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The Church hath its poets, as the world hath, and Professor Trench is of them. Perhaps the most Wordsworthian of them. His strains have not the melodious chime of Keble's "solemn church music," as Thackeray reveringly characterises the "Christian Year;" nor have they the glistening decorations of Milman, or the sonorous dignity of Croly, or perhaps the gentle tenderness of Moultrie, or the cathedral awe and dim religious light of Isaac Williams. But they have depth without bathos, while the vastly more popular verses of Robert Montgomery have bathos without depth; and if inferior in picturesque diction and vivid suggestiveness to the best things of Charles Kingsley, they have none of that "Keepsake" prettiness, and "Annual" efflorescence, which mark the lyrics of the Dale and Stebbing order. "Justin Martyr," and "Poems from Eastern Sources," "Sabbation," "Honor Neale," and other his more elaborate metrical essays, are dear to a select audience of thinking hearts—they are truthful and refined, the effusions of a benign, spiritual nature—healthy and pure in tone, and, though pensively attuned to the still sad music of humanity, they are inspired with the gladdening, elevating evangelism of Christianity. Mr. Trench has his mannerisms, and now and then his seeming obscurities, which pertain, however, only to the surface of his composition. Thus, in his "Century of Couplets," will be found, as the terse requirements of the subject might imply, many a line that asks to be scanned as well as read—scanned for the sake both of sense and metre; and though the result will prove that the poet has thought himself clear, it may sometimes leave doubts as to the delicacy of his ear. This defect in the matter of rhythmical beauty, is more patent in the blank verse of his longer pieces, which usually wants relief and colour—albeit Christopher North has praised it as excellent of its kind. Mr. Trench is probably most effective in stanzas of the description we are about to quote—where some historic incident or biographic tradition b graphically told, and made the text of a quietly emphasised memento, addressed to the universal conscience. The following lines were suggested. by a passage in Elphinstone's "History of India:"
Lo! an hundred proud pagodas have the Moslem torches burned,
Lo! a thousand monstrous idols Mahmoud's zeal has overturned.
He from northern Ghuznee issuing, thro' the world one word doth bear,—
"God is One; ye shall no other with the peerless One compare!"
Till in India's furthest corner he has readied the costliest shrine
Of the Brahmin's idol-tending—which they hold die most divine.
Profits not the wild resistance; stands the victor at the gate,
With this hugest idol's ruin all his work to consummate.
Ransom vast of gold they offer, pearls of price and jewels rare,
Will he hear their supplication, and that only image spare.
Then he answered: " God has armed me, not to make a shameful gain,
Trafficking for hideous idols, with a service false and vain;
