The paradox of Dr Johnson, in reference to sacred poetry, has long ago fallen into disrepute. It seems singular indeed, how it ever obtained credence, even although supported by one of the most powerful pens that ever wrote in Britain, when we remember that, previous to that author's day, the best poetry in the world had been sacred. The Holy Scriptures then existed, with that poetry which bursts out at their every pore, besides being collected here and there into masses of rich song, "pressed down, shaken together, and running over." Dante, too, had written his great work, which, as if to mark it out for ever from things unclean and common, he had called the Divina Commedia, and which was worthy of the name. Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata had a religious moral, as well as a title suggestive of religious ideas. Spenser's Faery Queen was sacred, if not in all the parts, yet at least in the pervading spirit of its poetry. Cowley's Davideis, Herbert's Temple, Milton's Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, and Young's Night Thoughts, existed then, were all admitted to be more or less masterpieces, and were all sacred in their subjects and aims. Blair's Grave too, had, ere Johnson's day, appeared, and furnished a good example of a solemn and religious theme, treated with genuine poetic power.
We need not say what a flood of sacred song has arisen since, and drowned the dictum of the lexicographer in the waves. Nay, an opinion is gaining ground, that all lofty poetry tends toward the sacred, and lies under the shadow of the divine. Poetry is like fire, which, even when employed in culinary or destructive purposes, points its column upwards, and seems to transmit the flower and essence of its conquests to heaven. All poetry that does not thus ascend is either morbid in spirit, or secondary in merit.
We come now to the life of one of our best religious poets,—Robert Blair—whose short poem The Grave, is so admirable as to excite keen regret that it is almost the only specimen extant of his gifted and original mind.