like a demonstrator of anatomy.

Mark the style of his first ser

mon, The Wisdom of being Religious:

These words consist of two propositions, which are not distinct in sense: ... So that they differ only as cause and effect, which by a metonymy, used in all sorts of authors, are frequently put one for another. . . . Having thus explained the words, I come now to consider the proposition contained in them, which is this: That religion is the best knowledge and wisdom. This I shall endeavor to make good these three ways:

1st. By a direct proof of it.

2d. By showing on the contrary the folly and ignorance of irreligion and wickedness. 3d. By vindicating religion from those common imputations which seem to charge it with ignorance or imprudence. I begin with the direct proof of this.'

Expositions, apologies, moral essays, while they supply rational motives to virtue, rarely kindle a living piety, and are utterly unable to reclaim the depraved. The heart is not touched by the dust that settles on the countenance. But between the dregs at the bottom and the foam at the top quietly coursed the genuine sap of the national life. Under the smoke, burning in silence, glowed the simple faith that never dies, soon to give evidence of its powerful vitality. The revival began with a small knot of Oxford students, whose master spirit was John Wesley. Their methodical regularity of life gained them the nick-name of Methodists. Breaking away from the settled habits of the clerical profession, they avoided all polemical and abstract reasoning, and preached, as they were moved by the spirit, the lost condition of every man born into the world; the eternal tortures which are the doom of the unconverted; justification by faith; free salvation by Christ; the necessity of personal regeneration; the imminence of death-doctrines which were now seldom heard from a Church of England pulpit. These they regarded as the cardinal tenets of the Christian religion, and taught them with a vehemence and fire that started the smouldering piety of the nation into flame. Their unstudied eloquence and their complete disregard of conventionalities contrasted with the polished and fastidious sermons that were the prevailing fashion of the time. Wesley, relying upon the Divine guidance, frequently opened the Bible at random for a text. He believed in the devil, saw God in the commonest events, heard supernatural noises. His father had been thrice pushed by a ghost. He declared that 'a string of opinions is no more Christian faith than a string of beads is Christian holiness.' Such convictions are able to turn emotion into madness, and render the madness contagious. At

his death, he had eighty thousand disciples; now he has a million. The oratory of Whitefield, another of the Oxford society, was so impassioned that at times he was overcome by his tears, while half his audience were convulsed with sobs. His first sermon, as a bishop complained, 'drove fifteen people mad.' He instituted itinerant preaching, became a roving evangelist, sought the haunts of ignorance and vice, to deal out to their half-savage populations the bread of life.' His rude auditors, numbering five, ten, fifteen, or even twenty thousand, were electrified. A few incidents will exemplify his peculiarities, and at the same time illustrate the characteristics of this reaction against the colorless, marble polish of the age. On one occasion, seeing the actor Shuter, who was then attracting much attention in the part of Ramble in the. Rambler, seated in a front pew of the gallery, he turned suddenly towards him, and exclaimed: 'And thou, too, poor Ramble, who hast rambled so far from Him, oh! cease thy ramblings and come to Jesus.' 'God always makes use of strong passions,' he was accustomed to say, 'for a great work,' and it was his object to rouse such passions to the highest point. Sometimes he would reproduce the condemnation scene as he had witnessed it in a court of justice. With tearful eyes and a trembling voice, he would begin, after a momentary pause: 'I am now going to put on the condemning cap. Sinner, I must do it. I must pronounce sentence upon you.' Then, with a dramatic change of tone, he thundered over his awe-struck hearers the solemn words: 'Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire!' On another occasion, to illustrate the peril of sinners, he described an old blind man deserted by his dog, tottering feebly over the desolate moor, vainly endeavoring to feel his way with the staff, drawing nearer and nearer to the verge of an awful precipice; and drew the picture so vividly that the urbane Chesterfield lost all selfpossession, and was heard to exclaim, 'Good God! he is gone.' Preaching before seamen at New York, he adopted the familiar symbols of their occupation: 'Well, my boys, we have a clear sky, and are making fine headway over a smooth sea before a light breeze, and we shall soon lose sight of land. But what means this sudden lowering of the heavens, and that dark cloud arising from beneath the western horizon? Hark! don't you hear distant thunder? Don't you see those flashes of lightning?

There is a storm gathering. Every man to his duty! How the waves arise and dash against the ship! The air is dark! the tempest rages! Our masts are gone! The ship is on her beamends! What next?' 'The long boat! take to the long boat!' shouted the excited crowd. His favorite maxim was, that 'a preacher, when he entered the pulpit, should look upon it as the last time he might preach, and the last time his people might hear.'

In this burning fervor of realization, began the revival of popular religion,—a revolt against the frigid and formal teaching, the easy-going indifference of the dominant church; and this reactionary movement, communicating its impulse to contemporary thought, is premonitory of the general return to rapture and imagination, the grand and the tragic.

