Robert Montgomery (poet)

Robert Montgomery (1807–1855) was an English poet. In 1828 he published The Omni-presence of the Deity, which hit popular religious sentiment so exactly that it ran through eight editions in as many months. In 1830 he followed it with The Puffiad (a satire), and Satan, or Intellect without God. His name was immortalized by Macaulay's famous onslaught in the Edinburgh Review for April 1830.

Quotes

• And thou, vast ocean! on whose awful face
  Time’s iron feet can print no ruin-trace.
  • The Omnipresence of the Deity, Part i, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919). Compare: "Man marks the earth with ruin,—his control / Stops with the shore", Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto iv, stanza 179.

• The soul aspiring pants its source to mount,
  As streams meander level with their fount.
  • The Omnipresence of the Deity, Part i, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919). Compare: "We take this to be, on the whole, the worst similitude in the world. In the first place, no stream meanders or can possibly meander level with the fount. In the next place, if streams did meander level with their founts, no two motions can be less like each other than that of meandering level and that of mounting upwards", Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay, Review of Montgomery's Poems (Eleventh Edition), Edinburgh Review, (April, 1830). These lines were omitted in the subsequent edition of the poem.

• The solitary monk who shook the world
  From pagan slumber, when the gospel trump
  Thundered its challenge from his dauntless lips
  In peals of truth.
  • Luther, "Man's Need and God's Supply", reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

• Ye quenchless stars! so eloquently bright,
  Untroubled sentries of the shadowy night.
  • The starry Heavens, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).