Page images
PDF
EPUB

In truth he was a strange and wayward wight,
Fond of each gentle and each dreadful scene.
In darkness and in storm, he found delight:

Nor less than when on ocean-wave serene
The southern Sun diffused his dazzling sheen.1
E'en sad vicissitude amused his soul:

And if a sigh would sometimes intervene,
And down his cheek a tear of pity roll,
A sigh, a tear, so sweet, he wish'd not to control.

MORNING.2

But who the melodies of morn can tell?

The wild-brook babbling down the mountain side;
The lowing herd; the sheepfold's simple bell;
The pipe of early shepherd dim descried
In the lone valley; echoing far and wide
The clamorous horn along the cliffs above;
The hollow murmur of the ocean-tide;
The hum of bees, and linnet's lay of love,
And the full choir that wakes the universal grove.

The cottage-curs at early pilgrim bark;

Crown'd with her pail the tripping milkmaid sings;
The whistling ploughman stalks afield; and, hark!
Down the rough slope the ponderous wagon rings;
Thro' rustling corn the hare astonish'd springs;
Slow tolls the village-clock the drowsy hour;

The partridge bursts away on whirring wings;
Deep mourns the turtle in sequester'd bower,
And shrill lark carols clear from her aërial tour.

THE HUMBLE WISH.

The end and the reward of toil is rest.

Be all my prayer for virtue and for peace.
Of wealth and fame, of pomp and power possess'd,
Who ever felt his weight of wo decrease?

Ah! what avails the lore of Rome and Greece,
The lay heaven-prompted, and harmonious string,
The dust of Ophir, or the Tyrian fleece,
All that art, fortune, enterprise, can bring,
If envy, scorn, remorse, or pride the bosom wring!

Let vanity adorn the marble tomb

With trophies, rhymes, and scutcheons of renown,

In the deep dungeon of some Gothic dome,

Where night and desolation ever frown.

Mine be the breezy hill that skirts the down;

Where a green grassy turf is all I crave,

With here and there a violet bestrown,

Fast by a brook, or fountain's murmuring wave;
And many an evening sun shine sweetly on my grave.

1 Brightness, splendor. The word is used by some late writers, as well as by Milton.

"Do you rise early? If not, let me conjure

you to acquire the habit. This will very much contribute towards rendering your life long, useful, and happy."-LORD CHATHAM, Letters.

And thither let the village swain repair;
And light of heart, the village maiden gay,
To deck with flowers her half-dishevell'd hair,
And celebrate the merry morn of May.

There let the shepherd's pipe the livelong day
Fill all the grove with love's bewitching wo;

And when mild evening comes in mantle gray,
Let not the blooming band make haste to go;
No ghost nor spell my long and last abode shall know.

THE CHARMS OF NATURE.

Oh, how canst thou renounce the boundless store
Óf charms which Nature to her votary yields!
The warbling woodland, the resounding shore,
The pomp of groves, and garniture of fields;
All that the genial ray of morning gilds,
And all that echoes to the song of even,

All that the mountain's fostering bosom shields,
And all the dread magnificence of Heaven,-

Oh, how canst thou renounce, and hope to be forgiven?1

THE HERMIT.

At the close of the day, when the hamlet is still,
And mortals the sweets of forgetfulness prove,
When nought but the torrent is heard on the hill,
And nought but the nightingale's song in the grove,
'Twas thus, by the cave of the mountain afar,

While his harp rung symphonious, a hermit began;
No more with himself or with nature at war,

He thought as a sage, though he felt as a man.

"Ah! why, all abandon'd to darkness and woe,
Why, lone Philomela, that languishing fall?
For spring shall return, and a lover bestow,
And sorrow no longer thy bosom inthrall.
But, if pity inspire thee, renew the sad lay,

Mourn, sweetest complainer, man calls thee to mourn;
Oh, soothe him, whose pleasures like thine pass away:
Full quickly they pass-but they never return.

"Now gliding remote on the verge of the sky,
The moon, half extinguish'd, her crescent displays;
But lately I mark'd when majestic on high

She shone, and the planets were lost in her blaze.
Roll on, thou fair orb, and with gladness pursue
The path that conducts thee to splendor again:
But man's faded glory what change shall renew?
Ah, fool! to exult in a glory so vain!

""Tis night, and the landscape is lovely no more;

I mourn, but, ye woodlands, I mourn not for you;

i. 124.

