Yes! I have loved thy wild abode, To tame thy torrent's thunder-shock, 'Unheeded spreads thy blossom❜d bud Like thine her fruit dishonour'd falls; A thousand treasures forth.' We alluded, in our opening remarks, to the coldness and indifference with which poetry is said to be regarded at present by the reading public. We have heard this spoken of as an almost inexplicable phenomenon. To what extent such a lethargy prevails we cannot tell, but we regard it as little else than that natural oscillation of feeling which communities, as well as individuals, exhibit. In the age that has just elapsed, there was felt towards this branch of literature a degree of public interest which has never been equalled. Never, we will venture to say, was a nation so poetically disposed,-so generally imbued with those restless and aspiring feelings most favourable to the art,-so ready to add the domain of fancy to the returning triteness of the sober realities of life. Other circumstances, beside the great talents of the poets who arose, were undoubtedly at work to produce this enthusiasm, but into these it were too long a history at present to enter. feeling, it is evident, could not be sustained at its unusual height, and by a common reaction it sunk into torpor and repose. But there is no fear of any permanent indifference towards this most delightful of the finer arts. The Whilst engaged in the toilsome occupations of manhood-its rude excitements and perpetual collisions-the labours of the poet may seem as foreign to our purpose, and as alien to our hearts, as the laughter and the tears of childhood. It is chiefly, we suspect, at the commencement and the close of life that poetry is read,and read at these periods with what different feelings! In youth we apply to poetry to have our emotions called forth, and the heart informed of its own dangerous capabilities. We thirst for the the cup of passion. It is then we read, not separable parts, scanned with critical judgment, but the whole long work, devoured with unrepressed avidity. We desire to be carried on, idays and nights, in the car of the enchanter, quite careless by what enchantment it is moving. We rather feel the passion which the melody is breathing, than listen to the cadence of the music itself. A happy time! which, like youth itself, never comes but once. In age, we return to poetry in order to embody, in adequate and perfect expression, feelings now made familiar to us by experience. We wish again to smooth, in the music of verse, the ruffled and distracted sentiment. We care not to be transported beyond the bounds of a known and tried reality, and sympathize little with ideal and imaginary conditions of the human heart; or, if we seek these wilder transports, we seek them as the ecstasies of our former days,—as the revived delight of a past existence. Our youth is with us as we read, and mingles one amongst the visions of the poet. Where we first learned to feel,to more than to live, we again revive an ardent sympathy with the various passions of mankind, which helps to ward off the torpor and contraction of old age. 'O deem not, midst this worldly strife, Even in manhood itself, amongst its severest labours and sternest cares, many a breeze from Araby the blest' comes freshening over our path. Paradise is not lost utterly while it remains in the poetry of Milton. And many a mind of far less power than Milton's may throw a momentary grace upon the scene of life, sufficient to conceal or obliterate its lesser troubles and afflictions. Amongst these the writer whose works we have attempted to estimate may fairly be placed; and who shall say that the sentiment of hope, the dearest to the heart of man, may not have gained one avenue the more from the language in which the poet has invested it? ART. V.-The Church and Dissent considered in their Practical Influence. By Edward Osler, Surgeon to the Swansea House of Industry. London. 12mo. 1836. 7HILST the matter is still in abeyance, we are anxious to say a very few words on the subject of church-rates, with the simple view of putting our lay readers, and through them the public at large, rather more in possession of that question. We are encouraged to hope that such an attempt may not be altogether fruitless, by observing that many popular hallucinations have been abated abated of late by the gentle operation of time, which has allowed a nearer investigation of things, so that matters which at first sight were the easiest in the world to dispatch (for qui pauca considerat facile pronunciat), were found on approaching them more intricate than had been supposed. When one of our enterprising northern voyagers looked on one occasion from the mast-head, he saw, as he thought, his way smooth over the snow to the Pole; yet on actual experiment, the surface which seemed so level at a distance, proved to be a succession of chasms and ridges, presenting obstacles the most formidable at every step. We know not what Ministers may propose to do on a subject into which, we must be allowed to say, they rushed, as Baxter would express it, with the shell upon their heads.' However, if they are to make any change at all, there are but two ways of proceeding open to them: either to uphold the churches still out of the national purse, but by some other mode than church-rates; or to leave it to their respective congregations to uphold them for themselves. If the first plan be adopted, and the repairs be charged on the consolidated fund, for instance, where is the relief to the dissenter? for the principle by which he is made, indirectly to be sure, but still substantially, to contribute to the maintenance of a building which he never enters, is just in as full force under this system as under the system of rates; and it is the principle of the payment, if we understand it right, to which the dissenter objects, and not to the amount. And yet it seems singular that whilst he sees so much to reprobate in the principle which makes one man minister to the support of another man's creed, he should, nevertheless, accept on his own part the regium donum, a provision for poor preachers of the three denominations voted out of the national purse; and which, it appears, from the discussion in parliament towards the close of the last session, he is not willing to relinquish. True it is that the sum is small-a four or five thousand pounds matter-but the principle is not the less objectionable on that account; for we presume that he would shrink from