Those deeds shall thy memorial be:
Fear not, thou didst them unto Me.'"
But it is not merely in the lyrical productions of his muse that Montgomery has indicated the deep feeling of piety that lives as a higher life in him; in every one of those larger and very beautiful poems, in which we might have rather supposed him bent on indulging his literary ambition, and sitting down to a long and systematic piece of labor, which should remain a monument of the more continuous, if not higher flights of his genius, we perceive the same still higher object of a sacred duty toward God and man. In no instance has he been content merely to develop his poetical powers, merely to aim at amusing and delighting. Song has been to him a holy vocation, an art practiced to make men wiser and better, a gift held like that of the preacher and the prophet, for the purposes of heaven and eternity. In every one of those productions are still recognized the zealous and devoted spirit of one of that indefatigable and self-renouncing people, who from the earliest ages of the Christian Church have trod the path of persecution, and won the burning crown of martyrdom; and in the present age continue to send out from their still retreats in Europe an increasing and untiring succession of laborers, male and female, to the frozen regions of the north, and to the southern wilds of Africa, to civilize and Christianize those rude tribes, which others, bearing the Christian name, have visited only to enslave or extirpate. The Wanderer of Switzerland, the poem which first won him a reputation, was a glowing lyric of liberty, and denunciation of the diabolical war-spirit of the revolutionary French. It was animated by the most sacred love of country, and of the hallowed ground and hallowed feelings of the domestic hearth. The West Indies was a heroic poem, on one of the most heroic acts which ever did honor to the decrees of a great nation—the abolition of the slave-trade. But it was a work not merely of triumph over what was done, but of incentive to what yet remained to do—to the abolition of slavery itself. Time has shown what a stupendous mustering of national powers that achievement has demanded. What a combination of all the eloquence, and wisdom, and exertions, of all the wisest, noblest, and best men of, perhaps, the most glorious period of our history, was needed! Time has shown that the very slave-trade was only abolished on paper. That like a giant monster, that hideous traffic laughed at our enactments, and laughs at them still, having nearly quadrupled the number of its annual victims since the great contest against it was begun. But among those whose voice and spirit have been in fixed and perpetual operation against this vile cannibal commerce, none have more effectually exercised their influence than James Montgomery. His poem, arrayed in all the charms and graces of his noble art, has been read by every genuine lover of genuine poetry. It has sunk into the generous heart of youth; and who shall say in how many it has been in after-years the unconscious yet actual spring of that manly demand for the extinction of the wrongs of the African, which all good men in England, and wherever the English language is read, still make, and will make till it be finally accomplished. What fame of genius can be put in competition with the profound satisfaction of a mind conscious of the godlike privilege of aiding in the happiness of man in all ages and regions of the earth, and feeling that it has done that by giving to its thoughts the power and privileges of a spirit, able to enter all houses at all hours, and stimulate brave souls to the bravest deeds of the heroism of humanity?
There are great charms of verse displayed in the poem of The West Indies. One would scarcely have believed the subject of the slave-trade capable of them. But the genial, glowing descriptions of the West-Indian islands, of the torrid magnificence of the interior of Africa—
"Regions immense, unsearchable, unknown—
Amid the splendors of the solar zone;
A world of wonders,—where creation seems
No more the work of Nature, but her dreams,—
Great, wild, and wonderful."
The white villains of Europe, desecrating the name of Christian—Spaniards, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Dutchmen, Danes, and Portuguese, all engaged in the brutal traffic, are all sketched with the same vigorous pencil; but the portraiture of the Creole is a master-piece, and I quote it because it still is not a mere picture, but a dreadful reality in the shape of Brazilian and North American, on which the humane can not too fully reflect. If any one would see all that is here described, he has only now to make a ten days' voyage, and he will see it on an enormous scale in the southern states of the Free Republic of North America, as well as on the plains of the more torrid south.