This is the verse of the Minstrel which | almost to tears. See GILLIES' Literary Veteran, Dugald Stewart could never, by any chance, recite without a faltering voice and being moved

For morn is approaching, your charms to restore,
Perfum'd with fresh fragrance, and glittering with dew.
Nor yet for the ravage of winter I mourn;

Kind Nature the embryo blossom will save:
But when shall Spring visit the mouldering urn?

Oh, when shall it dawn on the night of the grave?1

""Twas thus, by the glare of false science betray'd-
That leads to bewilder; and dazzles, to blind-
My thoughts wont to roam, from shade onward to shade,
Destruction before me, and sorrow behind.

'Oh, pity, great Father of Light,' then I cried,

"Thy creature, who fain would not wander from thee; Lo, humbled in dust, I relinquish my pride:

From doubt and from darkness thou only canst free!

"And darkness and doubt are now flying away;
No longer I roam in conjecture forlorn:
So breaks on the traveller, faint and astray,

The bright and the balmy effulgence of morn.
See Truth, Love, and Mercy in triumph descending,
And Nature all glowing in Eden's first bloom!

On the cold cheek of death smiles and roses are blending,
And beauty immortal awakes from the tomb."

WILLIAM PALEY, 1743-1805.

"2

"No writers are rewarded with a larger share of immediate celebrity than those who address themselves to the understandings of general readers, who investigate truths, develop principles, and convey instruction in that popular style and that plain, expressive language which all read with pleasure and comprehend with ease." Such was eminently the characteristic of Dr. William Paley. He was the son of the head-master of Giggleswick grammarschool, in Yorkshire, and was born in 1743. In November, 1758, he was admitted as a sizer of Christ's College, Cambridge. For some time he attracted notice only as an uncouth but agreeable idler. "I spent," he says, "the first two years of my under-graduateship happily, but unprofitably. I was constantly in society, where we were not immoral, but idle and rather expensive.. At the commencement of my third year, however, after having left the usual

1 There is a tradition, and the internal evidence certainly confirms its truth, that Dr. Beattie wrote The Hermit to the end of the fourth stanza, when under the influence of skeptical opinions. He had not then attained his majority, and he put the piece aside, never intending to publish it,-ending as it did with a doubt concerning the soul's immortality:"Oh, when shall Spring dawn on the night of the grave?" But when, in a few years after, he became a con

[blocks in formation]

party at rather a late hour in the evening, I was awakened, at five in the morning, by one of my companions, who stood at my bedside, and said, 'Paley, I have been thinking what a fool you are. I could do nothing profitably were I to try, and can afford the life I lead: you could do every thing, and cannot afford it. I have had no sleep during the whole night on account of these reflections, and I am now come solemnly to inform you that if you persist in your indolence I must renounce your society.' I was so struck with the visit and the visitor, that I lay in bed a great part of the day and formed my plan." The result was that he changed his whole habits, became a close student, and at the close of his college course was the first in his class.

Soon after taking his degree, he obtained the situation of usher at a private school at Greenwich; but being elected, in June, 1766, a fellow of the college to which he belonged, he fixed his residence at the university, became a tutor of his college, and delivered lectures on metaphysics, morals, and the Greek Testament. In 1775 he was presented to the rectory of Musgrove, in Westmoreland; and in the following year he vacated his fellowship by marrying. He was soon advanced by his friend Dr. Law, then Bishop of Carlisle, to various preferments, until he was finally, in 1782, made archdeacon and chancellor of that diocese. Here he digested and prepared his celebrated work the Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy, which appeared in 1785. His Hora Paulina followed in 1790, and his Evidences of Christianity in 1794. Soon after this he became so infirm as to be incapable of preaching, and he devoted his attention almost exclusively to the preparation of his Natural Theology, or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of a Deity, collected from the Appearances of Nature, which was published in 1802. He died on the 25th of May, 1805, leaving a wife and eight children.