sheltering himself under the argument of the frail girl, That her child though it was, it was a little one.' The dissenter in his new Marriage Act does not abstain from drawing upon the churchman's purse for the support of his registrar, he being clerk of a union, though he must be well aware that so far as that functionary is employed in celebrating a marriage, he is employed in doing a gross violence to the conscience of every churchman who pays him his salary; and who differs from the dissenter in holding marriage to be a holy rite, and not to be made over to unconsecrated hands. Surely it would be as well that the dissenter should not decry a principle when it happens to work for the church, and hail it when it happens to work for the chapel, lest he should expose himself to misinterpretation, and give room for the surmise that his scruples are not so disinterested as they profess to be. The principle, however, to which the dissenters object thus inconsistently, is one of vast importance to maintain, and the pertinacity with which it is impugned by parties hostile to all our institutions shows that they think it so. Indeed, the principle lies at the root of all government, for it is merely this, that the minority shall give way. And if the contrary be contended for in our religious relations, why should it not be in our civil? One man may think it hard to support a church when he dissents from its doctrines; another, to support an army or navy when he objects to the profession of arms; a third, to support a police, when he repudiates such abridgment of the liberty of the subject. Now, if all these objections are to be allowed-and why should they not, if all men's alleged scruples are to be listened to?-all government is dissolved; for the nation must split into sections, according to corresponding divisions of opinion; and as opinion is infinitely divisible, those sections must split again; till at last each individual must do what seems right in his own sight; and then the principle has worked itself out, and the decomposition of the social system is complete. It may be replied that in the cases we have supposed, the parties objecting do, in spite of themselves, reap the benefits of the institutions against which they protest, by their reflex operation for good upon themselves, their property, their comforts, or their lives;that though they resent an army, yet, there being an army in spite of them, no foreign foe lays waste their fields; or a police, yet, there being a police, no robber breaks open their doors; and that thus they receive ample interest for what they contribute towards these wants of the state, having nothing to complain of, save that (as King Lear's fool says) they get a blessing against their will.' The same answer may be made to those who resist church-rates: they too have their full equivalent,' to use the nervous language of Archdeacon Bather, in one of his admirable charges, in having a better land to live in; the purification, through the Gospel, of the moral atmosphere in which they breathe being worth more than any man has to pay for it.' Or, as the great anti-puritan divine puts it- If there were not a minister in every parish, you would quickly find cause to increase the number of constables; and if the churches were not employed to be places to hear God's law, there would be need of them to be prisons for the breakers of the laws of men.' Nay more- Dissent,' says Mr. Osler, in the little work of which the title heads our paper, and which we hope to make thus more generally known, Dissent is a fluctuating creed, and seldom continues in a family beyond the third generation. generation. Without, therefore, alluding to the powerful influence which an orthodox and pervading religious establishment exerts upon every man, the Church is the source whence the individual dissenter received, either directly in his youth, or through his immediate forefathers, that religious knowledge which, when he became a separatist, made him a dissenter instead of an infidel: and however unwelcome the truth to his present feelings, he may conclude, from all the experience of society, that his own descendants will worship in the Church, and that, perhaps, even in his lifetime. Add to this, that the Church offers to himself security, that if the changes to which every Meeting is liable should destroy that which he attends, or compel him to leave it; or if he should remove into the country, or to a distant part of the kingdom, he will be sure to find a place where God is worshipped according to the truth of the Bible. In as far, therefore, as every man is interested in the source whence he derived the good he enjoys, in the welfare of his children, and in the contingent probabilities of his own life, every dissenter is interested in supporting the Church of England.' Nor is this all that can be said in defence of the principle of church-rates. So long as you have national church-rates, you have a national church establishment properly so called. Rates are a sort of pepper-corn rent (for they are little more) paid by the people in testimony that the people has an interest in its services. Accordingly, the nation at large, without any reference to distinction of creed, does benefit in other ways besides those we have named, in having a body of functionaries in the country on whom society can devolve a number of offices which they are peculiarly qualified to fill; some springing out of laws and regulations which Courts call for at the hands of the legislature; and some out of laws and regulations which private societies adopt for themselves. It is a great public convenience, independently of the question of religious instruction, to have in a nation a body of individuals of the station, class, and character of the clergy-safe men upon the whole to trust; intelligent from their education; pledged to good behaviour from their profession; known in their several districts from their functions; at hand from the necessity of fixed residence; universal in their presence from the parochial divisions to which they are severally attached, and so covering every nook where it is wanted that a law or a regulation, public or private, shall penetrate. And accordingly it is difficult to frame an act of parliament for any im provement whatever in our internal economy, without some appeal or other in it to the services of the clergy; services which they never undertook to discharge, but which, when required of them, they |