Part 29

But it is not merely in the lyrical productions of his muse that Montgomery has indicated the deep feeling of piety that lives as a higher life in him; in every one of those larger and very beautiful poems, in which we might have rather supposed him bent on indulging his literary ambition, and sitting down to a long and systematic piece of labor, which should remain a monument of the more continuous, if not higher flights of his genius, we perceive the same still higher object of a sacred duty toward God and man. In no instance has he been content merely to develop his poetical powers, merely to aim at amusing and delighting. Song has been to him a holy vocation, an art practiced to make men wiser and better, a gift held like that of the preacher and the prophet, for the purposes of heaven and eternity. In every one of those productions are still recognized the zealous and devoted spirit of one of that indefatigable and self-renouncing people, who from the earliest ages of the Christian Church have trod the path of persecution, and won the burning crown of martyrdom; and in the present age continue to send out from their still retreats in Europe an increasing and untiring succession of laborers, male and female, to the frozen regions of the north, and to the southern wilds of Africa, to civilize and Christianize those rude tribes, which others, bearing the Christian name, have visited only to enslave or extirpate. The Wanderer of Switzerland, the poem which first won him a reputation, was a glowing lyric of liberty, and denunciation of the diabolical war-spirit of the revolutionary French. It was animated by the most sacred love of country, and of the hallowed ground and hallowed feelings of the domestic hearth. The West Indies was a heroic poem, on one of the most heroic acts which ever did honor to the decrees of a great nation--the abolition of the slave-trade. But it was a work not merely of triumph over what was done, but of incentive to what yet remained to do--to the abolition of slavery itself. Time has shown what a stupendous mustering of national powers that achievement has demanded. What a combination of all the eloquence, and wisdom, and exertions, of all the wisest, noblest, and best men of, perhaps, the most glorious period of our history, was needed! Time has shown that the very slave-trade was only abolished on paper. That like a giant monster, that hideous traffic laughed at our enactments, and laughs at them still, having nearly quadrupled the number of its annual victims since the great contest against it was begun. But among those whose voice and spirit have been in fixed and perpetual operation against this vile cannibal commerce, none have more effectually exercised their influence than James Montgomery. His poem, arrayed in all the charms and graces of his noble art, has been read by every genuine lover of genuine poetry. It has sunk into the generous heart of youth; and who shall say in how many it has been in after-years the unconscious yet actual spring of that manly demand for the extinction of the wrongs of the African, which all good men in England, and wherever the English language is read, still make, and will make till it be finally accomplished. What fame of genius can be put in competition with the profound satisfaction of a mind conscious of the godlike privilege of aiding in the happiness of man in all ages and regions of the earth, and feeling that it has done that by giving to its thoughts the power and privileges of a spirit, able to enter all houses at all hours, and stimulate brave souls to the bravest deeds of the heroism of humanity?

There are great charms of verse displayed in the poem of The West Indies. One would scarcely have believed the subject of the slave-trade capable of them. But the genial, glowing descriptions of the West-Indian islands, of the torrid magnificence of the interior of Africa--

"Regions immense, unsearchable, unknown-- Amid the splendors of the solar zone; A world of wonders,--where creation seems No more the work of Nature, but her dreams,-- Great, wild, and wonderful."

The white villains of Europe, desecrating the name of Christian--Spaniards, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Dutchmen, Danes, and Portuguese, all engaged in the brutal traffic, are all sketched with the same vigorous pencil; but the portraiture of the Creole is a master-piece, and I quote it because it still is not a mere picture, but a dreadful reality in the shape of Brazilian and North American, on which the humane can not too fully reflect. If any one would see all that is here described, he has only now to make a ten days' voyage, and he will see it on an enormous scale in the southern states of the _Free_ Republic of North America, as well as on the plains of the more torrid south.

"Lives there a reptile baser than the slave? --Lothsome as death, corrupted as the grave; See the dull Creole, at his pompous board, Attendant vassals cringing round their lord; Satiate with food, his heavy eyelids close, Voluptuous minions fan him to repose; Prone on the noonday couch he lolls in vain, Delirious slumbers mock his maudlin brain; He starts in horror from bewildering dreams; His bloodshot eye with fire and frenzy gleams; He stalks abroad; through all his wonted rounds, The negro trembles, and the lash resounds, And cries of anguish, thrilling through the air, To distant fields his dread approach declare. Mark, as he passes, every head reclined; Then slowly raised--to curse him from behind. This is the veriest wretch on nature's face, Owned by no country, spurned by every race; The tethered tyrant of one narrow span; The bloated vampire of a living man: His frame,--a fungus form of dunghill birth, That taints the air, and rots above the earth; His soul;--has _he_ a soul, whose sensual breast Of selfish passions is a serpent's nest? Who follows headlong, ignorant and blind, The vague, brute instincts of an idiot mind; Whose heart 'mid scenes of suffering senseless grown, Even from his mother's lap was chilled to stone; Whose torpid pulse no social feelings move; A stranger to the tenderness of love; His motley harem charms his gloating eye, Where ebon, brown, and olive beauties vie: His children, sprung alike from sloth and vice, Are born his slaves, and loved at market price: Has _he_ a soul?--With his departing breath A form shall hail him at the gates of death, The specter Conscience,--shrieking through the gloom, 'Man, we shall meet again beyond the tomb!'"

