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ART. VI.-The Cherwell Water-Lily, and other Poems. By the REV. FREDERICK WILLIAM FABER, M.A., Fellow of University College, Oxford. 8vo. London, 1840.

The Styrian Lake, and other Poems. By the REV. FREDERICK WILLIAM FABER, M.A., Fellow of University College, Oxford. 8vo. London, 1842.

England's Trust, and other Poems. By LORD JOHN MANNERS. 8vo. London, 1841.

The Cathedral, or the Catholic and Apostolic Church in England. 8vo. Oxford, 1838.

IT is certainly not any great degree of poetical merit in Mr. Faber and Lord John Manners that has attracted our attention. Still less is it their peculiar deficiency in this respect. Their poetry bears throughout the marks of taste and refinement, and we might almost say, over-cultivation. It is imbued also with that spirit of gentleness and amiability, which is the most wholesome atmosphere for the every-day life of a poet. The defects of these writers, so far as concerns their poetry, are of a kind too common in the present day to call for special reprehension. There is a lack of power, showing itself sometimes in contented, and therefore not necessarily ungraceful feebleness; and sometimes, more unhappily, in overstraining after effects which will not be produced. The spirit of their poetry, too, is often lost by diffusion. But these are sins of the times, in regard to which we enter our protest, not against Mr. Faber and Lord John Manners, but against any thing now in existence which can be called a school of English poetry; and especially against the one great poet who is still left among us, to study, in the works of his disciples, the results of his poetical theories. Probably it was by nature that Mr. Wordsworth delighted in the interminable flow of words; but it was in the pursuit of a theory, that he wrote habitually below his powers, until, in spite of his genius, we find him to be too often perhaps the most feeble of all really great poets. The result of his poetical career seems to be, that he has silenced the rival school of Byron, because, though intimately conversant with the inmost and truest feelings of the mind, it also promulgated so much that was absolutely false-and that he will leave behind him, as an alloy to his own fame, a model and an excuse for every writer of refinement, and purity of sentiment, and the facility of composition, which are henceforth to be the qualifications for writing poetry, as refined, as pure, but we hope not often so long, as The Excursion. Better lessons, indeed, might well be learned from the writings of Mr. Wordsworth,

to portions of which we turn with ever-increasing delight; but still we find these indisputable marks of paternity to a school of which we do not think its master can be proud.

To return, however, to Mr. Faber and Lord John Manners, we must allow that upon the whole their volumes are less deficient in vigour, and more distinguished by the graces of a cultivated fancy -never perhaps rising into the higher region of imagination—than most of the recent poetry into which we have happened to look. Our quarrel with these authors is rather for the strain of thinking on moral and religious subjects in which they indulge, than for the quality of their verses-though we may have occasion to show that this is sadly marred by certain peevish conceits and fantastical notions, which are ever and anon obtruded upon us, in lines which, if they have any meaning, it is purely controversial, and might more fitly form the thesis for a lecture in Oxford theology, than the theme of a minor poet. It must not, indeed, be supposed that they are didactic poets. Nothing can be farther from their character and intention. They do not profess to be teachers of any science or system, but are poets in all good faith, and to the best of their ability, which we have said is by no means despicable. This constitutes in our eyes the interest of their poems. Mr. Faber and Lord John Manners are, we believe, ardent and accomplished disciples of the Oxford school of theology. They hold the theological opinions of that school, with all the cognate views of secular politics and the ordinary relations of human life, which complete its system. It is of the nature of this system, that it possesses an all-pervading influence. It not only imbues the life and character of those who embrace it-it moulds their manners, it guides their reading, it even operates upon the fashion of their dress. Above all, it affects their literature. Illuminating the title-page, and impressing the cloth boards with a cross, it is never absent from the mind of the writer. We have thus Tractarian travels, and Tractarian novels, and in great abundance, Tractarian poetry; in all of which the dark sayings and unexpoundable dogmas of the system are struggling in every page for an utterance, which, to say the truth, it has been found difficult to accord to them even in professed treatises composed by the great theological leaders of the movement. But, after all, it seems to us that the real meaning and tendency of Tractarianism is best developed in these occasional, and sometimes inopportune effusions of its less skilful, and therefore less guarded, advocates. We see in them the effect which the system is calculated to produce upon the minds of those who embrace it; and we have the opinions of its teachers tested, as it were, by experiment, when they are thus reproduced from the minds of their disciples. We have sometimes thought that many

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of those who have opposed Tractarian theology in the way controversy, have spoken too moderately of its faults, because they have studied it only in the controversial writings of its ablest and most cautious champions. We could have wished that these writers had leisure to look into the lighter works to which we have alluded, where they would find the dry dogmas of the theology stated with no esoteric reserve, and developed in full activity as principles of action and sources of feeling.

With this view it might not be a useless task, however repulsive, to institute an examination of some works of smaller merit and more glaring faults than those before us. It would not be difficult to find many such. We lately saw quoted from a volume of "Church Rhymes," or some similar title, several verses much in the style of "Little Jack Horner," having for their object to express in poetical phrase the doubts which their author entertains as to the validity of a marriage performed in a meetinghouse. To such a depth of absurdity, sapping the foundations of morality, and offering to overturn the most deep-laid institutions of human life, have the weaker and more ignorant votaries of the Church faith carried its advocacy. There are many qualities in Mr. Faber and Lord John Manners which are a sufficient guarantee for their superiority to doctrines such as this, on which all wise and good men must look with simple and unmitigated abhorrence. Their philosophy may be shallow and fantastical, and their theology grievously false-but amidst all this we gladly recognise a generous love of virtue and of their kind, unsubdued by the dark and exclusive views with which it so ill harmonizes. We wish at present to examine the effects of Tractarian principles as they develop themselves in cultivated and virtuous minds, when they are not in combination with any qualities revolting to the moral sense or taste of our readers.

