can be conferred on society, than by giving all possible notoriety to the labours of such benefactors of mankind as our own Bernard Gilpin, and George Herbert, or Frederick Oberlin, who, in their humble stations of parish priests, promoted the temporal and spiritual good of their people at the same time. Many a young clergyman has received the same impression as Neff, from reading such biography; and has lighted his candle at such glorious lamps, and has been inspired with the noblest of all ambition, that of distributing happiness and comfort within the immediate circle of his duties. Neff himself is now a burning and a shining light,' by which others will be kindled. No English clergyman has difficulties of the same kind to contend with; but it is not less true than lamentable that there is scarcely a parish in England in which there are not much more formidable ones. Neff had no ale-houses in his parish, no beer-shops, (those most mischievous creations of the legislature, against which a cry is heard from all parts of the land). There were no schismshops there no interloping bigots or itinerant fanatics to obstruct his usefulness, by disparaging his office, vilifying his motives, and traducing his doctrines. No newspapers found their way there to counteract (systematically) his religious instructions, and to set before his people the details of every loathsome and every atrocious crime that is committed in the midst of a depraved and thoroughly corrupted society. There was no poverty there but what nature inflicted; it belonged to the place-the people re garded it as their portion, their hereditary lot, and there was no close contrast to embitter it. There were none there who ground the faces of the poor-no iron-hearted manufacturers; and, on the other hand, none who existed in a state of hostility, secret or avowed, with the world and the world's law; no smugglers, no poachers, no sabbath-breakers; none of that rising population which is to be seen, not in our great cities alone, but in all manufacturing and all populous places, and from which scarcely the smallest town is free-running wild, as it were, among their fellowcreatures, and trained up from earliest childhood in the ways of sin, misery, and perdition. We could name parishes (and every reader assuredly could add to the list) to which, as to their moral state, the Ban de la Roche, when Oberlin commenced his labours there, was as the garden of Eden; and as to the physical condition of a large proportion of the people, the poverty of Dormilleuse might seem like comfort and abundance when compared with them. If there is a crime in England,' says the author of an unpretending but very pleasing little volume, if there is a crime in England * * Evenings by Eden Side, by George Pearson, Kendal, 1832. which may be properly termed national, it is the sin of Sabbath breaking. I do not know what idea a foreigner would form of Christian England, if he took a survey of our towns and villages on a Sabbath day: he would be led to look upon our bible societies, our missionary societies, as no more than sunbeams glancing from a plain of ice. Let not the splendour of our good deeds, the heavenly halo which sheds its glory round us, blind us to the moral plague, which, lurking beneath, is preying upon the very vitals of society. Pass on from town to town, and from village to village; visit the churches, the chapels also, and see what proportion their united congregations bear to the population that swarms around them: visit the dwellings of the people, ask if family altars are common among them, and how many of their inhabitants are really on the Lord's side? sum up the account, and the glory of England is laid in the dust.' Well does this amiable and right-minded writer remind those in high places who regard the sabbath with habitual contempt, that rank and fortune are dependent upon social order, in other words, upon the submission of the people to certain regulations, the observance of which is founded upon, and sanctioned by the sacred authority of that religion they so madly despise for, let religion once lose its hold on the minds of the people, and hereditary power and pride will be swept away and mingle in the wreck of better things.' Well has he said this to the great; and well and eloquently too does he say The waters are agitated, and public opinion, like a river that has burst beyond its banks, threatens to overturn all that is within its reach; and what is beyond its reach? The most durable works of man are unable to resist it: the torrent is rolling onward, and its waters are now heaving and splashing against a fabric that has withstood the storms of centuries,- -a fabric that now trembles to its very foundation beneath the mighty pressure. Let the clergy not despise the signs of the times: the searching waters will also try the solidity of their structure, and what is not based upon the rock the uplifted billows will batter down.' The clergy have not despised those signs. Whoever can call to mind the state of the church and of the universities thirty or forty years ago, must know, that in no other class has there been so great and undeniable an improvement. Were they but favoured by external circumstances as much as they are obstructed by them, the good that might be effected through their influence would be great indeed. For it is only by their zealous and persevering endeavours that that reformation can be hoped for, without which all other reforms (real or putative) will only mock the expectations that they excite. By them it is that men must be induced (as indeed from the pulpit we have heard them properly exhorted) to to 'reform the rotten boroughs of their own hearts;' to inquire into the guilds and corporations of their own vices; to lessen the tyranny and the vexations in their own establishments and families; to petition-not the legislature to change the constitution of their country-but their God to regenerate their own corrupted nature. But much as they are doing and can do, too much is expected from them, especially when the laws whereby they ought to be aided are operating against them. In vain may we desire to see a sober and a moral people when the legislature, by a single act, doubles the haunts of drunkenness and the temptations to it. In vain may we hope to become once more a religious nation, while those who openly, and in defiance of human laws, break the sabbath, outnumber, and in some places even disturb, those by whom it is kept holy. In vain may the people be exhorted from the desk and the pulpit to fear God and honour the king and those who are in authority under him, while the press inculcates its weekly and daily lessons of insubordination and impiety, sowing the seeds of all vices and of all crimes. Here indeed some indignation must be awakened