Poetry. To arrange words in decasyllabic couplets so that the accents may fall correctly, that the rhymes may strike the ear strongly, that the lines may flow in unbroken cadence, is an art as mechanical as that of mending a shoe, and may be learned by any dunce who will never blunder on one happy thought or expression. Dryden suggested the art; Pope mastered it, and his brilliant success produced a host of dull imitators. His well chosen sounds and symmetrical rhythms were adopted as fashion and fine manners, wherein the point of excellence was not to alter the pattern, but to vary its details of color. Without his powers, they affected his livery, till it became trite, then offensive. In their devotion to form, they forgot the spirit that warms it. Sense was

Sacrificed to sound,

And truth cut short to make the period round.'

Poetry, impoverished, soulless, and hollow, was waiting for a new development.

A few assert their freedom, strike the key-note of a higher strain, and seem to give signs that the human mind is turning on its hinges, that externals are not the true concern of the poet, that a pink doll is not a woman, that gallantry is not love, that amusement is not happiness, that

Kind hearts are more than coronets,

And simple faith than Norman blood.'

Four poems mark the change,-Thomson's Seasons, Young's

Night Thoughts, Akenside's Pleasures of the Imagination, and Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. Their main current runs in the direction of sentimental reflection.

Thomson was contemplative, affectionate, sympathetic, and artless. He loved nature with those fresh feelings and glad impulses which all would wish to cherish, and he painted his love, in its smallest details, without being ashamed. His lines on the robin in Winter are in his best vein:

The fowls of heaven,

Tamed by the cruel season, crowd around
The winnowing store, and claim the little boon
Which Providence assigns them. One alone,
The redbreast, sacred to the household gods,
Wisely regardful of the embroiling sky,
In joyless fields and thorny thickets leaves
His shivering mates, and pays to trusted man
His annual visit. Half afraid, he first

Against the window beats; then, brisk, alights
On the warm hearth; then, hopping o'er the floor,
Eyes all the smiling family askance,

And pecks, and starts, and wonders where he is;
Till, more familiar grown, the table-crumbs

Attract his slender feet.'

A passage at the end of Spring contains a well-known line, and

is characteristic:

'Delightful task! to rear the tender thought,

To teach the young idea how to shoot,
To pour the fresh instruction o'er the mind,
To breathe the enlivening spirit, and to fix
The generous purpose in the glowing breast.'

In his mode of thinking and of expressing his thought, he was original.

Young was a clergyman and a courtier, who had aspired in vain to a seat in Parliament, then to a bishopric in the Church; married, lost his wife and children, but made use of his disappointments and sufferings to write meditations on Life, Death, Immortality, Time, Friendship, and similar themes. He was a lover of gloom, of the imagery of the grave, of the awful mysteries of life. When he was writing a tragedy, Grafton sent him a human skull, with a candle in it, as a lamp; and he used it. His poem is a wilderness of reflection, through which his fertile fancy scatters flowers of every hue and odor. Its strength is in the vast number of noble and sublime passages, maxims of the highest practical value, everlasting truths,—

'The glorious fragments of a fire immortal,
With rubbish mixed, and glittering in the dust.'

The following may suggest its general complexion:

Too low they build, who build beneath the stars.'

Procrastination is the thief of time.'

'In human hearts what bolder thought can rise
Than man's presumption on to-morrow's dawn?'

Shall man be proud to wear his livery,

And souls in ermine scorn a soul without?

Can place or lessen us, or aggrandize?

Pygmies are pygmies still, though perched on Alps,
And pyramids are pyramids in vales.'

'Look nature through, 'tis revolution all!

All change, no death; day follows night, and night
The dying day; stars rise and set, and set and rise;
Earth takes the example. See, the Summer gay,
With her green chaplet and ambrosial flowers,

Droops into pallid autumn: Winter gray,

Horrid with frost and turbulent with storm,

Blows Autumn and his golden fruits away,

Then melts into the Spring: soft Spring, with breath
Favonian, from warm chambers of the south,

Recalls the first. All, to reflourish, fades:

As in a wheel, all sinks to reascend;
Emblems of man, who passes, not expires.'

Akenside, earnest and severe, believed he had a message to deliver to mankind, and wrote in blank verse a philosophical poem on the pleasures of the purified intellect, as it contemplates flourishing groves, murmuring streams, calm seas under moonlight, autumn mists slumbering on the gray sky, noble architecture, music, sculpture, painting. We look, if not for a vision, for something that suggests an element of progress,—at least, a disposition to cease chiselling, and to quarry the living rock:

'Say, why was man so eminently raised

Amid the vast creation; why ordained
Through life and death to dart his piercing eye,
With thoughts beyond the limit of his frame;
But that the Omnipotent might send him forth

In sight of mortal and immortal powers,

As on a boundless theatre, to run

The great career of justice; to exalt

His generous aim to all diviner deeds? . . .

Who that, from Alpine heights, his labouring eye

Shoots round the wide horizon, to survey

Nilus or Ganges rolling his bright wave

Through mountains, plains, through empires black with shade,

And continents of sand, will turn his gaze

To mark the windings of a scanty rill

That murmurs at his feet? . . .