Robert Montgomery (poet) Quotes

Robert Montgomery was an English poet and minister, the natural son of Robert Gomery , an actor and clown, and Elizabeth Medows Boyce, a schoolteacher.

Born in Bath, Somerset, it is unknown why Robert Jnr. was baptised with the surname Montgomery. He was educated at a private school in the city. Later, he founded an unsuccessful weekly paper in that city. 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 , and Satan, or Intellect without God. An exhaustive review in Blackwood's by John Wilson, followed in the thirty-first number by a burlesque of Satan, and two articles in the first volume of Fraser, ridiculed Montgomery's pretensions and the excesses of his admirers.

His name was immortalized by Macaulay's famous onslaught in the Edinburgh Review for April 1830, "an annihilating so Jove-like that the victim automatically commands the spectator's rueful sympathy." This review did not, however, diminish the sale of his poems; The Omnipresence of the Deity reached its 28th edition in 1858.

In 1830, Montgomery entered Lincoln College, Oxford, graduating B.A. in 1833 and M.A. in 1838. Taking holy orders in 1835 he obtained a curacy at Whittington, Shropshire, which he exchanged in 1836 for the charge of the church of St. Jude, Glasgow. In 1843, he removed to the parish of St. Pancras, London, when he was minister of Percy Chapel. Wikipedia

✵ 1807 – 1855

Robert Montgomery (poet): 4 quotes 0 likes

Famous Robert Montgomery (poet) Quotes

“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.”

Robert Montgomery (poet)

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.”

Robert Montgomery (poet)

The starry Heavens, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

“And thou, vast ocean! on whose awful face
Time’s iron feet can print no ruin-trace.”

Robert Montgomery (poet)

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.”

Robert Montgomery (poet)

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.