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affinity of the two arts, it is not difficult to transfer the sentiment to poetry. We can hardly expect that the youthful mind will be attracted by such a style as Herbert's. A school has grown up which has especial charms for youth: a class of writings characterized by great sensibility, a profusion of imagery, and an unsurpassable melody of diction, developing each requisite for Poetry, luxuriance of ideas, and exquisitely harmonious versification. But to the cool, reflective critic, who looked beyond this, there appeared, in this style, a chilling indifference to all the high, intellectual purposes of Poetry, to common morality, not to speak of religion. This objection was certainly justified by the fact, that while men's senses were absorbed in such delights, our greatest Poets, the mighty master-pieces of genius, were suffered to pass into obscurity. Shakspeare and Milton were thrown aside for Byron and Moore. Lately, however, a reaction has taken place; and we must wonder at the depraved taste of the time when men* "sate with dazzled eyes at a high festival of poetry, where, as at the funeral of Arvalan, the torchlight put out the starlight."

The mind and muse of the divine Herbert were of

the most pure and unaffected nature. "I need not," says he, in a letter to his mother when a freshman at Cambridge, "the scholar's help, to reprove the vanity of those many love-poems that are daily writ and consecrated to Venus; nor to bewail that so few are writ that look toward God and heaven. For my own part, my meaning is in these sonnets, to declare my resoluPreface to Taylor's "Philip Van Artevelde," a Dramatic Romance, p. xi.

tion to be, that my poor abilities in poetry shall be for ever consecrated to God's glory." Is he to be thought lightly of by modern critics, because he preferred to hymn the praises of his Maker, while he ministered at the altars of His Church? Yet-though Herbert, from inclination as well as from the nature of his profession, chose this line of poetry, it is not necessary to question his secular learning. We know that he was an excellent scholar in a variety of languages, and we have seen poems of his, Greek and Latin, of all metres, that would by no means disgrace a modern student. Rather let it be considered in his favour, that, being a great scholar, he chose the humble, secluded life of a Parish Priest, from which retirement he might "behold the court with an impartial eye, and see plainly that it is made up of fraud, titles, flattery, and many other empty, imaginary, painted pleasures-so empty, as not to satisfy when enjoyed; but in God and His service is a fulness of all joy and pleasure, and no satiety." And if he did ever gladden his friends with the production of his luxuriant muse, the outpourings of an overflowing piety, his talents were always exercised in the right direction, and that which best befitted his sacred office, always used in honour of his Maker, and in vindication of the Church and the Monarchy.

The following stanzas are free from the mysterious quaintness which offends some tastes; on them and two or three other Poems we intend to rest Herbert's claim to the title of a Poet :

* Willmott's Sacred Poets, p. 234.

EASTER.

I got me flowers to strew thy way;
I got me boughs off many a tree;

But Thou wast up by break of day,

And brought'st Thy sweets along with Thee!

The sun arising in the East,

Though he give light, and th' East perfume;

If they should offer to contest

With Thy arising, they presume.

Can there be any day but this,

Though many suns to shine endeavour ?
We count three hundred, but we miss ;
There is but one, and that One ever.

EMPLOYMENT.

If, as a flower doth spread, and die,
Thou wouldst extend to me some good,

Before I were by frost's extremity

Nipt in the bud;

The sweetness and the praise were Thine,

But the extension and the room

Which in Thy garland I should fill, were mine,

At Thy great doom.

For as Thou dost impart Thy grace

The greater shall our glory be:

The measure of our joys is in this place,

The stuff with Thee.

Let me not languish then and spend

A life as barren to Thy praise,

As is the dust to which that life doth tend,

But with delays.

All things are busy; only I

Neither bring honey with the bees,

Nor flowers to make that, nor the husbandry

To water these.

I am no link of Thy great chain;

But all my company is as a weed;

Lord, place me in Thy concert, give one strain

To my poor reed.

VIRTUE.

Sweet Day! so cool, so calm, so bright,

The Bridal of the earth and sky,

The dew must weep thy fall to-night,
And thou must die:

Sweet Rose! whose hue, angry and brave,
Bid the rash gazer wipe his eye,

Thy root is ever in its grave,

And thou must die.

Sweet Spring! full of sweet days and roses,

A box where sweets compacted lie;

My music shews ye have your closes,

And all must die.

Only a sweet and virtuous soul,

Like seasoned timber, never gives ;

Though all the whole world turn to coal,

Then chiefly lives.

What the affected taste is in these last verses, which Mr. Willmott complains of, we confess ourselves at a loss to conceive.

Two more stanzas-and we have done. The first is from a poem called "Home."

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O loose this frame! This knot of man untie !
That my free soul may use her wing,

Which now is pinioned with mortality,
As an entangled, hampered thing.
O shew thyself to me,

Or take me up to Thee!—

How beautiful are these "longings after immortality," like those of the sweet Lyrist of Israel: "Oh that I had wings like a dove, then would I flee away and be at rest." The subject of the next is "Church rents and schisms." We tremble at the bare possibility of the recurrence of such scenes as Herbert witnessed, the murder of the Primate and his Sovereign, of Blessed Memory; the Church destroyed and trampled on; and Her ministers ejected from the service of the altar.

Brave Rose! alas! where art thou? In the chair
Where thou didst lately so triumph and shine
A worm doth sit, whose many feet and hair
Are the more foul, the more thou wert divine.
This, this hath done it. This did bite the root
And bottom of the leaves: which when the wind
Did once perceive, it blew them under foot,
Where rude unhallowed steps do crush and grind

Their beauteous glories: only shreds of thee,
And those all bitten, in thy chair I see.

Those who object to sacred poetry, seem to be ignorant that no species of poetry is so difficult of execution, and consequently, that more praise is due to him who stands out,-as Herbert does in our opinionfirst, or nearly so, of his class. Milton, who may be allowed to know more than any man the requisites for this style, calls a sacred poem, "a work not to be raised from the heat of youth, nor to be obtained by the invocation to Memory and her Siren daughters, but by devout prayer to that eternal Spirit, who can enrich with all utterance and knowledge, and sends out His seraphim with the hallowed fire from His altar, to touch and purify the lips of whom he pleases."

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