one of universal and profound interest; and "The Grave" will outlast a thousand frothy trifles of feebler minds.

Isaac Watts-a name ever to be honoured-was, perhaps, the first very eminent writer of devotional lyrics. We had, already, some noble hymns; such as Milton's ode on the Nativity, and one or two by Addison: but Dr. Watts founded the school of Hymnology, and carried the style to a higher perfection. His hymns are generally marked by correct diction, often by vivid imagery, occasionally by grandeur, and always by excellence of sentiment. The following verses, describing the Psalmist of Israel, remind the reader of the Puritan poets :

"Softly the tuneful shepherd leads

The Hebrew flocks to flowery meads;
He marks their path with notes divine,
While fountains spring with oil and wine.

"When, kindling with victorious fire,
He shakes his lance across the lyre,
The lyre resounds unknown alarms,
And sets the Thunderer in arms.

"Behold the God! The' almighty King
Rides on the tempest's glorious wing;
His ensigns lighten round the sky,
And moving legions sound on high.
"Ten thousand cherubs wait His course,
Chariots of fire and flaming horse :
Earth trembles; and her mountains flow,
At His approach, like melting snow.
"Turning His hand with sovereign sweep,
He drowns all Egypt in the deep;
Then guides the tribes, a glorious band,

Through deserts to the promised land."

The vigour of this passage resembles that fierce enthusiasm with which Milton clothed himself when he sat down to paint the acts of Samson against the uncircumcised.

Quite a different man from Dr. Watts was William Collins. In our mind it greatly exalts Milton's genius to remark the way in which he has influenced diverse kinds of poetry. The Odes of Collins and Gray rise in some passages almost to an equality with Milton himself. When the former deals with the "Passions," we have a series of splendid allegorical pictures. Revenge, for example, is thus represented :—

"With a frown,

Revenge impatient rose;

He threw his blood-stain'd sword in thunder down;

And, with a withering look,

The war-denouncing trumpet took,

And blew a blast so loud and dread,

Were ne'er prophetic sounds so full of woe:

And ever and anon he beat

The doubling drum with furious heat."

The works of Collins are marked by purity, as well as elegance; being free from that vicious license which the authority of Milton did so much to drive from our poetry.-Thomas Gray never fulfilled the rich promise of his first productions. To an imagination kindred to that of Milton, he united extreme fastidiousness; which, perhaps, has deprived posterity of many valuable pieces. Gray was a man of profound learning; he had studied the old Greek masters till their music had sunk into his very soul. But more closely than almost any other bard he imitates Milton. In not a few of his lines we find epithets felicitously polished from a Miltonic original, sometimes transferred entire; similes copied almost exactly; and the whole pervaded by an infusion of the styles of Pindar and “Paradise But Gray was a great poet, if not original. The effect of Milton on his verse was a classic splendour; as on that of some others it was reverence, simplicity, or force. The following character of Dryden, in the “Progress of Poesy,” is very fine :—

Lost."

"Behold where Dryden's less presumptuous car

Wide o'er the fields of glory bear

Two coursers of ethereal race,

With necks in thunder clothed, and long-resounding pace.

"But ah! 'tis heard no more :

O lyre divine! what daring spirit
Wakes thee now? though he inherit
Nor the pride, nor ample pinion,

That the Theban eagle bear,
Sailing with supreme dominion
Through the azure deep of air:
Yet oft before his infant eyes would run

Such forms as glitter in the Muse's ray

With orient hues, unborrow'd of the sun :

Yet shall he mount, and keep his distant way

Beyond the limits of a vulgar fate;

Beneath the good how far!-but far above the great."

Akenside had more of egotistic pedantry than Milton, more of diffuseness, and at times a touch of his great master's sublimity and strength. He was a man of worth; and his chief poem, on the " Pleasures of Imagination," is dignified by philosophy and liberal ideas. Upon his metaphysical speculations, however, Akenside did not succeed in grafting human interests and passions. He considered nature as improved by art and science, and viewed the rainbow with increased delight when he had analysed it after the Newtonian theory of light and colours. He speaks his sentiments in verse, which will illustrate his style and character:

"Nor shall e'er

The graver tasks of manhood, or the advice

Of vulgar wisdom, move me to disdain
Those studies which possess'd me in the dawn
Of life, and fix'd the colour of my mind
For every future year: whence even now
From sleep I rescue the clear hours of morn;
And, while the world around lies overwhelm'd
In idle darkness, am alive to thoughts
Of honourable fame, of truth divine

Or moral, and of minds to virtue won

By the sweet magic of harmonious verse.'

The influence of Milton is powerful throughout the poetry of Cowper. Not that the usual style of the latter is similar to the ornate splendour of the former; but that in some other respects a resemblance may be traced. In a few instances there is almost Milton's grandeur of expression. The one mind was of imperial mould; the other was sensitive, melancholy to excess, tender, and sympathetic. No poetry has done more than Cowper's in bringing about a change for the better in the national taste. He led the people from artificial follies to strong and stirring truths; from epigrammatic satire to a love of nature, and the utterance of the life-like. For long had our national school of poetry been under servitude to Pope and his followers: Cowper arose, and the varnish crumbled away, and the woodland glades, the vocal groves, the everlasting hills, were again revealed in their pristine beauty. When he commenced, he declared war against the reigning fashion, by which sentiment was

"sacrificed to sound,

And truth cut short to make a period round."

And again, claiming the freedom of nature, he exclaimed,

"Give me the line that ploughs its stately course,

Like some proud swan, conquering the stream by force;
That, like some cottage beauty, charms the heart,

Quite unindebted to the tricks of art."