There are few more pathetic passages in the English language than these, describing the labors and the extinctions of the Charib tribes:--

"The conflict o'er, the valiant in their graves, The wretched remnant dwindled into slaves: --Condemned in pestilential cells to pine, Delving for gold amid the gloomy mine. The sufferer, sick of life-protracting breath, Inhaled with joy the fire-damp blast of death; --Condemned to fell the mountain palm on high, That cast its shadow from the evening sky, Ere the tree trembled to his feeble stroke, The woodman languished, and his heart-strings broke; --Condemned in torrid noon, with palsied hand, To urge the slow plough o'er the obdurate land, The laborer, smitten by the sun's fierce ray, A corpse along the unfinished furrow lay. O'erwhelmed at length with ignominious toil, Mingling their barren ashes with the soil, Down to the dust the Charib people passed, Like autumn foliage, withering in the blast; The whole race sunk beneath the oppressor's rod, And left a blank among the works of GOD."

When we bear in mind that these beautiful passages of poetry are not the mere ornamental descriptions of things gone by and done with; but that, though races are extinguished, and millions of negroes, kidnapped to supply their loss, have perished in their misery, the horrors and outrages of slavery remain, spite of all we have done to put an end to them,--we can not too highly estimate the productions of the muse which are devoted to the cause of these children of misery and sorrow, nor too often return to their perusal. According to the calculations of the Anti-slavery Society, there were, half-a-century ago, when the anti-slavery operations began, _from two to three millions of slaves in the world_; there are now said to be FROM SIX TO SEVEN MILLIONS! There were then calculated to be _one hundred thousand slaves annually ravished from Africa_; there are now calculated to be FOUR HUNDRED THOUSAND ANNUALLY! With these awful facts before us, I fear it will be long before the eloquent appeals of such writers as Montgomery and Cowper will cease to possess a living interest.

In the World before the Flood, and Greenland, the same great purpose of serving the cause of virtue is equally conspicuous. The one relates the contests and triumphs of the good over the vicious in the antediluvian ages, and is full of the evidences of a fine imagination and a lofty piety. Many think this the greatest of Mr. Montgomery's productions. It abounds with beauties which we must not allow ourselves to particularize here. In Greenland he celebrates the missionary labors of the body to which his parents and his brother belonged. In the Pelican Island he quitted his favorite versification, the heroic, in which he displays so much force and harmony, and employed blank verse. There is less human interest in this poem, but it is, perhaps, the most philosophical of his writings, and gives great scope to his imaginative and descriptive powers. He imagines himself as a sort of spiritual existence, watching the progress of the population of the world, from its inanimate state till it was thronged with men, and the savage began to think, and to be prepared for the visitation of the Gospel messengers of peace and knowledge. It may be imagined that vast opportunity is given for the recital of the wonders, awful and beautiful, of the various realms of nature--the growth of coral islands and continents in the sea, and the varied developments of life on the land. The last scene, with a noble savage and his grandchild, in which the old man is smitten with a sense of his immortality, and of the presence of God, and praying, is followed in his act of devotion by the child, is very fine. But I must only allow myself to quote, as a specimen of the style of this poem, so different to all others by the same author, one of its opening passages already referred to.

"I was a Spirit in the midst of these, All eye, ear, thought; existence was enjoyment; Light was an element of life, and air The clothing of my incorporeal form,-- A form impalpable to mortal touch, And volatile as fragrance from the flower, Or music in the woodlands. What the soul Can make itself at pleasure, that I was A child in feeling and imagination; Learning new lessons still, as Nature wrought Her wonders in my presence. All I saw, Like Adam, when he walked in Paradise, I knew and named by surest intuition. Actor, spectator, sufferer, each in turn, I ranged, explored, reflected. Now I sailed, And now I soared; anon, expanding, seemed Diffused into immensity, yet bound Within a space too narrow for desire. The mind, the mind, perpetual themes must task, Perpetual power impel, and hope allure. I and the silent sun were here alone, But not companions: high and bright he held His course: I gazed with admiration on him-- There all communion ended; and I sighed To feel myself a wanderer without aim, An exile amid splendid desolation, A prisoner with infinitude surrounded."

