66

WORDSWORTH.

The "blessing in the air" is one of the beautiful indications of the awakening of the earth from its winter sleep. It may proclaim the waking hour in March -the cold north-east wind may permit no sense of joy" till April. But the opening of the year comes to the poet when he first hears the voice of gladness in the song of birds, or sees the humblest flower putting on its livery of glory. It opened to the Ayrshire ploughman when he heard "A Thrush Sing in a Morning Walk in January;" and that song filled his heart with thankfulness and contentment :

Sing on, sweet thrush, upon the

leafless bough,

Sing on, sweet bird, I listen to thy strain :

See aged Winter, 'mid his surly reign,

Riches denied, Thy boon was pure joys,

At thy blithe carol clears his furrow'd What wealth could never give nor take

Spring in the lap of Winter is very beautiful. February smiles and pouts like a self-willed child. We are gladdened by the flower-buds of the elder and the long flowers of the hazel. The crocus and the snow-drop timidly lift up their heads. Mosses, the verdure of winter, that rejoice in moisture and ilefy cold, luxuriate amidst the general barrenness. The mole is busy in his burrowed galleries. There are clear mornings, not unmusical with the voices of more birds than the thrush of Burns. Spenser, the most imaginative of poets, has painted the March of rough winds-the "sturdy March," the March of

the bent brow-with weapon and armour. But he is also the March of gifts and of hope, in whose "sternest frown" there is "a look of kindly promise." So he is described by one of a band of poets whose native voice is heard over that mighty continent which our forefathers peopled. The cultivation of the same literature-for that literature is the common property of all "who speak the tongue which Shakspere spake"-ought, amongst other influences, to bind America and England in eternal peace and good fellowship:

The stormy March is come at last, With wind, and cloud, and changing skies;

I hear the rushing of the blast

That through the snowy valley flies. Ah, passing few are they who speak, Wild, stormy month! in praise of thee!

When the changed winds are soft and

warm,

And heaven puts on the blue of
May.

Then sing along the gushing rills,
And the full springs, from frost set
free,

Yet, though thy winds are loud and That, brightly leaping down the hills,

[THE Reverend Henry Hart Milman, Dean of Saint Paul's, was the son of an eminent physician, Sir Francis Milman, and passed through his university education at Brasenose College, Oxford, with distinguished honours. He died Sept. 24, 1868. Dean Milman's poetical works are full of grace: his tragedy of "Fazio " is perhaps the most finished dramatic production of our times, though others may have surpassed it in force of character and stage effect. His "Fall of Jerusalem" is a truly beautiful conception, and some of its lyrical pieces remarkable for tenderness and sublimity. As a prose writer, Mr Milman may justly take rank amongst "the best authors." The following extract is from his learned and unaffectedly pious "History of Christianity."]

At Athens, at once the centre and capital of the Greek philosophy and heathen superstition, takes place the first public and direct conflict between Christianity and Paganism. Up to this time there is no account of any one of the apostles taking his

station in the public street or market-place, and addressing the general multitude. Their place of teaching had invariably been the synagogue of their nation, or, as at Philippi, the neighbourhood of their customary place of worship. Here, however, Paul does not confine himself to the synagogue, or to the society of his countrymen and their proselytes. He takes his stand in the public market-place, (probably not the Ceramicus, but the Eretriac Forum,) which, in the reign of Augustus, had begun to be more frequented, and at the top of which was the famous portico from which the Stoics assumed their name. In Athens, the appearance of a new public teacher, instead of offending the popular feelings, was too familiar to excite astonishment, and was rather welcomed as promising some fresh intellectual excitement. In Athens, hospitable to all religions and all opinions, the foreign and Asiatic appearance, and possibly the less polished tone and dialect of Paul, would only awaken the stronger curiosity. Though they affect at first (probably the philosophic part of his hearers) to treat him as an idle "babbler," and others (the vulgar, alarmed for the honour of their deities) supposed that he was about to introduce some new religious worship which might endanger the supremacy of their own tutelar divinities, he is conveyed, not without respect, to a still more public and commodious place, from whence he may explain his doctrines to a numerous assembly without disturbance. On the Areopagus the Christian leader takes his stand, surrounded on every side with whatever was noble, beautiful, and intellectual in the older world,-temples, of which the materials were only surpassed by the architectural grace and majesty; statues, in which the ideal anthropomorphism of the Greeks had almost elevated the popular notions of the Deity, by embodying it in human forms of such exquisite perfection; public edifices, where the civil interests of man had been discussed with the acuteness and versatility of the highest Grecian intellect, in all the purity of the inimitable Attic dialect, when oratory had obtained its highest triumphs by "wielding at will the fierce democracy;" the walks of the philosophers, who unquestionably, by elevating the human mind to an appetite for new and

nobler knowledge, had prepared the way for a loftier and purer religion. It was in the midst of these elevating associations, to which the student of Grecian literature in Tarsus, the reader of Menander and of the Greek philosophical poets, could scarcely be entirely dead or ignorant, that Paul stands forth to proclaim the lowly yet authoritative religion of Jesus of Nazareth. His audience was chiefly formed from the two prevailing sects, the Stoics and Epicureans, with the populace, the worshippers of the established religion. In his discourse, the heads of which are related by St Luke, Paul, with singular felicity, touches on the peculiar opinions of each class among his hearers; he expands the popular religion into a higher philosophy, he imbues philosophy with a profound sentiment of religion.

It is impossible not to examine with the utmost interest the whole course of this (if we consider its remote consequences, and suppose it the first full and public argument of Christianity against the heathen religion and philosophy) perhaps the most extensively and permanently effective oration ever uttered by man. We may contemplate Paul as the representative of Christianity, in the presence, as it were, of the concentrated religion of Greece, and of the spirits, if we may so speak, of Socrates, and Plato, and Zeno. The opening of the apostle's speech is according to those most perfect rules of art which are but the expressions of the general sentiments of nature. It is calm, temperate, conciliatory. It is no fierce denunciation of idolatry, no contemptuous disdair of the prevalent philosophic opinions; it has nothing of the sternness of the ancient Jewish prophet, nor the taunting defiance of the later Christian polemic. "Already the religious people of Athens had, unknowingly indeed, worshipped the universal Deity, for they had an altar to the unknown God. The nature, the attributes of this sublimer Being, hitherto adored in ignorant and unintelligent homage, he came to unfold. This God rose far above the popular notion; He could not be confined in altar or temple, or represented by any visible image. He was the universal Father of mankind, even of the earth-born Athenians, who boasted that they were of an older race than the other families of