"Dr. Paley was, in private life, a cheerful, social, unassuming character, and of an equable temper. As a writer, he did not possess a comprehensive and grasping genius, nor was he endowed with a rich and sparkling imagination. His mind was well informed, but not furnished with deep, extensive, ponderous erudition. His distinguishing characteristic is a penetrating understanding and a clear, logical head: what he himself comprehends fully, that he details luminously. He takes a subject to pieces with the nice skill of a master, presents to us distinctly its several parts, and explains them with accuracy and truth."1

Few writers have obtained greater popularity than Dr. Paley. Ten editions of his Moral Philosophy were sold during his lifetime; his Evidences of Christanity was reprinted seventeen times in twenty-seven years; and his Natural Theology reached a tenth edition in the short space of three years from the time of its first publication. His Hora Paulina-decidedly his most ingenious and original work-was not so popular, though exceedingly valued by scholars and students of divinity. Its object is to open a new department of evidence in favor of Christianity, by comparing the Epistles of Paul with his history as recorded by Luke in the Acts, and by marking what he designates as the undesigned coincidences" of the one with the other. In this way he shows the genuineness of both, and thus furnishes a novel and ingenious, and at the

1 Quarterly Review, ii. 86.

Literally, Pauline Hours;" that is, hours pent in comparing numerous facts which the

Apostle Paul incidentally states of himself in his Epistles, with what is narrated of him în the Acts of the Apostles.

same time a very conclusive, species of testimony in behalf of revealed religion.

The most exceptionable of all Paley's works is his Moral Philosophy.1 In it he takes the ground that "whatever is expedient is right,"-a doctrine true, indeed, if man could see all things and look into futurity; but a most dangerous one to a being to whom the future is unknown. Indeed, in many parts of this work may be found sentiments altogether too loosely expressed, and principles of action laid down of a character far too compromising; which at once remind us of his remark, when he was a fellow at Cambridge, and had been requested to sign a petition for relief in the matter of subscription to the "Thirty-Nine Articles" of the Church of England, that he "was too poor to keep a conscience;" in other words, that, where his conscience and his worldly interests came in conflict, the former must give way to the latter. So also, about the same time, he offered, as a subject which he intended to discuss, "The Eternity of Future Punishment contradictory to the Divine Attributes;" but, finding that it would be very displeasing to the master of his college, he concluded to insert the word "NOT" before "contradictory." Such facts reveal a character lacking in moral firmness, certainly, if not in moral principle."

THE WORLD WAS MADE WITH A BENEVOLENT DESIGN3

It is a happy world, after all. The air, the earth, the water, teem with delightful existence. In a spring noon or a summer evening, on whichever side I turn my eyes, myriads of happy beings crowd upon my view. "The insect youth are on the wing." Swarms of new-born flies are trying their pinions in the air. Their sportive motions, their wanton mazes, their gratuitous activity, their continual change of place without use or purpose, testify their joy and the exultation which they feel in their lately

1 For a triumphant refutation of the dan- satisfactory evidence before the tribunal of the gerous doctrines of his Moral Philosophy, read public that he has had foul wrong done unto the Essays on Morality, by that clear-headed, him, his reputation as an honest writer sinks conscientious Christian moralist, Jonathan forever beneath the sea of contemptuous obDymond, one of the best works upon the sub- livion. He is no more the author of the Na ject. But a clergyman of the Church of Eng-tural Theology than of any other work which land has come to the rescue of Paley, in a work with the following title:-A Vindication of Dr. Paley's Theory of Morals from the Objections of Dugald Stewart, Mr. Gisborne, Dr. Pierson, and Dr. Thomas Brown, dc., by the Rev. Latham Wainewright, M.A. His arguments, if not conclusive, are certainly very ingenious.

2 A writer in the London Athenæum of August, 1848, has shown very conclusively that Dr. Paley's Natural Theology is, in the outline of its argument and in its most striking illustrations (especially in the well-known story of the watch), a stupendous plagiarism, taken from a work of Dr. Nieuwentyt, of Holland, and translated into English and published by Longman, in 1718, under the title of The Christian Philosopher. A writer in the Church and State Gazette, in reviewing this article in the Athenæum, remarks, "In the annals of literary corsairship we never heard of any thing equalling piracy like this; and, unless the friends and relatives of Paley can submit

he did not write." In a subsequent number of the Athenæum a writer comes to the vindication of Paley, and partially excuses him on the ground that his Natural Theology was originally lectures delivered to his students, in which he embodied all he had read, without giving credit to the sources whence he bor rowed; and that when these lectures were published in the form in which we now have them, he was unable to cite his authorities. On this defence the editor of the Athenæum remarks, "We think the letter of our correspondent gives the most satisfactory solution of this matter that has yet been offered, and the best, probably, that can be given. To our view, then, the most satisfactory is a most unsatisfactory one."

3 The common course of things is in favor of happiness: happiness is the rule, misery the exception. Were the order reversed, our attention would be called to examples of health and competency, instead of disease and want."-BUTLER's Analogy.

[ocr errors]
« ՆախորդըՇարունակել »