le we look'd with favour'd eyes,
Did sullen mist hide lake and skies
And mountains from your view?

"I ask in vain--and know far less,
If sickness, sorrow, or distress
Have spared my Dwelling to this hour;
Sad blindness! but ordained to prove
Our faith in Heaven's unfailing love,
And all-controlling power."

Let us fly from Rydal to Sheffield. James Montgomery is truly a
religious poet. His popularity, which is great, has, by some scribes
sitting in the armless chairs of the scorners, been attributed chiefly
to the power of sectarianism. He is, we believe, a sectary; and, if all
sects were animated by the spirit that breathes throughout his poetry,
we should have no fears for the safety and stability of the Established
Church; for in that self-same spirit was she built, and by that
self-same spirit were her foundations dug in a rock. Many are the
lights--solemn and awful all--in which the eyes of us mortal creatures
may see the Christian dispensation. Friends, looking down from the top
of a high mountain on a city-sprinkled plain, have each his own vision
of imagination--each his own sinking or swelling of heart. They urge no
inquisition into the peculiar affections of each other's secret
breasts--all assured, from what each knows of his brother, that every
eye there may see God--that every tongue that has the gift of lofty
utterance may sing His praises aloud--that the lips that remain silent
may be mute in adoration--and that all the distinctions of habits,
customs, professions, modes of life, even natural constitution and form
of character, if not lost, may be blended together in mild amalgamation
under the common atmosphere of emotion, even as the towers, domes, and
temples, are all softly or brightly interfused with the huts, cots, and
homesteads--the whole scene below harmonious because inhabited by beings
created by the same God--in his own image--and destined for the same
immortality.

It is base therefore, and false, to attribute, in an invidious sense,
any of Montgomery's fame to any such cause. No doubt many persons read
his poetry on account of its religion, who, but for that, would not have
read it; and no doubt, too, many of them neither feel nor understand it.
But so, too, do many persons read Wordsworth's poetry on account of its
religion--the religion of the woods--who, but for that, would not have
read it; and so, too, many of them neither feel nor understand it. So