is
it with the common-manners-painting poetry of Crabbe--the
dark-passion-painting poetry of Byron--the high-romance-painting poetry
of Scott--and so on with Moore, Coleridge, Southey, and the rest. But it
is to the _mens divinior_, however displayed, that they owe all their
fame. Had Montgomery not been a true poet, all the Religious Magazines
in the world could not have saved his name from forgetfulness and
oblivion. He might have flaunted his day like the melancholy
Poppy--melancholy in all its ill-scented gaudiness; but as it is, he is
like the Rose of Sharon, whose balm and beauty shall not wither, planted
on the banks of "that river whose streams make glad the city of the
Lord."

Indeed, we see no reason why poetry, conceived in the spirit of a most
exclusive sectarianism, may not be of a very high order, and powerfully
impressive on minds whose religious tenets are most irreconcilable and
hostile to those of the sect. Feelings, by being unduly concentrated,
are not thereby necessarily enfeebled--on the contrary, often
strengthened; and there is a grand austerity which the imagination more
than admires--which the conscience scarcely condemns. The feeling, the
conviction from which that austerity grows, is in itself right; for it
is a feeling--a conviction of the perfect righteousness of God--the
utter worthlessness of self-left man--the awful sanctity of duty--and
the dreadfulness of the judgment-doom, from which no soul is safe till
the seals have been broken, and the Archangel has blown his trumpet. A
religion planted in such convictions as these, may become dark and
disordered in its future growth within the spirit; and the tree, though
of good seed and in a strong soil, may come to be laden with bitter
fruit, and the very droppings of its leaves may be pernicious to all who
rest within its shade. Still, such shelter is better in the blast than
the trunk of a dead faith; and such food, unwholesome though it be, is
not so miserable as famine to a hungry soul.

Grant, then, that there may be in Mr Montgomery's poetry certain
sentiments, which, in want of a better word, we call Sectarian. They are
not necessarily false, although not perfectly reconcilable to our own
creed, which, we shall suppose, is true. On the contrary, we may be made
much the better and the wiser men by meditating upon them; for while
they may, perhaps (and we are merely making a supposition), be too
strongly felt by him, they may be too fe