ROBERT MONTGOMERY'S LUTHER.
MB. MONTGOMERY is a remarkable example of the success of sounds, which are " so like sense they serve the turn as well "—or, as far as profit is concerned, very much better. Of poesy, presenting the essence of truth in the most striking and attractive modes, he has not a particle. He has not even any of that inferior kind of poetry which selects the most pleasing among the obvious images of nature and presents them in musical verse. He is by nature a rhetorician, not a poet ; and a rhetorician of an inferior stamp ; for when left, even in prose, to his own resources, and compelled to produce ideas from his own mind, he furnishes the moat singular instance we have ever met of words that leave no impression behind them : after reading his most sonorous passages, the mind has re- ceived no distinct and tangible ideas. The true field for a person possessing Mr. MONTGOMERY'S fluency without his facility of gravely parodying the versification of MILTON and SHELLEY, would have been a conventicle of the lower class, or even field-preaching; for his idealess words are essentially of this character of discourse. The only quality of a higher rhetorician which he seems to possess, is that of seizing the most effective points in a mass of materials and presenting them in a telling way, though without any consider- ation of a whole. At a missionary meeting he would have pro- duced a great sensation by picking out a few " interesting facts" regarding the heathen or the brethren ; and in the Introduction to the poem before us, he makes some points in the life of the Re- former tell with effect ; and these are about the best things in the volume.
Education, and, so to speak, an imitative ear, have given Mr. MONTGOMERY a wider sphere of attraction than a single audience. His faculty of pouring forth unmeaning verse, joined to the cha- racter of his themes, has rendered him a favourite with that very large body respectable commonplace people. Knowing nothing of art, incapable of comprehending nature, (which, by the by, they rarely see, even in the common sense of it,) they reckon poetry on their finger-ends, and, guiltless of mind, whatever fills the ear is sufficient for them. It must also be said that Mr. MONTGOMERY'S rhapsody is of a respectable kind, in the usual application of the term. There is little of the intense, little of the affected schools about him, and none of the sickly sentimental, which adorns dis- honesty and unchastity with garlands and paints criminals as the "victims of circumstances." His views, so far as they can be un- derstood, are of an orthodox kind : the most rigid head of a family could see nothing to object to so far as he could see at all ; and any indistinctness the old gentleman would not put down to the opacity of the author, but to the circumstance of its being poetry, which "he does not read." It is all "as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal " ; but the sounds are of that solemn sort which the Apostle who denounced them had in his mind.
We have said that the best parts of the volume are parts of the prose preface ; for they tell something of the theme distinctly, which the poetry cannot be said to do. " Luther, a Poem," is a series of independent cantos, some of which might be introduced into a poem on Religion, others into one on the " Reformation," and all of which might be read separately ; this perhaps being a canon of the Mozrr- GOMERY art of poetry—cut up the theme into a sufficient number of parts to furnish a " daily exercise " for the reader, so as not to tire the attention by straining at a whole. For instance, Luther opens with a rhapsody on Christ as the "centre and circumference of truth " ; the theme of the next canto is " the mystical body of the Church" ; then comes "Man's need and God's supply " ; and then a "divine prologue," which bears this sort of relation to the subject, that it is a rapid enumeration of the human causes which had a direct bearing on the Reformation, by their obvious tendency to expand the mind and awaken thought—as the discovery of Ame- rica, and the invention of printing. " Characteristics " is a general sketch of the Hero in CARLYLE'S sense, including a defence Oa LUTHER against modern objections. We are then introduced more immediately to the Reformer, under the heads of Childhood, the University, Man's Religion, (LUTHER as a Roman Catholic monk,) and so forth ; in which some event in LUTHER'S life is selected as a text to write about, not to describe ; for Mr. MONTGOMERY does not narrate events as they occurred in reality, but rhapsodizes upon them, just as a schoolboy might declaim a thesis, or indite a prize-poem upon the Diet of Worms. In all these cantos—and they are numerous, and the poem awfully long—the composition ie mainly of two kinds; one in which the ideas are borrowed and somewhat commonplace, the other where Mr. MONTGOMERY la- bours with the abortion of original thoughts, which seem to us shapeless and half incomprehensible—" a twilight of sense which he can never fashion into wit or English." As an example of the commonplace, we will give his panegyric on printing ; which, con- sidering how continually the subject has been handled by every class of mind, strikes us as very poor commonplace indeed.
A RHAPSODIST ON PRINTING.
But in this prologue of preparing means Heaven-moulded, chief and prime of arts immense, See Printing rise—that miracle of powers I That bids the past become perpetual now, Gives reason sway, imagination shape, To time a soul, to thought a substance lends, And, with ubiquity almost divine, For living permanence and local power Each ray of soul immortally endows. Thou great embalmer of departed mind Thou dread magician I by whose mental charm A mournful, pale, and solitary man, Who pines unheeded, or who thinks unknown,
Long after dust and darkness hide his grave,
Himself can multiply with magic force Beyond all-reaching language to explore, And the wide commonwealth of minds may rule With sway imperial I—who can image thee ? Whether to Heaven uplifting mind and man, Or, Hell-ward both seducing, like a fiend ?
Boundless in each thine unremember'd sway ! Thine was a voice whose resurrection-blast Peal'd through the catacombs where buried mind For cent'ries lay : and lo, with living might The fathers burst their cerements, and breathed ; Dead intellect from classic tombs came forth Quicken'd, and into active substance changed By thy vast potency ; and then was felt The pith of thought, the marrow of the mind Itself transfusing, like a second life, The old absorbing as with heat divine.
And since that moment, have not books become Our silent prophets, intellectual kings, And hierarchs of human thought To vice or virtue ? Are they not like shrines For truth? cathedrals, where the heart Can worship, or in tranquil hours retreat To meet the spirit of the olden time ? For there the drama of the world abides
Yet in full play.
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