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Appears; who frown'st-and life hath pass'd away!
Thou God!-I feel thine everlasting Curse,
Yet wither not the lightnings of Thy wrath
Burn in my spirit, yet it shall endure
Unblasted, that which cannot be extinct.

Thou sole Transcendency, and deep Abyss
From whence the universe of life was drawn!
Unutter'd is Thy nature; to Thyself
Alone the proved, and comprehended God;
Though once the steep of thine Almightiness
This haught, unbowing spirit would have climb'd,
And sat beside thee, God with God enthroned,—
And vanquish'd, fell-Thy Might I'll not disclaim.
Immutable! Omnipotence is Thine;

Perfections, Powers, and Attributes unnamed
Attend Thee; Thou art All; and oh, how great
That consummation! Worlds to listening worlds
Repeat it; angels and archangels veil

Their wings, and shine more glorious at the sound;
Thus, Infinite and fathomless, Thou wert,

And art, and wilt be. In Thine awful blaze

Of majesty, amid empyreal pomp

Of Sanctities, chief Hierarch, I stood

Before thy throne terrifically bright,

And heard the hymning thunders voice thy name, While bow'd the Heavens, and echoed Deity!

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And yet divided empire have I won. Behold the havoc in Thy beauteous world! And have I not, recount it, Space and Time! Thy master-piece, creation's god of clay, Dethroned from that high excellence he proved, When first man walk'd a shadow of Thyself? Then roll thee on, thou high and haughty World, And queen it bravely o'er the universe!

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And empires, heap the mountain of thy crimes,
Be mean or mighty, wise or worthless still,—

Yet I am with thee! and my power shall reign
Until the trumpet of thy doom be heard,
Thine ocean vanish'd and thy heavens no more!
Till thou be tenantless, a welt'ring mass

Of fire, a dying and dissolving world.

But then, Thy hidden lightnings are unsheath'd,
O God! the thunders of Despair shall roll;
Mine hour is come, and I am wreck'd of all-
All, save Eternity, and that is mine!

An attempt has been made (when to derogate from the noble sublimity of the above passage was impossible) to derogate from its originality, by referring it to Satan's address to the Sun, in Milton: the detractors might as well have compared it to Ossian's address to the Sun, which, with self-betraying anachronism, is obviously borrowed from Milton. The passage has more affinity to the most faultless piece in Young— the poet's Address to the Almighty, beginning 'Oh, thou great Arbiter,' in the Christian Triumph;' but the latter is brief and unimaginative, though well reasoned, and, when compared with this characteristic address of Satan, shrinks into dwarfish little

ness.

I Now proceed with some remarks on The Omnipresence of the Deity. This work has been honoured with a wreath of as unanimous applause as ever greeted the production of any poet, however popular. As some publications are beneath criticism, so the universal suffrage of the vox populi, vox Dei should have placed

this at least above cavil and detraction. What commendation now can benefit, or what dispraise deteriorate a work, which, in an unprecedented short time, reached eleven editions, and is now (a tribute paid to no modern poet besides) published as an Oratorio? All the magnates of criticism, and almost the whole town and provincial press, concurred in offering unanimous and splendid homage to its merits. Surely these are not the Arcadian nightingales,' whose bray provoked the phrenitis of the writers in Fraser's Magazine, and the Edinburgh Journal, only to be cured by cupping and cold water! Hard judgment on their brethren or on themselves!

Having said thus much on the established reputation of the Omnipresence, I may be spared a detailed analysis of its merits or demerits. In conception, the poem is original; in the sweet flow, and chastened and balanced structure of the versification, it resembles Campbell's Pleasures of Hope: if it has less classical polish, it glows with more enthusiastical fervour; and the tone of equable elevation is sustained with wellpoised wing throughout; but it has little affinity to that, or to the two cognate didactic poems-Rogers's Pleasures of Memory, or Akenside's Pleasures of Imagination, in the nature of the pervading sentiment. The sense of an Almighty, omnipresent witness of our minutest actions and thoughts, and whose thought could, at any given particle of time, arrest the movement of onr' fearfully-made' mechanism, and call us

into his awful presence for judgment, intensely and sublimely pervades the entire poem. A sacred tranquillity overshadowed with terror,' which Burke has affirmed to be one element of the sublime, is its poetical characteristic. It is imbued with that thrilling, yet pleasing and elevating fear, on surveying the mighty design of the universe, which Horace describes as alone peculiar to men of mind :

Hunc solem et stellas et decedentia certis

Tempora momentis, sunt qui formidine nulla

Imbuti spectent;

and which is even extorted from the materialist Lucretius, in an obviously heartfelt and painfully-wrung feeling

His tibi me rebus quædam divina voluptas,
Percipit atque horror, quod sic natura tua vi
Tam manifesta patet ex omni parte retecta.

But the archetypal idea of the poem may be probably traced to the sublime passage in the Psalms :

Whither shall I go then from thy Spirit: or whither shall I go then from thy presence?

If I climb up into heaven, thou art there: if I go down to hell, thou art there also.

If I take the wings of the morning: and remain in the uttermost parts of the sea;

Even there also shall thy hand lead me: and thy right hand shall hold me.

If I say, peradventure the darkness shall cover me: then shall my night be turned to day.

Yea, the darkness is no darkness with thee, but the night is as clear as the day: the darkness and light to thee are both alike.

Burke considers the Deity's omnipresence as the highest elevation of the contemplative sublime.

Though in a just idea of the Deity, perhaps none of his attributes are predominant; yet, to our imagination, his power is by far the most striking. To be struck with his power, it is only necessary to open our eyes. But while we contemplate so vast an object, under the arm, as it were, of Almighty power, and invested on every side with OмNIPRESENCE, we shrink into the minuteness of our own nature, and are in a manner annihilated before him. * * * If we rejoice, we rejoice with trembling; and even whilst we are receiving benefits, we cannot but shudder at a power which can confer benefits of such mighty importance.'-Burke on the Sublime and Beautiful.

As the design of the Satan of Mr. Montgomery brings him into comparison with the Paradise Regained of Milton and the Childe Harold of Byron, so his Omnipresence, combined with his Satan, bring him into fair comparison with two living authors of great genius-Campbell and Rogers. These poets, following up Akenside's idea of the Pleasures of Imagination, which may be considered as a poetical essay on Taste, produced their twin didactic splendid poems, the Pleasures of Memory and the Pleasures of Hope. Both the latter embrace the two provinces of taste -the beautiful and the sublime, but chiefly limit themselves within the bounds of the former.

The

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