1838

Preface to the American Edition

We here present to the American public a book which has produced no little sensation in England, and which has been, for some time, known to many in this country. But although the first edition was issued six years since, it has had but a limited circulation among us; and it is believed that in republishing Festus, we not only perform a work which its merits demand, but open, for the first time, to many who will appreciate it, a great and original poem. The peculiar value of the second English edition, from which this is printed, consists in the “Proem,” which was not attached to the first. Having placed at the end of the volume some of the highest literary opinions in England, we will not intrude any analysis of our own. But a word upon one point With many minds, it will be difficult to acquit the author from the charge of irreverence. For this purpose, we refer to his vindication in the “Proem” and in the body of the work; by which the reader will perceive that he is free from irreverence in spirit, whatever question there may be as to the propriety of certain forms of expression. As to the extravagances, which all will discover, they are the extravagances of deep and eloquent passion—the luxuriant overgrowth of a profoundly rich soil. With all its faults, Festus is a great poem—a mine of thought and imagery. It is perfectly safe to pronounce it one of the most powerful and splendid productions of the age.

Festus

Proem

Without all fear, without presumption, he
Who wrote this work would speak respecting it
A few brief words, and face his friend the world;
Revising, not reversing, what hath been.

Poetry is itself a thing of God;
He made His prophets poets; and the more
We feel of poesie do we become
Like God in love and power—under-makers.
All great lays, equals to the minds of men,
Deal more or less with the Divine, and have
For end some good of mind or soul of man.
The mind is this world’s, but the soul is God’s;
The wise man joins them here all in his power.
The high and holy works, amid lesser lays,
Stand up like churches among village cots;
And it is joy to think that in every age,
However much the world was wrong therein,
The greatest works of mind or hand have been
Done unto God. So may they ever be!
It shows the strength of wish we have to be great,
And the sublime humility of might.

True fiction hath in it a higher end
Than fact; it is the possible compared
With what is merely positive, and gives
To the conceptive soul an inner world,
A higher, ampler, Heaven than that wherein
The nations sun themselves. In that bright state
Are met the mental creatures of the men
Whose names are writ highest on the rounded crown
Of Fame’s triumphal arch; the shining shapes
Which star the skies of that invisible land,
Which, whosoe’er would enter, let him learn;—
’Tis not enough to draw forms fair and lively,
Their conduct likewise must be beautiful;
A hearty holiness must crown the work,
As a gold cross the minster-dome, and show,
Like that instonement of divinity,
That the whole building doth belong to God.
And for the book before us, though it were,
What it is not, supremely little, like
The needled angle of a high church spire,
Its sole end points to God the Father’s glory,
From all eternity seen; making clear
His might and love in saving sinful man.
One bard shows God as He deals with states and kings;
Another, as He dealt with the first man;
Another, as with Heaven and earth and hell;
Ours, as He loves to order a chance soul
Chosen out of the world, from first to last.
And all along it is the heart of man
Emblemed, created and creative mind.
It is a statued mind and naked heart
Which is struck out. Other bards draw men dressed
In manners, customs, forms, appearances,
Laws, places, times, and countless accidents
Of peace or polity: to him these are not;
He makes no mention, takes no compt of them:—
But shows, however great his doubts, sins, trials,
Whatever earthborn pleasures soil man’s soul,
What power soever he may gain of evil,
That still, till death, time is; that God’s great Heaven
Stands open day and night to man and spirit;
For all are of the race of God, and have
In themselves good. The life-writ of a heart,
Whose firmest prop and highest meaning was
The hope of serving God as poet-priest,
And the belief that He would not put back
Love-offerings, though brought to Him by hands
Unclean and earthy, e’en as fallen man’s
Must be; and most of all, the thankful show
Of His high power and goodness in redeeming
And blessing souls that love Him, spite of sin
And their old earthy strain—these are the aims,
The doctrines, truths, and staple of the story.
What theme sublimer than soul being, saved?
’Tis the bard’s aim to show the mind-made world
Without, within; how the soul stands with God,
And the unseen realities about us.
It is a view of life spiritual
And earthly. Let all look upon it, then,
In the same light it was drawn and colored in;
In faith, in that the writer too hath faith,
Albeit an effect, and not a cause.
Faith is a higher faculty than reason,
Though of the brightest power of revelation;
As the snow-headed mountain rises o’er
The lightning, and applies itself to Heaven.
We know in day-time there are stars about us,
Just as at night, and name them what and where
By sight of science; so by faith we know,
Although we may not see them till our night,
That spirits are about us, and believe,
That, to a spirit’s eye, all Heaven may be
As full of angels as a beam of light
Of motes. As spiritual, it shows all
Classes of life, perhaps, above our kind,
Known to tradition, reason, or God’s word,
Whose bright foundations are the heights of Heaven.
As earthly, it embodies most the life
Of youth, its powers, its aims, its deeds, its failings;
And, as a sketch of world-life, it begins
And ends, and rightly, in Heaven and with God;
While Heaven is also in the midst thereof.

