with an essential change in our
nature and relations, there must likewise be an essential change in
what is morally good or evil. If all human hopes were limited to this
world, it would be folly for any one to act as if he and others were
to exist for ever. The whole plan of life and of its duties formed
by a wise man, would be quite different in the one case from what it
would be in the other; and the course of life actually pursued by the
generality, if destitute of all religious belief, would be still more
unlike that of men under its influence.
‘Sapias, vina liques, et spatio brevi
Spem longam reseces.’[450]
‘Quid brevi fortes jaculamur ævc
Multa?’[451]
‘Lætus in præsens, animus quod ultra est
Oderit curare, et amara lento
Temperet risu.’[452]
In the absence of religious faith, this is true philosophy. If this
life were the limit of our being, its pleasures and pains would be
the only objects of our concern. Nothing would be virtuous which
tended not to the attainment and communication of those limited and
perishing pleasures we might here partake; nothing morally evil, but
what lessened our own capacity for enjoying them, or tended to prevent
others from sharing them with us. There would be no sphere for the
exercise of those powers, no object for those capacities of happiness,
that belong to the imperishable part of our nature. There would be
nothing to prompt one to great sacrifices or acts of moral heroism;
for these have their source in the consciousness of immortality, in
a sense of our connexion with the infinite, our look forward to good
for ourselves and others beyond the limits of life. Earthly motives
afford no soil in which the nobler virtues can strike their roots.
It is true that the ancients, particularly the ancient philosophers,
were not without the influence of truly religious conceptions; and,
under almost any forms of opinion, the better nature of man will of
itself occasionally break out into exhibitions of excellence. But the
religious sentiment being so weak and perverted among the ancient
poets, we find little in their works that can be regarded as morally
noble, and scarcely an indistinct recognition of those deep feelings
and unearthly virtues which have their source in our spiritual nature.
The same remark is almost equally applicable to a large proportion of
the modern poets: for true religion has been little understood or felt
by them. Where, in any age preceding our own, may we hope to find such
expressions of sentiment as in the following verses from Mrs Hemans’
‘Vaudois Wife?’[453]
‘But calm thee! Let the thought of death
A solemn peace restore;
The voice that must be silent soon,
Would speak to thee once more:
That thou may’st bear its blessing on
Through years of after life,--
A token of consoling love,
Even from this hour of strife.
‘I bless thee for the noble heart,
The tender, and the true,
Where mine hath found the happiest rest
That e’er fond woman’s knew;
I bless thee, faithful friend and guide!
For my own, my treasured share
In the mournful secrets of thy soul,
In thy sorrow, in thy prayer.
* * * * *
‘I bless thee for the last rich boon
Won from affection tried--
The right to gaze on death with thee,
To perish by thy side!
And yet more for the glorious hope
Even to these moments given--
Did not thy spirit ever lift
The trust of mine to heaven?
‘Now be thou strong! Oh! knew we not
Our path must lead to this?
A shadow and a trembling still
Were mingled with our bliss!
We plighted our young hearts when storms
Were dark upon the sky,
In full, deep knowledge of their task--
To suffer and to die!
‘Be strong! I leave the living voice
Of this, my martyr’d blood,
With the thousand echoes of the hills,
With the torrent’s foaming flood,--
A spirit midst the caves to dwell,
A token on the air,
To route the valiant from repose,
The fainting from despair.
‘Hear it, and bear thou on, my love!
Ay, joyously endure!
Our mountains must be altars yet,
Inviolate and pure;
Where must our God be worshipp’d still
With the worship of the free;--
Farewell! there’s but one pang in death,
One only,--leaving thee!’
“With this, may be compared the speech of Alcestis in Euripides, when
dying in the presence of her husband, under circumstances adapted to
call forth all that power of expressing the tender emotions, for which
Euripides has been thought to be distinguished.
“Under the influence of religion, we are acted upon by new motives,
through the sense created within us, of the worth of our fellow-men.
Religion invests them with a new character, strips off the disguise
with which the accidents of mortality, imperfections, weaknesses,
follies, miseries, and crimes hide their essential nature from our
view, and presents them before us with all the interests and capacities
of immortal beings. They who are dear to us are worthy of all love and
self-devotion, worthy of affections unlimited by death or time. They
are members with us of the imperishable family of God, in whose company
we are to exist for ever, and with whom our union will become more
entire, as we grow purer and more disinterested.
“Thus in later days there has been a growth of sentiments and
affections, almost unknown before. Our better feelings toward our
fellow-men have acquired far more strength, and assumed new forms.
In other times, man has been comparatively an insulated being.
Domestic life--that life in which now almost all our joys or sorrows
are centred--was scarcely known to the ancients; and it has had but
a sickly and artificial existence even in modern ages, through the
operation of false notions of domestic government and discipline, and
of the mutual relations of husband and wife, parents and children.
Religion, by teaching us justly to estimate what is truly excellent in
our nature, what is intellectual, moral, and ever-enduring, has given
to woman the rank to which she is entitled. It has made her the friend
of man; and our feelings are in harmony with the poet when he speaks
of--
‘A perfect woman, nobly plann’d
To warn, to comfort, and command;
And yet a spirit still and bright,
With something of an angel light.’
But man has never regarded woman with respect and true love, except so
far as he has regarded her as a spiritual and immortal being. Without
this, no conception can exist of that inseparable union which blends
all the interests and affections of one being with those of another.
The poetry of the ancients that expresses any sentiments toward the
female sex is, with rare exceptions, of the grossest kind, sensual,
coarse, indecent, brutal. We can pick out only a few passages from
the mass, which shadow forth anything like real affection. The same
character has continued to cleave to much of our modern poetry,
rendering it at once pernicious and disgusting. But wherever the
power of true religion has been felt, there woman, more disinterested,
more pure, and more moral than man, has exerted a constant influence
to raise the character of society. Where it has not been felt, woman
has been treated as a mere creature of this earth, an object only of
sensual passion, courted, wronged, and insulted; her character has
sunk, and the infection of the evil has spread itself every where. It
would be difficult, in as few words, to suggest to a reflecting mind a
more melancholy picture of the state of society at Athens, than that
of which Aristotle affords us a glimpse in a short passage of his ‘Art
of Poetry,’ where he remarks, with his usual brevity and dryness, that
‘the manners (character) of a woman or slave may be good; though in