James Montgomery was born November 4th, 1771, in the little town of Irvine, in Ayrshire; a place which has also had the honor of giving birth to John Galt, and of being for about six months the abode of Robert Burns, when a youth, who was sent there to learn the art and mystery of flax-dressing, but his master's shop being burned, he quitted Irvine and that profession at the same time. The house in which Burns resided does not seem to be now very positively known, but it was in the Glasgow Vennel. The house where Montgomery was born is well known. It is in Halfway-street, and was pointed out to me by the zealous admirer and chronicler of all that belongs to genius, Mr. Maxwell Dick, of Irvine, in whose possession are some of the most interesting of the autograph copies of Burns's Poems, especially the Cotter's Saturday Night.

The house of Montgomery, at the time of his birth and till his fifth year, was a very humble one. His father was the Moravian minister there, and probably had not a large congregation. We know how the ministers of this pious people will labor on in the most physically or morally desolate scene, if they can hope but to win one soul. The cottage is now inhabited by a common weaver, and consists of two rooms only, on the ground-floor, one of which is occupied by the loom. The chapel, which used to stand opposite, is now pulled down. This cottage stands in a narrow alley, back from the street. Mr. Dick said he accompanied Mr. Montgomery, some years ago, to this lowly cottage of his birth, and that no sooner had he entered the first room, which used to be, as it is still, the sitting-room, than the memory of his childhood came strongly back upon him, and he sat down and recounted various things which he recollected of the apartment, and of what had taken place in it.

Yet, as we have said, he was sent thence in his fifth year to Grace hill, a settlement still of the Moravian Brethren, near Ballymony, in the county of Antrim, in Ireland; and in which the poet, I believe, has at present a niece residing. In the following year he was again removed to the seminary of the Brethren at Fulneck, in Yorkshire. Soon after this his parents were sent out as missionaries to the West Indies, to preach to the poor slave the consoling doctrine of another and a better world, "where the wretched hear not the voice of the oppressor," and "where the servant is free from his master." There they both died. One lies in the island of Barbadoes, the other in Tobago.

"Beneath the lion-star they sleep, Beyond the western deep, And when the sun's noon-glory crests the waves, He shines without a shadow on their graves."

In the Fulneck academy, among a people remarkable for their ardor in religion, and their industry in the pursuit of useful learning, James Montgomery received his education. He was intended for the ministry, and his preceptors were every way competent to the task of preparing him for the important office for which he was designed. His studies were various: the French, German, Latin, and Greek languages; history, geography, and music: but a desire to distinguish himself as a poet among his school-fellows, soon interfered with the plan laid out for him. When ten years old he began to write verses, and continued to do it with unabated ardor till the period when he quitted Fulneck in 1787; they were chiefly on religious subjects.

This early devotion to poetry, irresistible as it was, he was wont himself to regard as the source of many troubles. That it retarded his improvement at school, and finally altered his destination in life, seducing him to exchange an almost monastic seclusion from society, for the hurry and bustle of a world, which, for a time, seemed disposed to repay him but ill for the sacrifice. We can not think that his opinions of this change remain the same now. In whatever character James Montgomery had performed his allotted work in this world, I am persuaded that he would have performed it with the same conscientious steadfastness. In his heart, the spirit of his pious parents, and of that society in which he was educated, would have made him a faithful servant of that Master whom he has so sincerely served. Whether he had occupied a pulpit here, or had gone out to preach Christianity in some far-off and savage land, he would have been the same man, faithful and devout. But it may well be questioned whether in any other vocation he could have been a tenth part as successfully useful as he has been. There was need of him in the world, and he was sent thither, spite of parentage, education, and himself There was a talent committed to him that is not committed to all. He was to be a minister of God, but it was to be from the hallowed chair of poetry, and not from the pulpit. There was a voice to be raised against slavery and vice, and that voice was to perpetuate itself on the rhythmical page, and to kindle thousands of hearts with the fire of religion and liberty long after his own was cold. There was a niche reserved for him in the temple of poetry, which no other could occupy. It was that of a bard who, freeing his most religious lays from dogmas, should diffuse the love of religion by the religion of love. He himself has shown how well he knew his appointed business, and how sacredly he had resolved to discharge it, when, in A Theme for a Poet, he asks,--

"What monument of mind Shall I bequeath to deathless fame, That after-times may love my name?"

And after detailing the characteristics of the principal poets of the age, he adds:--

"Transcendent masters of the lyre! Not to your honors I aspire; Humbler, yet higher views Have touched my spirit into flame; The pomp of fiction I disclaim: Fair Truth! be thou my muse: Reveal in splendor deeds obscure-- Abase the proud, exalt the poor.

"I sing the men who left their home, Amid barbarian tribes to roam, Who land and ocean crossed,-- Led by a loadstar, marked on high By Faith's unseen, all-seeing eye,-- To seek and save the lost; Where'er the curse on Adam spread. To call his offspring from the dead.

