e
high--the faith sure--and human love must coalesce with divine, that the
strain may have power to reach the spirits of men, immersed as they are
in matter, and with all their apprehensions and conceptions blended with
material imagery, and the things of this moving earth and this restless
life.

So gifted and so endowed, a great or good poet, having chosen his
subject well within religion, is on the sure road to immortal fame. His
work, when done, must secure sympathy for ever; a sympathy not dependent
on creeds, but out of which creeds spring, all of them manifestly
moulded by imaginative affections of religion. Christian Poetry will
outlive every other; for the time will come when Christian Poetry will
be deeper and higher far than any that has ever yet been known among
men. Indeed, the sovereign songs hitherto have been either religious or
superstitious; and as "the day-spring from on High that has visited us"
spreads wider and wider over the earth, "the soul of the world, dreaming
of things to come," shall assuredly see more glorified visions than have
yet been submitted to her ken. That poetry has so seldom satisfied the
utmost longings and aspirations of human nature, can only have been
because Poetry has so seldom dealt in its power with the only mysteries
worth knowing--the greater mysteries of religion, into which the
Christian is initiated only through faith, an angel sent from heaven to
spirits struggling by supplications and sacrifices to escape from sin
and death.

These, and many other thoughts and feelings concerning the "Vision and
the Faculty divine," when employed on divine subjects, have arisen
within us, on reading--which we have often done with delight--"The
Christian Year," so full of Christian poetry of the purest character. Mr
Keble is a poet whom Cowper himself would have loved--for in him piety
inspires genius, and fancy and feeling are celestialised by religion. We
peruse his book in a tone and temper of spirit similar to that which is
breathed upon us by some calm day in spring, when all imagery is serene
and still--cheerful in the main--yet with a touch and a tinge of
melancholy, which makes all the blended bliss and beauty at once more
endearing and more profound. We should no more think of criticising such
poetry than of criticising the clear blue skies--the soft green
earth--the "liquid lapse" of an unpolluted stream, that

"Doth make sweet music with the enamell'd stones,
G