Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 097.djvu/135

Rh sought in practical duty, not in closet contemplation; yet, as a living writer has put it, there is a distinction to he drawn between spiritual and simply historical religion—between doubts arising from spiritual obtuseness, and those which are due to want of historical light. Mr. Keble recommended Arnold to take a curacy as the best means of clearing up Trinitarian difficulties; but whatever sanction this particular case might appear to lead to the counsel of that truly devout poet and able divine, there is only too real a truth in the comment of heterodoxy, that this was viewing "orders" as a kind of spiritual backboard, which, by dint of obliging a man to look as if he were straight, end by making him so; and however the scheme may answer in the case of a curved spine, its application to a warped faith or a crooked creed involves at the best a species of self-dissimulation, a latent, underlying sham. Hence our conviction that in the casuistry of his own difficulty as to ordination, Walker's resolution was wise as a judgment as well as honourable as a sacrifice; and that here too, whatever expediency might suggest, honesty was the best policy.

As to his position as an author, the future rather than the present must pronounce. Professedly, his writings of most mark and likelihood remain to be published. The "Poetical Remains" comprise many agreeable and tender verses—some quaint and humorous—recalling now the manner of Hartley Coleridge, now of R. C. Trench, and now of Moultrie, or Sterling, or Milnes, but ever "with a difference." Nor does he probably equal any of the minor poets just mentioned; certainly not the first or the last of them. It is rather by a musical interval, an isolated passage here and there, than by any sustained excellence of thought or style, that he wins the ear, and occasionally whispers to the heart. He never whispers an o'erfraught heart, to bid it break; never stirs it with a trumpet note; never startles it with revelations of its own hidden mystery, nor thrills it with echoes of its secret wailings, nor agitates it with a dramatised revival of its dearest ancient mtvories, nor wrings it with electric suggestion of thoughts too big for utterance, too deep for tears. It is a left-handed compliment to the poet, if we bid the reader construct an affirmative out of these negatives, and thus gather what he is from learning what he is not. Yet the poet has his merits—pensive fancy, mild contemplativeness, and snatches of soothing melody. And his verses garner at least the harvest of a quiet eye, though innocent of the eye in a fine frenzy rolling. To append specimens of sufficient longitude, our own latitude now forbids. And it may seem absurd, or unjust, to wind up with one or two shreds and patches, as illustrative of the robes whence they are rudely torn. Yet, at this risk, and with this proviso, we annex a fragment from the poem headed "Wandering Thoughts," a favourable instance of his serious mood:

O Stella! golden star of youth and love!

In thy soft name the voice of other years

Seems sounding; each green court, and archèd grove,

Where, hand in hand, we walked, again appears,

Called by the spell: the very clouds and tears

O'er which thy dawning lamp its splendour darted,

Gleam bright: and they are there, my youthful peers,

The lofty-minded and the gentle-hearted;

The beauty of the earth—the light of days departed,—