Milton is

The value set upon Cowper will, probably, never decline. a kind of etherial spirit, high above common minds, seldom read, and still more seldom appreciated by half his professing admirers. Cowper is known and loved by all. He is a clear, placid mirror of our purest affections. Friendship, love, melancholy, are deeply graven in his writings. He may be awhile neglected for pretentious rivals; but we return to him as an instructive companion; nay, as a dear and valued friend.

Perhaps the most interesting development of the school of natural and simple poetry is to be found in Wordsworth. His pieces may be divided into two sections,—the earlier and less valuable, and the later. Among the lyrical ballads, and indeed in many of his first poems, there may be found great faults of style and language, many absurd puerilities, and serious blemishes. These, certainly, he never borrowed from Milton. And yet most of Wordsworth's mistaken notions are to be traced to a cause which

existed, we may reasonably suppose, in the mind of the great poet. Neither had any keen perception of the humorous; Wordsworth had scarce any. Had Milton known what true humour is, where it should appear, and where it should not dare intrude on epic grandeur, his masterpiece would not have been disfigured by such a scene as the infernal cannonade against the angels. Had Wordsworth possessed the smallest sense of the ludicrous, Byron could never have laughed at such an absurdity as "The Idiot Boy." But the genius of Wordsworth countervailed in practice his theory of composition; and the remembrance of early puerilities was blotted out by works of enduring worth and beauty. He succeeded in reforming the taste of his age, and pictured the very sanctuary of nature in colours of undying freshness. As Byron declares, "To me high mountains are a feeling," so Wordsworth says, "The sounding cataract haunted me like a passion.” But he had no power of painting character: it is not too much to say, that there is not to be found in all his poetry one single character except his own. That is everywhere present,-a simple-minded, gentle lover of the beautiful; a man whose years were spent far from cities, who only lived to nature, and to nature's God. His chief merit-the tie that binds him to the hearts of the people—is his clear and calm naturalness. We return from Byron's gorgeous rhapsodies to Wordsworth's sweet lays, exhaling the breath of myriad flowers, wearing the azure of the skies, and yet swelling to the grandeur of the mountain,-with the feeling of relief like that we experience in passing from a room gleaming with a hundred lamps into the open air, into the dewy fields of morning. Coleridge justly praises Wordsworth's meditative pathos, and austere purity of language; but much less justly claims for him the gift of imagination in a degree only second to that of Milton and Shakspeare. Strange, that a man so wild, wonderful, and exuberant in fancy, should ascribe the "gift divine" to a matter-of-fact writer like Wordsworth! To our mind, imagination is the last of all the poetic graces to which he can lay claim. He is diffuse, metaphysical, highly intellectual, sometimes majestic, always natural and simple: but for the play of fancy,

"The light that never was on land or sea,

The consecration, and the poet's,dream,"

we search his works almost in vain. Nevertheless he accomplished a great task; and his moral teachings are a legacy to all time.

In this short retrospect it is impossible to note all the turns and phases of our post-Miltonic poetry. Few, comparatively, appreciate the greatest master of epic song, or imagine the influence he has exerted. In Milton a thousand attributes join to form one unsurpassed whole. There are defects in the greatest of all poems; but they are like spots on the sun's surface, absorbed into the brightness of the luminary. Worthy of the "thoughts that breathe" are the "words that burn." A tide of eloquence here rolls on, like a river of molten gold. To vary the figure: If Chaucer is the

"well of English undefiled," Milton is the high and rocky bank, rising in bold grandeur, and crowned with flowers of every hue, which directs the course of the stream, when it has become a broad and noble river.

F. T. P.

COVENANT OF AN INDEPENDENT CHURCH.

YARMOUTH has been called "the Puritan sea-port." The good people there in the olden time adopted a form of covenanting with God, which may be not unseasonably copied in the present Number of the WesleyanMethodist Magazine. It deserves to be noted, that a practice of this kind has been observed, from age to age, by many of the most eminently devout, and with great profit to their souls.

"Ir is manifest by God's word, that God alwaies was pleased to walke in a way of couenant with His people knitt together in a visible church estate; He promising to be their God, and they promising to be His people, separated from the world and the pollutions thereof, as may appeare

therein.

"Wee therefore, whose names are subscribed, being desirous (in the feare of God) to worship and serve Him according to His reuealed will, and beleeving it to be our duty to walke in a way of church-couenant, doe freely and solemnly couenant with the Lord and one another, in the presence of His saints and angells,—

"1. That we will for euer acknowledge and auouch the Lord to be our God in Christ Jesus, giuing up ourselues to Him, to be His people.

"2. That we will alwaies endeuour, through the grace of God assisting us, to walke in all His waies and ordinances, according to His written word, which is the onely sufficient rule of good life for euery man. Neither will we suffer ourselues to be polluted by any sinfull waies, either publike or priuate, but endeuour to abstaine from the uery appearance of euill, giuing no offence to the Jew or Gentile, or the Churches of Christ.

"3. That we will humbly and willingly submit ourselues to the gouernment of Christ in this Church, in the administration of the word, the seales, and discipline.

"4. That we will, in all loue, improve our com'union as brethren, by watching ouer one another, and (as need shal be) counsell, admonish, reproue, comfort, releeue, assist, and beare with one another, seruing in loue.

"5. Lastly, we doe not couenant or promise these things in our owne, but in Christ's strength; neither doe we confine ourselues to the words of this couenant, but shal at all tymes account it our duty to embrace any further light or trueth which shal be reuealed to us out of God's word.”