God, or all good, the evil of the world,
And man, wherein are both, are each displayed.
The mortal is the model of all men.
The foibles, follies, trials, sufferings—
And manifest and manifold are they—
Of a young, hot, unworld-schooled heart that has
Had its own way in life, and wherein all
May see some likeness of their own—’tis these
Attract, unite, and, sunlike, concentrate
The ever-moving system of our feelings.
The hero is the world-man, in whose heart
One passion stands for all, the most indulged.
The scenes wherein he plays his part are life,
A sphere whose centre is co-heavenly
With its divine original and end.
Like life, too, as a whole, the story hath
A moral, and each scene one, as in life—
One universal and peculiar truth—
Shining upon it like the quiet moon,
Illustrating the obscure unequal earth;—
And though these scenes may seem to careless eyes
Irregular and rough and unconnected,
Like to the stones at Stonehenge—though convolved,
And in primeval mystery—still an use,
A meaning, and a purpose may be marked
Among them of a temple reared to God:—
The meaning alway dwelling in the word,
In secret sanctity, like a golden toy
Mid Beauty’s orbed bosom. Scenes of earth
And Heaven are mixed, as flesh and soul in man.

Now, the religion of the book is this,
Followed out from the book God writ of old.
All creatures being faulty by their nature,
And by God made all liable to sin,
God only could atone—and unto none
Except Himself—for universal sin.
It is thus that God did sacrifice to God,
Himself unto Himself, in the great way
Of Triune mystery. His death, as man,
Was real as our own; and as, except
In the destruction of all life, there could
Be no atonement for its sin, while life
Doth necessarily result from God,
As thought and outward action from ourselves,
So the atonement must be to and by Him;
Which makes it justice equally with love;
For all His powers and attributes are equal,
And must make one in any act of His;
And every act of God is infinite.
He acts through all in all: the truth we know,
He doth Himself inbreathe; the ill we do,
He hath atoned for; and the scriptures show
That God doth suffer for the sins of those
Whom He hath made, that are liable to sin.
In all of us He hath His agony;
We are the cross, and death of God, and grave.
Him love then all the more, and worship Him
Who lived and died, and rose from death for us,
And is and reigns forever God in all.
Let each man think himself an act of God,
His mind a thought, his life a breath of God;
And let each try, by great thoughts and good deeds,
To show the most of Heaven he hath in him.

Many who read the word of life, much doubt
Whether salvation be of grace or faith,
Election, or repentance, or good works,
Or God’s high will: reconcile all of them.
Each of the persons of the Triune God
Hath had His dispensation, hath it now;
The Father by His prophets, and the Son
In His own days, by His own deeds; and now
The Spirit, by the ministry of Christ;
And thus, by law, by gospel, and by grace,
The scheme of God’s salvation is complete.
Salvation, then, is God-like, threefold; so
That under one or other, all may come;
By will of God alone, by faith in Christ,
And by repentance, and good works, and grace.
So there is one salvation of the Father,
One of the Son, another of the Spirit;
Each, the salvation of the Three in One.
The mortal in this lay is saved of will,
In manner as this hymn unfolds, which hath
Just warranty for every word from God’s.

O God! Thou wondrous One in Three,
As mortals must Thee deem;
Thou only canst be said to be,
We but at best to seem.
For Thou dost save, and Thou may’st slay,
Const make a mortal soul
In Thee eternal; in a day
Wilt bring to nought the whole.

Thou hardenest, and Thou openest hearts,
As in Thy Word is shown;
Thou safest and destroyest parts,
By Thy right will alone.
Let down Thy grace, then, Lord! on all
Whom Thou wilt save to live;
Oh! if they stumble, stop their fall!
Oh! if they fall, forgive!

