The Poetical Works of Mark Akenside — Inside the Classic

hat were the special reasons why Akenside turned aside from the Church we are not informed. Perhaps he had fallen into youthful indiscretions or early scepticism; or perhaps he felt that the business of a Dissenting pastor was not then, any more than it is now, a very lucrative one. Presbyterian Dissent at that time, besides, did not stand very high in England. The leading Dissenting divines were Independents--and the Presbyterian body was fast sinking into Unitarian or Arian heresy. On the other hand, the Church of England was in the last state of lukewarmness; the Church of Scotland was groaning under the load of patronage; and the Secession body was newly formed, and as yet insignificant. In such circumstances we cannot wonder that an ardent, ambitious mind like that of Akenside should revolt from divinity as a study, and the pulpit as a goal, although some may think it strange how the pursuit of medicine should commend itself instead to a genial and poetic mind. Yet let us remember that some eminent poets have been students or practisers of the art of medicine. Such--to name only a few--were Armstrong, Smollett, Crabbe, Darwin, Delta, Keats, and the two Thomas Browns, the Knight of the "Religio Medici," and the Philosopher of the "Lectures," both genuine poets, although their best poetry is in prose. There are, besides, connected with medicine, some departments of thought and study peculiarly exciting to the imagination. Such is anatomy, with its sad yet instructive revelations of the structure of the human frame--so "fearfully and wonderfully made"--wielding in its hand a scalpel which at first seems ruthless and disenchanting as the scythe of death, but which afterwards becomes a key to unlock some of the deepest mysteries, and leads us down whole galleries of wonder. There is botany, culling from every nook and corner of the earth weeds which are flowers, and flowers of all hues, and every plant, from the "cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop which springs out of the wall," and finding a terrible and imaginative pleasure in handling the fell family of poisons, and in deriving the means of protracting life and healing sickness from the very blossoms of death. And there is chemistry, most poetical save astronomy of all the sciences, seeking to spiritualise the material--to hunt the atom to the point where it trembles over the gulf of nonentity--to weigh gases in scales, and the elements in a balance, and, in its more transcendental and daring shape, trying to interchange one kind of metal with another, and all kinds of forms with all, as in a music-led and mystic dance. Hence we find that such men as Beddoes, the author of the "Bride's Tragedy," have turned away from poetry to physiology, and found in it a grander if also ghastlier stimulus to their imaginative faculty. Hence Crabbe delighted to load himself with grasses and duckweed, and Goëthe to fill his carriage with every variety of plant and mountain flower. Hence Davy, and the late lamented Samuel Brown, analysed, in the spirit of poets as well as of philosophers, and gave to the crucible what it had long lost, something of the air of a weird cauldron, bubbling over with magical foam, and shining, not so much in the severe light of science as in the

"Light that never was on sea or shore. The consecration and the poet's dream."

And hence, in the then state of Church matters, and of his own effervescent soul, Akenside felt probably in medicine a deeper charm than in theology, and imagined that it opened up a more congenial field for his powers both of reason and of imagination.

In December 1740, Akenside was elected a member of the Edinburgh Medical Society. This society held meetings for discussion, and in them our poet set himself to shine as a speaker. His ambition, it is said, at this time, was to be a member of Parliament; and Dr. Robertson, then a student in the University, used to attend the meetings of the society chiefly to hear the speeches of the young and fiery Southron. Indeed, the rhetoric of the "Pleasures of Imagination" is finer than its poetry; and none but an orator could have painted Brutus rising "refulgent from the stroke" which slew Caesar, when he

"Call'd on Tully's name, And bade the father of his country hail!"