that, when a ready and sure remedy exists, the evil should nevertheless be permitted-and all but licensed-all but encouraged-to proceed unchecked. But it is even more painful, and more fearful, to know, that in vain must the faithful pastor admonish the labouring classes to do their duty in that state of life to which it hath pleased God to call them, while they find themselves in that state helplessly, hopelessly, and miserably poor. This Journal will bear us witness that, for more than twenty years, we have insisted upon this topic, and proclaimed that, unless the condition of the poor be improved, both morally and physically, (and till it be physically improved, it is in vain to look for moral improvement,) nothing can save this nation from a more tremendous subversion than history has yet recorded as a warning to mankind ! But this we will venture to assert fearlessly, that whatever may be reserved for us in this age of experimental policy, -through whatever variety of untried changes' it may be destined that we should pass, the clergy of the Church of England will do their duty. That church as it had its confessors, and its noble army of martyrs' in the days of popish and of puritanical persecution, so has it never been without men who, in their humble spheres, discharged their duty faithfully towards God and man; and never at any time has it been better provided than at this present. The age of Oberlin and Neff was that of Henry Martyn and of Reginald Heber-(living names it were unfit to mention here, readily as as they would else occur,)-and many a heart is at this hour deriving strength from these examples. Let the legislature, we entreat, aid them with such wholesome enactments as the reports of its committees afford us reason to expect, and as those who have the welfare of their country and of their fellow-creatures earnestly at heart pray for. Let it restore to us the enjoyment of a Christian Sabbath ;-(no one will suppose that, in saying this, we ask for a puritanical one, with which heaven forbid that this nation should ever again be afflicted, and thereby prepared for licentiousness and impiety;)-let it provide a law for punishing cruelty towards animals, a crime which, notwithstanding the horror that the excess to which it is at this time carried excites in every heart of common feeling, is, because of the defects of the law, committed with entire impunity.* Let it diminish the inducements to drunkenness; instead of multiplying them as it has done. Let it look into the state of slavery at home as well as abroad-the slavery of children in our factories; and as it claims for the black slaves a portion of time for their own use, so let it claim for these part at least of one week-day for the purposes of instruction, that the Sunday may be to these poor creatures not a school-day-but, what the laws of God designed it to be-a day of recreation and rest. Let it pursue its inquiries into the condition of the poor, and take speedily what measures are possible for bettering it in all respects. Let this be done; and our Neffs and Oberlins (for such will rise among us) will enter, with the strength of hope as well as of zeal, upon their labours of love. ART. IV.-Poems by Alfred Tennyson. pp. 163. London. THI HIS is, as some of his marginal notes intimate, Mr. Tennyson's second appearance. By some strange chance we have never seen his first publication, which, if it at all resembles its younge brother, must be by this time so popular that any notice of it on our part would seem idle and presumptuous; but we gladly seize this opportunity of repairing an unintentional neglect, and of introducing to the admiration of our more sequestered readers a new prodigy of genius-another and a brighter star of that galaxy or milky way of poetry of which the lamented Keats was the harbinger; We saw, some months ago, two or three numbers of a little monthly magazine entirely devoted to this most painfully interesting subject; and we hope it has not been discontinued. Lord Porchester, from the zeal with which he has taken up the cause of humanity towards animals, and Lord Ashley, from his readiness to of supply Mr. Sadler's place as the advocate of the factory children, are reaping more real honour aud thankfulness than will ever in this country fall to the share whether of noble or ignoble demagogues. us and let us take this occasion to sing our palinode on the subject of 'Endymion.' We certainly did not* discover in that poem the same degree of merit that its more clear-sighted and prophetic admirers did. We did not foresee the unbounded popularity which has carried it through we know not how many editions; which has placed it on every table; and, what is still more unequivocal, familiarized it in every mouth. All this splendour of fame, however, though we had not the sagacity to anticipate, we have the candour to acknowledge; and we request that the publisher of the new and beautiful edition of Keats's works now in the press, with graphic illustrations by Calcott and Turner, will do us the favour and the justice to notice our conversion in his prolegomena. Warned by our former mishap, wiser by experience, and improved, as we hope, in taste, we have to offer Mr. Tennyson our tribute of unmingled approbation, and it is very agreeable to us, as well as to our readers, that our present task will be little more than the selection, for their delight, of a few specimens of Mr. Tennyson's singular genius, and the venturing to point out, now and then, the peculiar brilliancy of some of the gems that irradiate his poetical crown. A prefatory sonnet opens to the reader the aspirations of the young author, in which, after the manner of sundry poets, ancient and modern, he expresses his own peculiar character, by-wishing himself to be something that he is not. The amorous Catullus aspired to be a sparrow; the tuneful and convivial Anacreon (for we totally reject the supposition that attributes the 'Ειθε λύρη καλη yeon to Alcæus) wished to be a lyre and a great drinking cup; a crowd of more modern sentimentalists have desired to approach their mistresses as flowers, tunicks, sandals, birds, breezes, and butterflies;-all poor conceits of narrow-minded poetasters! Mr. Tennyson (though he, too, would, as far as his true-love is concerned, not unwillingly be 'an earring,' 'a girdle,' and ‘a necklace,' p. 45) in the more serious and solemn exordium of his works ambitions a bolder metamorphosis-he wishes to be-a river! SONNET. Mine be the strength of spirit fierce and free, rivers that travel in company are too common for his tasteWith the self-same impulse wherewith he was thrown'— a beautiful and harmonious line From his loud fount upon the echoing lea:- Every word of this line is valuable-the natural progress of human *See Quarterly Review, vol. xix. p. 204. ambition |