Betray the covert jest, or idleness.
Oft does he call with deep and pompous voice,
The class before him, and shrill chattering tones
In pert or blundering answers, break the soft
And dreamy hum of study, heretofore
Like beehive sounds prevailing.’
We could wish to have seen this volume make a more forcible appeal to the eye than it will be likely to do in the pamphlet form; but then it would not have been so widely diffused; and that is a ‘compensating’ feature, to the producer, which must not be forgotten by writers who would be read; and Mr. Street will be.
Mr. Cheever’s Lectures on the Pilgrim’s Progress, and on the Life and Times of John Bunyan. To Number Four, inclusive. New-York: Wiley and Putnam.
We have perused these Lectures, as far as they have advanced, not only with unabated but with increasing interest. For many years the Pilgrim’s Progress of Bunyan has been one of our ‘standard’ take-downable books from our library-shelf; and now that we have ‘a new lease’ of the imaginations of our early years, in the eager perusal of a second generation, the old feeling of admiration and delight, in following the narrative which records the trials and triumphs of Christian, Hopeful and Faithful, Christiana, Mr. Greatheart and Mercy, comes back upon us in all the freshness of its prime. With a quick eye to all the pictorial beauties, so to speak, of Bunyan’s matchless limnings, Mr. Cheever adds a thorough knowledge and appreciation of all their high spiritual teachings. Moreover, his own doctrinal views have given him a keen scent for the intolerant evils against which Bunyan warred, and of which he was the victim. We had marked for insertion three or four striking and characteristic passages, in the colloquy between Bunyan, the Justice who committed him to his twelve years’ imprisonment, and the Clerk of the Peace who came to remonstrate with him for his conscientious ‘obstinacy;’ but are compelled to omit them for the present. These passages, however, like his entire life, illustrate this eloquent sketch of Mr. Cheever:
‘He kept on his course, turning neither to the right hand nor the left, in his Master’s service, but he made all ready for the tempest, and familiarized himself to the worst that might come, be it the prison, the pillory, or banishment, or death. With a magnanimity and grandeur of philosophy which none of the princes or philosophers or sufferers of this world ever dreamed of, he concluded that ‘the best way to go through suffering, is to trust in God through Christ as touching the world to come; and as touching this world to be dead to it, to give up all interest in it, to have the sentence of death in ourselves and admit it, to count the grave my house, to make my bed in darkness, and to say to corruption, thou art my father; and to the worm, thou art my mother and sister; that is, to familiarize these things to me.’ With this preparation, when the storm suddenly fell, though the ship at first bowed and labored heavily under it, yet how like a bird did she afterward flee before it! It reminds me of those two lines of Wesley: