Chapter X: Introduction: To the Poem on the Soul of Man

1 The lights of heaven, which are the world's fair eyes,
Look down into the world, the world to see;
And as they turn or wander in the skies,
Survey all things that on this centre be.

2 And yet the lights which in my tower do shine,
Mine eyes, which view all objects nigh and far,
Look not into this little world of mine,
Nor see my face, wherein they fixed are.

3 Since Nature fails us in no needful thing,
Why want I means my inward self to see?
Which sight the knowledge of myself might bring,
Which to true wisdom is the first degree.

4 That Power, which gave me eyes the world to view,
To view myself, infused an inward light,
Whereby my soul, as by a mirror true,
Of her own form may take a perfect sight.

5 But as the sharpest eye discerneth nought,
Except the sunbeams in the air do shine;
So the best soul, with her reflecting thought,
Sees not herself without some light divine.

6 O light, which mak'st the light which makes the day!
Which sett'st the eye without, and mind within,
Lighten my spirit with one clear heavenly ray,
Which now to view itself doth first begin.

7 For her true form how can my spark discern,
Which, dim by nature, art did never clear,
When the great wits, of whom all skill we learn,
Are ignorant both what she is, and where?

8 One thinks the soul is air; another fire;
Another blood, diffused about the heart;
Another saith, the elements conspire,
And to her essence each doth give a part.

9 Musicians think our souls are harmonies;
Physicians hold that they complexions be;
Epicures make them swarms of atomies,
Which do by chance into our bodies flee.

10 Some think one general soul fills every brain,
As the bright sun sheds light in every star;
And others think the name of soul is vain,
And that we only well-mix'd bodies are.

11 In judgment of her substance thus they vary;
And thus they vary in judgment of her seat;
For some her chair up to the brain do carry,
Some thrust it down into the stomach's heat.

12 Some place it in the root of life, the heart;
Some in the liver, fountain of the veins;
Some say, she's all in all, and all in every part;
Some say, she's not contain'd, but all contains.

13 Thus these great clerks their little wisdom show,
While with their doctrines they at hazard play;
Tossing their light opinions to and fro,
To mock the lewd, as learn'd in this as they.

14 For no crazed brain could ever yet propound,
Touching the soul, so vain and fond a thought;
But some among these masters have been found,
Which in their schools the selfsame thing have taught.

15 God only wise, to punish pride of wit,
Among men's wits hath this confusion wrought,
As the proud tower whose points the clouds did hit,
By tongues' confusion was to ruin brought.

16 But thou which didst man's soul of nothing make,
And when to nothing it was fallen again,
'To make it new, the form of man didst take;
And, God with God, becam'st a man with men.'

17 Thou that hast fashion'd twice this soul of ours,
So that she is by double title thine,
Thou only know'st her nature and her powers,
Her subtle form thou only canst define.

18 To judge herself, she must herself transcend,
As greater circles comprehend the less;
But she wants power her own powers to extend,
As fetter'd men cannot their strength express.

19 But thou bright morning Star, thou rising Sun,
Which in these later times hast brought to light
Those mysteries that, since the world begun,
Lay hid in darkness and eternal night:

20 Thou, like the sun, dost with an equal ray
Into the palace and the cottage shine,
And show'st the soul, both to the clerk and lay,
By the clear lamp of oracle divine.

21 This lamp, through all the regions of my brain,
Where my soul sits, doth spread such beams of grace,
As now, methinks, I do distinguish plain
Each subtle line of her immortal face.

22 The soul a substance and a spirit is,
Which God himself doth in the body make,
Which makes the man; for every man from this
The nature of a man and name doth take.

23 And though this spirit be to the body knit,
As an apt means her powers to exercise,
Which are life, motion, sense, and will, and wit,
Yet she survives, although the body dies.

THE SELF-SUBSISTENCE OF THE SOUL.

1 She is a substance, and a real thing,
Which hath itself an actual working might,
Which neither from the senses' power doth spring,
Nor from the body's humours temper'd right.

2 She is a vine, which doth no propping need,
To make her spread herself, or spring upright;
She is a star, whose beams do not proceed
From any sun, but from a native light.

3 For when she sorts things present with things past,
And thereby things to come doth oft foresee;
When she doth doubt at first, and choose at last,
These acts her own,[1] without her body be.

4 When of the dew, which the eye and ear do take,
From flowers abroad, and bring into the brain,
She doth within both wax and honey make:
This work is hers, this is her proper pain.

5 When she from sundry acts, one skill doth draw;
Gathering from divers fights one art of war;
From many cases like, one rule of law;
These her collections, not the senses' are.

6 When in the effects she doth the causes know;
And seeing the stream, thinks where the spring doth rise;
And seeing the branch, conceives the root below:
These things she views without the body's eyes.

7 When she, without a Pegasus, doth fly
Swifter than lightning's fire from east to west;
About the centre, and above the sky,
She travels then, although the body rest.

8 When all her works she formeth first within,
Proportions them, and sees their perfect end;
Ere she in act doth any part begin,
What instruments doth then the body lend?

9 When without hands she doth thus castles build,
Sees without eyes, and without feet doth run;
When she digests the world, yet is not fill'd:
By her own powers these miracles are done.

10 When she defines, argues, divides, compounds,
Considers virtue, vice, and general things;
And marrying divers principles and grounds,
Out of their match a true conclusion brings.

11 These actions in her closet, all alone,
Retired within herself, she doth fulfil;
Use of her body's organs she hath none,
When she doth use the powers of wit and will.

12 Yet in the body's prison so she lies,
As through the body's windows she must look,
Her divers powers of sense to exercise,
By gathering notes out of the world's great book.

13 Nor can herself discourse or judge of ought,
But what the sense collects, and home doth bring;
And yet the powers of her discoursing thought,
From these collections is a diverse thing.

14 For though our eyes can nought but colours see,
Yet colours give them not their power of sight;
So, though these fruits of sense her objects be,
Yet she discerns them by her proper light.

15 The workman on his stuff his skill doth show,
And yet the stuff gives not the man his skill;
Kings their affairs do by their servants know,
But order them by their own royal will.

16 So, though this cunning mistress, and this queen,
Doth, as her instruments, the senses use,
To know all things that are felt, heard, or seen;
Yet she herself doth only judge and choose.

17 Even as a prudent emperor, that reigns
By sovereign title over sundry lands,
Borrows, in mean affairs, his subjects' pains,
Sees by their eyes, and writeth by their hands:

18 But things of weight and consequence indeed,
Himself doth in his chamber then debate;
Where all his counsellors he doth exceed,
As far in judgment, as he doth in state.

19 Or as the man whom princes do advance,
Upon their gracious mercy-seat to sit,
Doth common things of course and circumstance,
To the reports of common men commit:

20 But when the cause itself must be decreed,
Himself in person in his proper court,
To grave and solemn hearing doth proceed,
Of every proof, and every by-report.

21 Then, like God's angel, he pronounceth right,
And milk and honey from his tongue doth flow:
Happy are they that still are in his sight,
To reap the wisdom which his lips doth sow.

22 Right so the soul, which is a lady free,
And doth the justice of her state maintain:
Because the senses ready servants be,
Attending nigh about her court, the brain:

23 By them the forms of outward things she learns,
For they return unto the fantasy,
Whatever each of them abroad discerns,
And there enrol it for the mind to see.

24 But when she sits to judge the good and ill,
And to discern betwixt the false and true,
She is not guided by the senses' skill,
But doth each thing in her own mirror view.

25 Then she the senses checks, which oft do err,
And even against their false reports decrees;
And oft she doth condemn what they prefer;
For with a power above the sense she sees.

26 Therefore no sense the precious joys conceives,
Which in her private contemplations be;
For then the ravish'd spirit the senses leaves,
Hath her own powers, and proper actions free.

27 Her harmonies are sweet, and full of skill,
When on the body's instruments she plays;
But the proportions of the wit and will,
Those sweet accords are even the angels' lays.

28 These tunes of reason are Amphion's lyre,
Wherewith he did the Theban city found:
These are the notes wherewith the heavenly choir,
The praise of Him which made the heaven doth sound.

29 Then her self-being nature shines in this,
That she performs her noblest works alone:
'The work, the touchstone of the nature is;
And by their operations things are known.'

[1] That the soul hath a proper operation without the body.

SPIRITUALITY OF THE SOUL.

1 But though this substance be the root of sense,
Sense knows her not, which doth but bodies know:
She is a spirit, and heavenly influence,
Which from the fountain of God's Spirit doth flow.

2 She is a spirit, yet not like air or wind;
Nor like the spirits about the heart or brain;
Nor like those spirits which alchymists do find,
When they in everything seek gold in vain.

3 For she all natures under heaven doth pass,
Being like those spirits, which God's bright face do see,
Or like Himself, whose image once she was,
Though now, alas! she scarce his shadow be.

4 For of all forms, she holds the first degree,
That are to gross, material bodies knit;
Yet she herself is bodiless and free;
And, though confined, is almost infinite.

5 Were she a body,[1] how could she remain
Within this body, which is less than she?
Or how could she the world's great shape contain,
And in our narrow breasts contained be?

6 All bodies are confined within some place,
But she all place within herself confines:
All bodies have their measure and their space;
But who can draw the soul's dimensive lines?

7 No body can at once two forms admit,
Except the one the other do deface;
But in the soul ten thousand forms do fit,
And none intrudes into her neighbour's place.

8 All bodies are with other bodies fill'd,
But she receives both heaven and earth together:
Nor are their forms by rash encounter spill'd,
For there they stand, and neither toucheth either.

9 Nor can her wide embracements filled be;
For they that most and greatest things embrace,
Enlarge thereby their mind's capacity,
As streams enlarged, enlarge the channel's space.

10 All things received, do such proportion take,
As those things have, wherein they are received:
So little glasses little faces make,
And narrow webs on narrow frames are weaved.

11 Then what vast body must we make the mind,
Wherein are men, beasts, trees, towns, seas, and lands;
And yet each thing a proper place doth find,
And each thing in the true proportion stands?

12 Doubtless, this could not be, but that she turns
Bodies to spirits, by sublimation strange;
As fire converts to fire the things it burns:
As we our meats into our nature change.

13 From their gross matter she abstracts the forms,
And draws a kind of quintessence from things,
Which to her proper nature she transforms,
To bear them light on her celestial wings.

14 This doth she, when, from things particular,
She doth abstract the universal kinds,
Which bodiless and immaterial are,
And can be only lodged within our minds.

15 And thus from divers accidents and acts,
Which do within her observation fall,
She goddesses and powers divine abstracts;
As nature, fortune, and the virtues all.

16 Again; how can she several bodies know,
If in herself a body's form she bear?
How can a mirror sundry faces show,
If from all shapes and forms it be not clear?

17 Nor could we by our eyes all colours learn,
Except our eyes were of all colours void;
Nor sundry tastes can any tongue discern,
Which is with gross and bitter humours cloy'd.

18 Nor can a man of passions judge aright,
Except his mind be from all passions free:
Nor can a judge his office well acquit,
If he possess'd of either party be.

19 If, lastly, this quick power a body were,
Were it as swift as in the wind or fire,
Whose atoms do the one down sideways bear,
And the other make in pyramids aspire;

20 Her nimble body yet in time must move,
And not in instants through all places slide:
But she is nigh and far, beneath, above,
In point of time, which thought cannot divide;

21 She's sent as soon to China as to Spain;
And thence returns as soon as she is sent:
She measures with one time, and with one pain.
An ell of silk, and heaven's wide-spreading tent.

22 As then the soul a substance hath alone,
Besides the body in which she's confined;
So hath she not a body of her own,
But is a spirit, and immaterial mind.

23 Since body and soul have such diversities,
Well might we muse how first their match began;
But that we learn, that He that spread the skies,
And fix'd the earth, first form'd the soul in man.

24 This true Prometheus first made man of earth,
And shed in him a beam of heavenly fire;
Now in their mothers' wombs, before their birth,
Doth in all sons of men their souls inspire.

25 And as Minerva is in fables said,
From Jove, without a mother, to proceed;
So our true Jove, without a mother's aid,
Doth daily millions of Minervas breed.

[1] That it cannot be a body.

GILES FLETCHER.

Giles Fletcher was the younger brother of Phineas, and died twenty-three years before him. He was a cousin of Fletcher the dramatist, and the son of Dr Giles Fletcher, who was employed in many important missions in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and, among others, negotiated a commercial treaty with Russia greatly in the favour of his own country. Giles is supposed to have been born in 1588. He studied at Cambridge; published his noble poem, 'Christ's Victory and Triumph,' in 1610, when he was twenty- three years of age; was appointed to the living of Alderston, in Suffolk, where he died, in 1623, at the early age of thirty-five, 'equally loved,' says old Wood, 'of the Muses and the Graces.'

The poem, in four cantos, entitled 'Christ's Victory and Triumph,' is one of almost Miltonic magnificence. With a wing as easy as it is strong, he soars to heaven, and fills the austere mouth of Justice and the golden lips of Mercy with language worthy of both. He then stoops down on the Wilderness of the Temptation, and paints the Saviour and Satan in colours admirably contrasted, and which in their brightness and blackness can never decay. Nor does he fear, in fine, to pierce the gloom of Calvary, and to mingle his note with the harps of angels, saluting the Redeemer, as He sprang from the grave, with the song, 'He is risen, He is risen--and shall die no more.' The style is steeped in Spenser--equally mellifluous, figurative, and majestic. In allegory the author of the 'Fairy Queen' is hardly superior, and in the enthusiasm of devotion Fletcher surpasses him far. From the great light, thus early kindled and early quenched, Milton did not disdain to draw with his 'golden urn.' 'Paradise Regained' owes much more than the suggestion of its subject to 'Christ's Victory;' and is it too much to say that, had Fletcher lived, he might have shone in the same constellation with the bard of the 'Paradise Lost?' The plan of our 'Specimens' permits only a few extracts. Let those who wish more, along with a lengthened and glowing tribute to the author's genius, consult _Blackwood_ for November 1835. The reading of a single sentence will convince them that the author of the paper was Christopher North.

THE NATIVITY.

I.

Who can forget, never to be forgot, The time, that all the world in slumber lies: When, like the stars, the singing angels shot To earth, and heaven awaked all his eyes, To see another sun at midnight rise On earth? was never sight of pareil fame: For God before, man like himself did frame, But God himself now like a mortal man became.

II.

A child he was, and had not learned to speak, That with his word the world before did make: His mother's arms him bore, he was so weak, That with one hand the vaults of heaven could shake. See how small room my infant Lord doth take, Whom all the world is not enough to hold. Who of his years, or of his age hath told? Never such age so young, never a child so old.

III

And yet but newly he was infanted, And yet already he was sought to die; Yet scarcely born, already banished; Not able yet to go, and forced to fly: But scarcely fled away, when by and by, The tyrant's sword with blood is all denied, And Rachel, for her sons with fury wild, Cries, O thou cruel king, and O my sweetest child!

IV.

Egypt his nurse became, where Nilus springs, Who straight, to entertain the rising sun, The hasty harvest in his bosom brings; But now for drought the fields were all undone, And now with waters all is overrun: So fast the Cynthian mountains poured their snow, When once they felt the sun so near them glow, That Nilus Egypt lost, and to a sea did grow.

V.

The angels carolled loud their song of peace, The cursed oracles were stricken dumb, To see their shepherd, the poor shepherds press, To see their king, the kingly sophics come, And them to guide unto his Master's home, A star comes dancing up the orient, That springs for joy over the strawy tent, Where gold, to make their prince a crown, they all present.

VI.

Young John, glad child, before he could be born, Leapt in the womb, his joy to prophesy: Old Anna, though with age all spent and worn, Proclaims her Saviour to posterity: And Simeon fast his dying notes doth ply. Oh, how the blessed souls about him trace! It is the fire of heaven thou dost embrace: Sing, Simeon, sing; sing, Simeon, sing apace.

VII.

With that the mighty thunder dropt away From God's unwary arm, now milder grown, And melted into tears; as if to pray For pardon, and for pity, it had known, That should have been for sacred vengeance thrown: There too the armies angelic devowed Their former rage, and all to mercy bowed, Their broken weapons at her feet they gladly strowed.