Robert Pollok, the author of “The Course of Time,” was born at North Muirhouse, Eaglesham, Renfrewshire, on the 19th of October, 1798. He entered Glasgow University, and also studied for five years in the Divinity Hall of the United Secession Church at Glasgow with a view to the Presbyterian Ministry. While still a student, he wrote and published anonymously a series of “Tales of the Covenanters,” which became popular and reached a second edition, in issuing which he acknowledged the authorship. He commenced the poem with which his name is indissolubly associated in the month of December 1824, and completed it in July 1826. It was published in March 1827, and became immediately popular. Two months after the issue of his poem, Pollok was licensed for the Ministry. He preached, however, but four times. Symptoms of a pulmonary disease, which rapidly developed, compelled rest during the following summer, and before its close he visited London, en route for Italy, but was too ill to pursue his intentions. Acting on advice he went to Shirley Common, near Southampton, to winter, but died there on the 18th of September, 1827.
The Course of Time, 1827
It is with much pleasure that I am now able to tell you that I have finished my poem. Since I wrote to you last, I have written about three thousand five hundred verses; which is considerably more than a hundred every successive day. This, you will see, was extraordinary expedition to be continued so long; and I neither can nor wish to ascribe it to anything but an extraordinary manifestation of Divine goodness. Although some nights I was on the border of fever, I rose every morning equally fresh, without one twitch of headache; and, with all the impatience of a lover, hastened to my study. Towards the end of the tenth book,—for the whole consists of ten books,—where the subject was overwhelmingly great, and where, I indeed, seemed to write from immediate inspiration, I felt the body beginning to give away…. I am convinced that summer is the best season for great mental exertion; because the heat promotes the circulation of the blood, the stagnation of which is the great cause of misery to cogitative men. The serenity of mind which I have possessed is astonishing. Exalted on my native mountains, and writing often on the top of the very highest of them, I proceeded, from day to day, as if I had been in a world in which there was neither sin nor sickness nor poverty.
The “Course of Time,” for so young a man, was a vast achievement. The book he loved best was the Bible, and his style is often scriptural. Of our poets he had studied, we believe, but Young, Milton, and Byron. He had much to learn in composition; and, had he lived, he would have looked almost with humiliation on much that is at present eulogized by his devoted admirers. But the soul of poetry is there, though often dimly enveloped, and many passages there are, and long ones too, that heave, and hurry, and glow along in a divine enthusiasm.
We doubt whether his merely poetic powers are such as to make his work interesting to any poetic mind, however religious, while to render its truths palatable to the world at large would require in its poetry the magnificence and beauty of Milton himself. It is a pity that any, in their zeal for religion, should have compared our author with him the sublimity of whose mind has not been surpassed since the times of the prophets. So far from it, as a poet Mr. Pollok is neither a Cowper nor a Young. Still, his diction, for the most part, is plain;—he has not learned the art of writing without thought, or of losing himself in a smother of words; and when you lay down his poem, you have a definite notion of what you have been reading, whatever rank you may give it,—which is more than can be said of many a favourite of these days.
The subject is a noble one, and in the poem there are graphic conceptions and passages of beauty and tenderness; but it is disfigured by amplifications and a redundancy of moral pictures; it has no continuous interest, and in parts of it which should have been and which the author endeavoured to make the most impressive, particularly those in which he subjects himself to a comparison with Dante and Milton, he utterly failed…. For its popularity, however, both here and in Great Britain, it is more indebted to its theology than to its merits as a poem.
The “Course of Time” is a very extraordinary poem—vast in its conception—vast in its plan—vast in its materials—and vast, if very far from perfect, in its achievement. The wonderful thing is, indeed, that it is such as we find it, and not that its imperfections are numerous. It has nothing at all savouring of the little or conventional about it; for he passed at once from the merely elegant and graceful.
Much over-lauded on its appearance, is the immature work of a man of genius who possessed very imperfect cultivation. It is clumsy in plan, tediously dissertative, and tastelessly magniloquent: but it has passages of good and genuine poetry.
Was exactly adapted to the level of culture in the religious classes of Scotland.
In style the work is a composite imitation of Milton, Blair, and Young. The object of the poet is to describe the spiritual life and destiny of man. The religious speculations of the author are varied with episodical pictures and narratives, illustrating the effects of virtue and vice. Many splendid passages and images are scattered through the work; but the poet is often harsh, turgid, vehement, and repulsive. His morbid fancy delights most in describing the woe and wailing of that future world of despair which his cheerful theology has graciously appropriated to the “non-elect.” In design and in diction the work indicates remarkable power, which tastes, refinement, and a better creed might have more happily developed. The work attained to great popularity, and Pollok was at the time even honored with the name of “the Scotch Dante.”… Still holds its own among very devout but not over-fastidious readers.
Concerned with the destiny of man, the poem is conceived on a stupendous scale, which baffled the writer’s artistic resources. Never absolutely feeble, it tends to prolixity and discursiveness, but is relieved by passages of sustained brilliancy.
One of the most popular of books, passing through edition after edition until it reached that desirable phase of becoming a prize book for the diligent scholars of Sunday and other schools—than which nothing could be more advantageous, from a material point of view.