"Strong in the great Redeemer's name, They bore the cross, despised the shame; And, like their Master here, Wrestled with danger, pain, distress, Hunger, and cold, and nakedness, And every form of fear; To feel his love their only joy. To tell that love their sole employ."

The highest ambition of James Montgomery was, then, to do that by his pen which his brethren did by word of mouth. He had not abandoned that great object to which he had as an orphan been, as it were, dedicated by those good men in whose hands he had been left; he had only changed the mode of attaining it. At the very time that he quitted their tranquil asylum and broke forth into the world, he was, unknown to himself and them, following the unseen hand of Heaven. His lot was determined, and it was not to go forth into the wilderness of the north or south, of Labrador or South Africa, but of the active world of England. There wanted a bold voice, of earnest principle, to be raised against great oppressions; a spirit of earnest duty, to be infused into the heart of poetic literature; and a tone of heavenly faith and confidence given to the popular harp, for which thousands of hearts were listening in vain; and he was the man. That was the work of life assigned to him. He was to be still of the UNITAS FRATRUM--still a missionary;--and how well has he fulfilled his mission!

Fulneck, the chief settlement of the Moravian Brethren in England, at which we have seen that Montgomery continued till his sixteenth year, is about eight miles from Leeds. It was built about 1760, which was near the time of the death of Count Zinzendorf. It was then in a fine and little inhabited country. It is now in a country as populous as a town, full of tall chimneys vomiting out enormous masses of soot, rather than smoke, and covering the landscape as with an eternal veil of black mist. The villages are like towns, for extent. Stone and smoke are equally abundant. Stone houses, door-posts, window-frames, stone floors, and stone stairs, nay, the very roofs are covered with stone slabs, and when they are new, are the most complete drab buildings. The factories are the same. Where windows are stopped up, it is with stone slabs. The fences to the fields are stone walls, and the gate-posts are stone, and the stiles are stones, reared so close to one another, that it is tight work getting through them. Not a bit of wood is to be seen, except the doors, water-spouts, and huge water-butts, which are often hoisted in front of the house, on the level of the second floor, on strong stone rests. The walls, as well as wooden frames in the fields, are clothed with long pieces of cloth, like horses, and women stand mending holes or smoothing off knots in them, as they hang. Troops of boys and girls come out of the factories at meal-times, as blue as so many little blue devils--hands, faces, clothes, all blue, from weaving the fresh-dyed yarn. The older mill-girls go cleaner and smarter, all with colored handkerchiefs tied over their heads, chiefly bright red ones, and look very continental. Dirty rows of children sit on dirty stone door-sills, and there are strong scents of oat-cake and Genoa oil, and oily yarn. There is a general smut of blackness over all, even in the very soil and dust. And Methodist chapels--Salems and Ebenezers--are seen on all hands. Who, that has ever been into a cloth-weaving district, does not see the place and people?

Well, up to the very back of Fulneck, throng these crowds and attributes of cloth manufacturing. Leaving the coach and the high-road, I walked on three miles to the left, through this busy smoke-land, and a large village, and then over some fields. Everywhere were the features of a fine country, but like the features o the people, full of soot, and with volumes of vapor rolling over it. Coming, at length, to the back of a hill, I saw emerging, close under my feet, a long row of stately roofs, with a belfry or cupola, crowned with a vane in the center. These were the roofs of the Moravian settlement of Fulneck, the back of which was toward me, and the front toward a fine valley, on the opposite slope of which were fine woods, and a fine old brick mansion. That is the house, and that the estate of a Mr. Tempest, who will have no manufactory on his land. This is the luckiest tempest that ever was heard of; for it keeps a good open space in front of Fulneck clear, though it is elbowed up at each end, and backed up behind with factories, and work-people's houses; and even beyond Mr. Tempest's estate, you see other tall, soot-vomiting chimneys rearing themselves on other ridges; and the eternal veil of Cimmerian smoke-mist floats over the fair, ample, and beautifully wooded valley, lying between the settlement and these swarthy apparitions of the manufacturing system, which seem to long to step forward and claim all--ay, and finally to turn Fulneck into a weaving-mill, as they probably will, one day.

The situation, were it not for these circumstances, is fine. It has something monastic about it. The establishment consists of one range of buildings, though built at various times. There are the school, chapel, master's house, etc., in the center, of stone, and a sister's and brother's house, of brick, at each end, with various cottages behind. A fine broad terrace-walk extends along the front, a furlong in length, being the length of the buildings, from which you may form a conception of the stately scale of the place, which is one-eighth of a mile long. From this descend the gardens, playgrounds, etc., down the hill for a great way, and private walks are thence continued as far again, to the bottom of the valley, where they are further continued along the brook-side, among the deep woodlands. The valley is called the Tong Valley; the brook, the Tong; and Mr. Tempest's house, on the opposite slope, Tonghall.