The poetical works of James Montgomery :: :: University of Virginia Library

“I speak all dialects; by me
The deaf may hear, the blind may see,
The dumb converse, the dead of old
Communion with the living hold;
All lands are one beneath my rule,
All nations learners in my school;
Men of all ages, everywhere,
Become contemporaries there.

“What is the Press?—'Tis what the tongue
Was to the world when Time was young;
When, by tradition, sire to son
Convey'd whate'er was known or done,—
But fact and fiction so were mix'd,
Their boundaries never could be fix'd.

“What is the Press?—'Tis that which taught,
By hieroglyphic forms of thought,
Lore, from the vulgar proudly hid
Like treasure in a pyramid;
For knowledge then was mystery,
A captive under lock and key,
By priests and princes held in thrall,
Of little use, or none at all,
Till the redoubted ALPHABET
Free their own Great Deliverer set,
At whose command, by simple spells,
They work their mental miracles.

“What is the Press?—'Tis what the pen
Through thrice ten centuries was to men,
When sibyl-leaves lent wings to words,
Or, caged in books, they sang like birds.
But slow the quill, and frail the page;
To write twelve folios asked an age,
And a pet-babe in sport might spoil
The fruits of twenty authors' toil:
A power was wanting to insure
Life to works worthy to endure;
A power the race to multiply
Of intellectual polypi;
—It came, all hardships to redress,
And Truth and Virtue hail'd the PRESS.

“What am I, then?—I am a power
Years cannot waste, nor flames devour,
Nor waters drown, nor tyrants bind;
I am the mirror of man's mind,
In whose serene impassive face
What cannot die on earth you trace;
Not phantom shapes, that come and fly,
But, like the concave of the sky,
In which the stars, by night and day,
Seen or unseen, hold on their way.

“Then think me not that lifeless Frame
Which bears my honourable name;
Nor dwell I in the arm, whose swing
Intelligence from blocks can wring;
Nor in the hand, whose fingers fine
The cunning characters combine;
Nor even the cogitating brain,
Whose cells the germs of thought contain,
Which that quick hand with letters sows,
Like dibbled wheat, in lineal rows,
And that strong arm, like autumn sheaves,
Reaps and binds up in gather'd leaves,
The harvest-home of learned toil
From that dead Frame's well-cultured soil.

“I am not one, nor all, of these;
They are my Types and Images,
The implements with which I work;
In them no secret virtues lurk:
—I am an omnipresent Soul;
I live and move throughout the whole,
And thence, with freedom unconfined
And universal as the wind,
Whose source and issues are unknown,
Felt in its airy flight alone,
All life supplying with its breath,
And where it fails involving death,
I quicken minds from Nature's sloth,
Fashion their forms, sustain their growth;
And when my influence flags or flies,
Matter may live, but spirit dies.

“Myself withdrawn from mortal sight,
I am invisible as light,—
Light, which, revealing all beside,
Itself within itself can hide:
The things of darkness I make bare,
And, nowhere seen, am everywhere.
All that philosophers have sought,
Science discover'd, genius wrought;

357

All that reflective memory stores,
Or rich imagination pours;
All that the wit of man conceives,
All that he wishes, hopes, believes,
All that he loves, or fears, or hates,
All that to heaven and earth relates;
—These are the lessons that I teach
In speaking silence, silent speech.

“Ah! who like me can bless or curse?
What can be better, what be worse,
Than language framed for Paradise,
Or sold to infamy and vice?
—Blest be the man by whom I bless,
But curst be he who wrongs the Press!
The reprobate, in prose or song,
Who wields the glorious power for wrong,
—Wrong to outlast his laurell'd tomb,
And taint the earth till ‘crack-of-doom.’”

May, 1842.