The Portland daily press. [volume] (Portland, Me.) 1862-1921, 1894-02-28
Modern Poets of Faith and Poets of Dou BIT.

That ours is an age of doubt, or per-
haps better, an age OF questioning is a
platitude, commonplace of the lecturer
and preacher. In beginning his lecture
Mr.. Bellows said that a line from Brown
ings Andrea del Sarto"-a common
grayness silvers everything"-well de-
scribed the present theological situation.
The poets, as representatives of the
worlds highest thought naturally show
this feeling of doubt, of storm and stress,
in their writings. The lecturer selected
Arthur Hugh Clough, Matthew Arnold
and Miss Emily Dickinson as modern
singers of doubt, whose poems are
touched by this common grayness.
Clough was one of the sincerest souls
that ever lived, and his sincerity led him
to resign many of the prizes of life, be-
cause he could not hold them and still
keep his intellectual honesty. Lowell
gives fine picture of him in his poem
on Agassiz. Selections were read from
the great out.of-door epic, The Bottle
of Tober ma Vuolich, showing Clough's
attitude toward the great problems OF
life, finding the world more or less of
"a mess and dislocation," and yet bow
ing to the sentiment of duty and order,
and ever listening for some clearer word
from "the great Field Marshal"
Matthew Arnold's poetry has perhaps
too much of the note of sadness in it
to allow it to reign among the greatest
He, like Clough, finds the world
battlefield "where ignorant armies clash
by night" where there is really neither
joy nor gertrude, nor peace. Still. as
in the great sonnet called The Better
PART" he would have us pitch this life
high" and trust that by our devotion
and courage, we may make life less dlffl-
cult "for others. In his poetry, as in
his prose, there is always distinction of
stvle. and some of his characterizations
of other poets-like those of Byron.
Heine, Goethe and Wordsworth, have
a rare felicity. There is also a fine feel
ing for natures fairy charm, which he
makes us share most wildly, as in some
.matchless stanzas from Thyrsis, or his
description of the course of the river
Oxus in his "Sohrab and Rustrum."
Robert Browning is one of the great
leaders of the spiritual life, because,
though he describes much of sin and
crime and shame, and boldly "calls
spade spade" he yet "holds on, hopes
hard in the subtle thing that's spirit,
and believes nightly in its final triumph
over all material obstacles. The last
poem in his last book, Aso1ande, has
the same high faith that "all's right
with the world" which characterized
"Pippa Passes :" Nor does it matter
how seemingly incomplete mans life
may be here on earth, for-as the artist
Hunt said" there's plenty more OF life
when this life is over; and we're going
there, sure.n The poem called "Appar-
ent Failure" where the three wretched
men lie dead at the Morgue, shows
Browning's constant faith, that Gods
purpose in humanity must eventually be
unto good. The law of love, and mans
salvation through love, is another great
lesson of Browning's poetry, and some of
his love lyrics are the most beautiful
in the English language.
Lowell, as his recently published let
tiers show, chung somewhat to the old
traditions in religion, though he had
gone .outside. as he said Agassiz had
done, of the old boundaries, where a
thus saith the Lord" was taken as the
final authority. A selection was read
from the half humorous poem,
Credidimus Jovem Regnare, in which
the new scientific religion was proved to
offer no surer resting place for the soul
than that proclaimed in the old Puritan
meeting houses. Mr.. Bellows concluded
by reading John Addington Symonds'
remarkable tribute to the genius of Walt
Whitman-a man of mistaken falkland
the service the good gray poet" had rem
dered to his spiritual development, fol-
lowed by some of the magnificent poetic
prose passages that have in them a rare
striving and uplifting impulse, what
ever we may say of their form, or form
lessness. The last lecture in the present
course will be next Monday ON Ralph
Waldo Emerson.