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Among the many views in which poetry has been regarded , we know not that it has yet been separately considered with reference to its bearings upon morality and religion . This subject has , indeed , been frequently touched upon incidentally ; or rather the occasional touching upon it was scarcely to be avoided .
The critic could not always be merely a critic ; he sometimes forgot himself into something of that , which the exercising of his artj when only exercised as an art , is very apt to exclude from his mind . The tendency of certain passages to excite the devotional affections , and to confirm the religious convictions of the reader , could not fail occasionally to strike even a critic of the order to which we have just alluded ; and much less him , to whom
' That strain he heard was of a loftier mood , ' and who could rise into a noble sympathy with the noblest inspirations of humanity . Yet even critics of this higher order , as far as we are at present aware , have not devoted any exclusive attention to the subject , nor ever considered it as a topic to which the entire powers of a vigorous and cultivated mind might be
directed , with no fear of satiety , and with no danger of exhaustion It is not with any hopes of supplying this desideratum , or even of producing any succedaneum for it , that we take up our pen to write a few papers upon the subject . Without any pretensions to geographical knowledge , the swallow ( now building in our chimney ) has dashed over ihe waters of half the globe ; and it is
even thus that we design to commit ourselves to the perilous expanse before us , intending only to dip the wing here and there , and humbly content if the drops we dash from the surface shall show the splendid substance of the element to which they belong . Metaphor apart , we simply design to make use of our own observations , in order in some degree to classify and arrange some
brief bat beautiful examples of the songs which poetry has consecrated to religion . And even in doing this , we must limit ourselves to a very small part of the subject . We do not mean to be reapers , but gleaners . We shall have nothing to say upon the ancient poets , nothing upon the foreign ones , nor even on the
earlier poets of our own poetical country ; but shall confine ourselves strictly to such of our recent or living bards , as have ever , ( to our knowledge , ) though but in a single song , excited the imagination for the benefit of the heart and the soul . For our part , we acknowledge , that the breath of genius is never so
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On the Connexion between Poetry and Religion . 4 86
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ON THE CONNEXION BETWEEN POETRY AND RELIGION . ART . I .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), July 2, 1832, page 485, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse2.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1816/page/53/
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