We think, that in fixing upon Mr. Faber and Lord John Manners, as its representatives, we have made a selection very favourable to the system. If we shall discover in their works many gross absurdities, much false sentiment, an open return to the weakest and most fatal errors of Romanism, with a self-complacent disregard of right reason, these faults are to be ascribed not to anything inherently bad in the writers themselves, but to the tenets which they have embraced.

It is not merely because these two writers hold the same opinions, that we have taken the liberty to associate their names here. They are already much united, both in their works and in their lives. Their poetry and their opinions seem to be, in great measure, the accidental growth of circumstances common to both. Indeed, the history of the mental career of these two poets, as it may be partly traced in their poems, is curious and in

structive. It appears that, in 1838, they were members of a little party of collegians, who spent that summer in a life of mingled relaxation and study amidst the mountains and lakes of Westmoreland. Greatly superior to the vulgar vices of academical life, and partaking largely of the literary enthusiasm which is its happiest fruit, the minds of these recluses were well prepared for the influence of mountain scenery, proximity to Mr. Wordsworth, and an ample recurrence to the theological discussions so prevalent in their colleges. The result was very natural. In the midst of much enjoyment, to which they now look back with mingled pleasure and regret, and much boyish speculation, their opinions took the colour of the passing scene.

"I mourn not, as thou mournest, o'er the fate
Of our own summer year of Thirty-Eight;
It came and went within us, like a breeze,
Chiming among our thoughts as in the trees.
It stirr❜d us as a breeze may stir the lake,
And thou art gazing yet on its bright wake."

Styrian Lake, p. 187.

In these lines, which are evidently addressed to Lord John Manners, and in many other passages, both the poets let us see that that same summer year has been an epoch in their mental history. We doubt not it was a happy and a virtuous season ; though we think it was also a time of great danger, which has not been escaped. A tasteful and reverent sense of the beauties of nature by which they were surrounded, with admiration and not unskilful imitation of the poet who has cast the charm of his genius upon that delightful scenery, and over all a pervading sentiment of religion, were natural to young men of pure tastes and cultivated minds, acted upon by the associations of time and place, in the midst of which they had fixed themselves. But neither purity nor mental cultivation could entirely supply the place of experience, or save this little band of "reading men" from the dangerous influence of a too high conceit of themselves, and proneness to idolize their intellectual leaders, incident to young men brought together by their common enthusiasm in academical pursuits. Their reception of the new theology being coincident, in point of time, with their first perception in themselves of a growing earnestness of spirit, and disposition to serious thought, they seem to have rashly ascribed to these mental movements the connexion of cause and effect; as if a yet deeper earnestness, and a thoughtfulness far more vigorous and devout, might not be the natural products of a theology which, discarding a system of empty and interminable symbols, should deal solely

with the realities of man's fallen nature, and of the heavenly kingdom which Christianity seeks to restore. In receiving too confidingly the system of their favourite teachers, they forgot to inquire what they rejected; and, accordingly, much of what is truest and best in their speculations, is just the unconscious and hardly consistent admission of truths for which their opponents are painfully contending.

Of these two poets, Mr. Faber is the most considerable in bulk. Indeed, the quantity of his published poetry, is one of its most undeniable defects. Of the two volumes which he has presented to the public, it cannot be doubted, that he might, with advantage to his reputation as a poet, have withheld three-fourths, and endeavoured, by skilful amputation, to repress the prolixity of the remaining portion. But the times are past when Collins or Gray could leave the world to admire equally the genius of their poems, and their marvellous scantiness. No copy of verses, no occasional literary exercise or literary amusement, is now consigned to oblivion; and so the bulk of every volume of poetry is swollen, and its dead weight increased. Mr. Faber is fond of discovering faults which are peculiar to our times; and we would point him to this characteristic of the age, as deserving both rebuke and discouragement.

We have announced a controversy with Mr. Faber as to his opinions upon moral and religious subjects, and it is time that we should put ourselves right with our readers, by showing that we have not misrepresented him. We complain that many of his favourite opinions are absolutely and dangerously wrong, and that they often betray him into a style of thinking miserably weak and childish. Nothing but the false system of which he is enamoured, could have produced in his writings the absurdities and unmanly weakness by which his pages are too often disfigured. The judgment of history upon past characters and events is not controverted, but quietly set aside. The weakness and cruelty of certain favourites are not palliated for the sake of better qualities, but made the substantial grounds of the reve rence that is paid them. Superstition, in its least imaginative, and therefore least inviting form, is extolled as a virtue.

A sonnet, entitled "Laud's Devotion," teaches us to whom Mr. Faber's party look, as the great apostolic guide of the Anglican Church. The reader of English history has long viewed Laud as a vindictive and superstitious prelate. We are not aware that any new light has been discovered. The evidence by which his character must be judged is just what it has always been. His diary and his correspondence with Strafford are not suspected of forgery. But a modern party have risen up, who look upon these things with quite a different eye, and greatly venerate what

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