They are forgiven from the first,
They are predestined Thine;
And though in sin they were the worst,
In Thee they are divine.
They are, and were, and will be, Lord!
In one, in Heaven, in Thee,
Yea with the Spirit, and the Word,
One God in Trinity.

These principles and doctrines pending not
Upon the action of the poem here,
But over and above it, influencing
Nevertheless the story, as the course
Of stars enwoven with our system, earth,
Vary the view of this life’s hemisphere,
And mingle it more palpably with Heaven,
And with its changeless, ceaseless, boundless God.
It is thus that by creating to and from
Eternity, and multiplying ever
His own one Being through the universe,
He doth eternize happiness, and make
Good infinite by making all in Him.
There is but one great right and good; and ill
And wrong are shades thereof, not substances.
Nothing can be antagonist to God.

Necessity, like electricity,
Is in ourselves and all things, and no more
Without us than within us; and we live,
We of this mortal mixture, in the same law
As the pure colourless intelligence
Which dwells in Heaven, and the dead Hadëan shades.
We will and act and talk of liberty;
And all our wills and all our doings both
Are limited within this little life.
Free will is but necessity in play—
The clattering of the golden reins which guide
The thunder-footed coursers of the sun.
The ship which goes to sea informed with fire—
Obeying only its own iron force,
Reckless of adverse tide, breeze dead, or weak
As infant’s parting breath, too faint to stir
The feather held before it—is as much
The appointed thrall of all the elements,
As the white-bosomed bark which wooes the wind,
And when it dies desists. And thus with man;
However contrary he set his heart
To God, he is but working out His will;
And, at an infinite angle, more or less
Obeying his own soul’s necessity.
He only hath freewill whose will is fate.

Evil and good are God’s right hand and left.
By ministry of evil good is clear,
And by temptation virtue; as of yore
Out of the grave rose God. Let this be deemed
Enough to justify the portion weighed
To the great spirit Evil, named herein.
If evil seem the most, yet good most is:
As water may be deep and pure below
Although the face be filmy for a time.
And if the spirit of evil seem more in
The work than God, it is but to work His will,
Who therefore is all that the, other seems.
And evil is in almost every scene
Of life more or less forward. Above all
The mystery of the Trinity is held,
Whose mystery is its reasonableness.
All that is said of Deity is said
In love and reverence. Be it so conceived.
What comes before and after the great world—
Deep in the secretest abyss of Light,
And Being’s most reserved immensity—
God alone knows eternally, who rends
The mantling Heavens with his hands; but with
The present is communion creatural:
He liveth in the sacrament of life.
And for the soul of man delineate here—
The outline half invisible—is shown
The self-sought grace, the self-aspiring truth
And natural religion of the heart
Contrasting Godhood with humanity
Ever; whereas the Spirit aye unites.
Temptation, and its workings in the heart
Whose faint and false resistance but assists—
Ambition, thirst of secret lore, joy, love—
Riverlike, doubling sometimes on itself—
Adventure, pleasure, travel heavenly
And earthly, friendship, passion, poesie,
Viewed ever in their spiritual end—
And power, celestial happiness and earth’s
Millenial foretaste, ill annihilate,
The restoration of the angels lost,
And one salvation universal given
To all create—all these, related, form,
With much beside, the body of the work:—
The islands, seas, and mainland of its orb.

Thus much then for this book. It aims to mark
The various belief as well as doubts
Which hold or search by turns the mind of youth
Unresting anywhere. Its heresies,
If such they be, are charitable ones;—
For they who read not in the blest belief
That all souls may be saved, read to no end.
We were made to be saved. We are of God.
Nor bates the book one tittle of the truth,
To smoothe its way to favour with the fearful.

All rests with those who read. A work or thought
Is what each makes it to himself, and may
Be full of great dark meanings, like the sea,
With shoals of life rushing; or like the air,
Benighted with the wing of the wild dove,
Sweepng miles broad o’er the far western woods,
With mighty glimpses of the central light—
Or may be nothing—bodiless, spiritless.

Now therefore to his work and to the world
The writer bids, God speed! It matters not
If they agree or differ. Each perchance
May bear true witness to another end.
Let then what hath been, be. It boots not here
To palliate misdoings. ’Twere less toil
To build Colossus than to hew a hill
Into a statue. Hail and farewell, all!

I

Scene—Heaven.

