who spake as never man spake, the models and elemental
laws of a people’s poetry, alike according to
the will of God and the heart of man; if he can welcome
gallantly and hopefully the future, and yet know that
it must be, unless it would be a monster and a machine,
the loving and obedient child of the past; if he can
speak of the subjects which alone will interest the
many, on love, marriage, the sorrows of the poor, their
hopes, political and social, their wrongs, as well
as their sins and duties; and that with a fervour
and passion akin to the spirit of Burns and Elliott,
yet with more calmness, more purity, more wisdom, and
therefore with more hope, as one who stands upon a
vantage-ground of education and culture, sympathising
none the less with those who struggle behind him in
the valley of the shadow of death, yet seeing from
the mountain peaks the coming dawn, invisible as yet
to them: then let that man think it no fall,
but rather a noble rise, to leave awhile the barren
glacier ranges of pure art, for the fertile gardens
of practical and popular song, and write for the many,
and with the many, in words such as they can understand;
remembering that that which is simplest is always
deepest; that the many contain in themselves the few;
and that when he speaks to the wanderer and the drudge,
he speaks to the elemental and primeval man, and in
him speaks to all who have risen out of him.
Let him try, undiscouraged by inevitable failures;
and if at last he succeeds in giving vent to one song
which will cheer hard-worn hearts at the loom and the
forge, or wake one pauper’s heart with the hope
that his children are destined not to die as he died,
or recall, amid Canadian forests or Australian sheep-walks,
one thrill of love for the old country, her liberties,
and her laws, and her religion, to the settler’s
heart— let that man know that he has earned
a higher place among the spirits of the wise and good,
by doing, in spite of the unpleasantness of self-denial,
the duty which lay nearest him, than if he had out-rivalled
Goethe on his own classic ground, and made all the
cultivated and the comfortable of the earth desert,
for the exquisite creations of his fancy, Faust, and
Tasso, and Iphigenie.
THE POETRY OF SACRED AND LEGENDARY ART {187}
Much attention has been excited this year by the alleged
fulfilment of a prophecy that the Papal power was
to receive its death-blow—in temporal matters,
at least—during the past year 1848.
For ourselves, we have no more faith in Mr. Fleming,
the obsolete author, who has so suddenly revived in
the public esteem, than we have in many other interpreters
of prophecy. Their shallow and bigoted views
of past history are enough to damp our faith in their
discernment of the future. It does seem that
people ought to understand what has been, before they
predict what will be. History is “the track
of God’s footsteps through time;” it is
in His dealings with our forefathers that we may expect