Eternity hath snowed its years upon them;
And the white winter of their age is come,
The World and all its worlds; and all shall end.

God! God! God!
As flames in skies
We burn and rise
And lose ourselves in Thee!
Years on years!
And nought appears
Save God to be.
God! God! God!
To us no thought
Hath Being brought
Toward Thee that doth not move!
Years on years!
And what appears
Save God to love?
God! God! God!
All Thou dost make
Lies like a lake
Below Thine infinite eye:
Years on years!
And all appears
Save God to die.

As sun and star,
How high or far,
Show but a boundless sky;
So creature mind
Is all confined
To show Thee, God, most High!
The sun still burns,
The sun still turns
Bound, round himself and round;
So creature mind
To self’s confined,
But Thou God hast no bound!
Systems arise.
Or a world dies,
Each constant hour in air;
But creature mind,
In Heaven confined,
Lives on like Thee, God! there.

God! God! God!
Thou fill’st our eyes
A were the skies
One burning, boundless sun!
While creature mind,
In path confined,
Passeth a spot thereon.
God! God! God!

Ye thrones of Heaven, how bright, how pure ye are!
How have ye brightened since I saw ye first!
How have I darkened since ye saw me last!
What is the dark abyss of fire, and what
The ravenous heights of air, o’er which I reign,
In agony of glory, to these seats?
The loathsome cavern of the oracle,
O’er which ye rise in templed majesty,
Filled with the incense of all worshippers,
And echoing with the eloquence of God,
Which rolls in sunny clouds around the heavens.
Yet must I work through world and life my fate;
And winding through the wards of human hearts,
Steal their incarnate strength. Death does his work
In secret and in joy intense, untold,
As though an earthquake smacked its mumbling lips
O’er some thick peopled city. But for me,
Exists nor peace nor pleasure, even here,
Where all beside, the very faintest thought,
Is rapture. I will speak to God as erst.
Father of spirit, as the sun of air!
Beginning of all ends, and end of all
Beginnings, throughout whole Eternity;
From whom Eternity and every power
Perfect, and pure cause, is and emanates!
Originator without origin!
End without end! Creator of all ages,
And sabbath of all Being; who hast made
All numbers sacred, who art all and one!
At whose right hand the wisdom of all worlds
Combined, is only fearful foolishness
Or inarticulate madness—and Thou, Lord!
Maker and Perfecter of all, the one!
Being above all Being, God the Life!
Who art the way whereon the world proceeds
From God, all-making, and whereby returns
The ever generated universe!—
Who rulest all worlds in the law of light,
Thy nature and their own; who art before
All ages, angels, blessed, times and worlds!
Word that in every world art safe to save
All souls, impregned with spirit, God-begot!
And Thou eternal spirit-Deity!
The sanctifier of the universe!
Being, and Life, and spirit, who dost make,
Destroyest, recreatest, makest God!
God one and Trine! Thou seest me here again;
Still, sunlike, though eclipsed, of blinding power
And fiery cause, and everness of ill;
Behold I bow before Thee; hear Thou me!

What wouldst thou, Lucifer?

There is a youth
Among the sons of men I fain would have
Given up wholly to me.

He is thine,
To tempt

I thank Thee, Lord!

Upon his soul
Thou hast no power. All souls are mine for aye.
And I do give thee leave to this that he
May know my love is more than all his sin,
And prove unto himself that nought but God
Can satisfy the soul He maketh great.

Thou God art all in one! Thy infinite
Bounds Being. Thou hast said the world shall end.
The world is perfect, as concerns itself,
And all its parts and ends; not as towards Thee.
So man is Likest and unlikest God,
Of all existence; therefore doth as much
Resemble Thee as any act a mind.
In him of whom I ask, I seek once more
To tempt the living world, and then depart.

And I will hallow him to the ends of Heaven,
That though he plunge his soul in sin like a sword
In water, it shall nowise ding to him.
He is of Heaven. All things are known in Heaven,
Ere aimed at upon earth. The child is chosen.

Another soul
The Holy one
Hath chosen out of earth;
And there is none
Throughout the whole
Like worthy of his birth.

Oh! who hath joy like mine? was I not here
When from Thy boundless bosom, as a star
Out of the air, that soul was kindled, Lord!
And given to me to guard and guide—while both,
Mid starry strains out of the depths of Heaven,
Fell at Thy feet in worship?—joy of joys!
To you, ye saints and angels, let me speak;
For ye I see rejoice with me. Ye know
What ’tis to triumph o’er temptation, what
To fall before it; how the young spirit faints—
The virgin tremor, the heart’s ebb and flow,
When first some vast temptation calmly comes
And states itself before it, like the sun
Low looming in the west, above the wave
Of wimpling streamlet, ere its waters grow
To size aortal. Than the Fiend himself
There is no greater evil. Less the shame
Of yielding, more the glory of conquering,
In him, to whom he goes, this soul elect.
From infancy through childhood, up to youth,
Have I this soul attended; marked him blest
With all the sweet and sacred ties of life;—
The prayerful love of parents, pride of friends,
Prosperity, and health and ease, the aids
Of learning, social converse with the good
And gifted, and his heart all-lit with love,
Like to the rolling sea with living light;—
Hopeful and generous and earnest; rich
In commune with high spirits, loving truth
And wisdom for their own divinest selves:
Tracking the deeds of the world’s glory, or
Conning the words of wisdom, Heaven-inspired,
As on the soul, in pure effectual ray,
The bright, transparent atoms, thought by thought,
Fall fixed for evermore. And thus his days,
Through sunny noon, or mooned eve, or night
Star-armied, shining through the deathless air,
All radiantly elapsed, in good or joy.
All this, for long, I marked. There grew, at length,
A change within his spirit; and I feared
A fatal and a final fall from good.
God’s love seemed lost upon him. He became
Heart-deadened. Watching, warning, vain, I fled
Hither to intercede with God our Lord,
To bless him with salvation. We may plead
Alway for those we love, by leave divine.
Nor knew I till this moment, with all Heaven,
That, in the righteous providence of God,
That soul was saved. Thou knowest, Lord! the mould
Of mortals, and the infinite end whereto
The souls Thou savest are predestinate;
Oh! be Thy mercy mighty to this soul,
Fiend-threatened; nor permit him who presides
O’er Hell’s eternal holocaust, too far
To tempt or tamper with the heart of man!—

My mercy doth outstretch the universe;
Shall it not be sufficient for one soul?

I am the wrath of God unto myself,
And made by Him to do my part Do thou
Thine! they are far enough apart I ween.

The heaven-strung chords of man’s immortal soul
Are not for thee to wither at thy will.
Bear witness, all ye blessed, to the word;—
Angels, intelligences, sons of God!
Ye who know nought but truth, feel nought but love,
Will nought but bliss, do nought but righteousness!
Whose life was ere the Heavens were conceived,
The stars begotten, or the ages born;
Ye many ordered hierarchies, which are
The love, truth, justice, majesty and might,
Dominion, glory, wisdom, bliss of God;
Ye through whose ministry of mercy—His
Immediate, ever instant, active, all
Spirits and worlds are governed—age by age
Gazing and gaining glory; ye who stand,
Stirless, before the throne, entranced in joy;
Or ye, whose life is to present all souls
Reborn to their Creator; or to search
The golden globed skies for deeds of grace;
And ye who move all Heavens, in whose names
The name of God is, as in angels’ all;
The crown, the wisdom, the intelligence,
Kindness, and strength and beauty, splendour, worth,
Original and rule; and ye who move
Restless around the throne, the burning seven,
The virtue, power, salvation, fire and rest,
Blessing and praise of God; and ye who rule
Regions or kingdoms, states, tribes, families,
Ages and times, and seasons, and events;
Systems and elements, material powers,
Mental and spiritual; or ye who bear
Souls from the heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
Ye tenants of the archetypal worlds
And spiritual spheres; and you, ye saints!
Freed once on earth into the liberty
Of the necessity which is of God;
Yours are the many multitudes of stars,
And bliss and power for ever, ye are gods!
And live an endless life, bespoken here;
Bear witness, all, that happiness succeeds
To godliness; and that, despite of sin,
The world may recognise in all time’s scenes,
Though belts of clouds bar half its burning disk,
The overruling, overthrowing power,
Which by our creature purposes works out
Its deeds, and by our deeds its purposes.

God! for thy glory only can I act,
And for thy creatures’ good. When creatures stray
Farthest from Thee, then warmest towards them burns
Thy love, even as yon sun beams hotliest on
The earth when distant most.

The earth whereon
He dwells, this grain selected from the sands
Of life, dies with him.