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SIR FULK GREVILL.

89

Had all the poem been like these stanzas, I should not have spoken so strongly concerning its faults. There are a few more such in it. It closes with a very fantastic use of musical terms, following upon a curious category of the works of nature as praising God, to which I refer for the sake of one stanza, or rather of one line in the stanza :

To see the greyhound course, the hound in chase,
Whilst little dormouse sleepeth out her eyne;
The lambs and rabbits sweetly run at base,1
Whilst highest trees the little squirrels climb,

The crawling worms out creeping in the showers,
And how the snails do climb the lofty towers.

What a love of animated nature there is in the lovely lady! I am all but confident, however, that second line came to her from watching her children asleep. She had one child at least: that William Herbert, who is generally, and with weight, believed the W. H. of Shakspere's Sonnets, a grander honour than the earldom of Pembroke, or even the having Philip Sidney to his uncle: I will not say grander than having Mary Sidney to his mother.

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Let me now turn to Sidney's friend, Sir Fulk Grevill, Lord Brooke, who afterwards wrote his life, as an intended preface" to all his "Monuments to the memory of Sir Philip Sidney," the said monuments being Lord Brooke's own poems.

My extract is from A Treatise of Religion, in which,

1 An old English game, still in use in Scotland and America, but vanishing before cricket.

if the reader do not find much of poetic form, he will find at least some grand spiritual philosophy, the stuff whereof all highest poetry is fashioned. It is one of the first poems in which the philosophy of religion, and not either its doctrine, feeling, or history, predominates. It is, as a whole, poor, chiefly from its being so loosely written. There are men, and men whose thoughts are of great worth, to whom it never seems to occur that they may utter very largely and convey very little; that what is clear to themselves is in their speech obscure as a late twilight. Their utterance is rarely articulate their spiritual mouth talks with but half-movements of its lips; it does not model their thoughts into clear-cut shapes, such as the spiritual ear can distinguish as they enter it. Of such is Lord Brooke. These few stanzas, however, my readers will be glad to have:

What is the chain which draws us back again,
And lifts man up unto his first creation?
Nothing in him his own heart can restrain;
His reason lives a captive to temptation;
Example is corrupt; precepts are mixed;
All fleshly knowledge frail, and never fixed.

It is a light, a gift, a grace inspired;
A spark of power, a goodness of the Good;
Desire in him, that never is desired;
An unity, where desolation stood;

In us, not of us, a Spirit not of earth,
Fashioning the mortal to immortal birth.

Sense of this God, by fear, the sensual have,
Distressed Nature crying unto Grace;

A TREATISE OF RELIGION.

For sovereign reason then becomes a slave,
And yields to servile sense her sovereign place,
When more or other she affects to be
Than seat or shrine of this Eternity.

Yea, Prince of Earth let Man assume to be,
Nay more-of Man let Man himself be God,
Yet without God, a slave of slaves is he;
To others, wonder; to himself, a rod;

Restless despair, desire, and desolation;
The more secure, the more abomination.

Then by affecting power, we cannot know him.
By knowing all things else, we know him less.
Nature contains him not. Art cannot show him.
Opinions idols, and not God, express.

Without, in power, we see him everywhere;
Within, we rest not, till we find him there.

Then seek we must; that course is natural-
For owned souls to find their owner out.
Our free remorses when our natures fall-

When we do well, our hearts made free from doubt-
Prove service due to one Omnipotence,

And Nature of religion to have sense.

Questions again, which in our hearts arise-
Since loving knowledge, not humility-
Though they be curious, godless, and unwise,
Yet prove our nature feels a Deity;

For if these strifes rose out of other grounds,
Man were to God as deafness is to sounds.

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If we could bend the force of power and wit
To work upon the heart, and make divorce
There from the evil which preventeth it,

In judgment of the truth we should not doubt
Good life would find a good religion out.

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If a fair proportion of it were equal to this, the poem would be a fine one, not for its poetry, but for its spiritual metaphysics. I think the fourth and fifth of the stanzas I have given, profound in truth, and excellent in utterance. They are worth pondering.

We now descend a decade of the century, to find another group of names within the immediate threshold of the sixties.

CHAPTER VI.

LORD BACON AND HIS COEVALS.

EXCEPT it be Milton's, there is not any prose fuller of grand poetic embodiments than Lord Bacon's. Yet he always writes contemptuously of poetry, having in his eye no doubt the commonplace kinds of it, which will always occupy more bulk, and hence be more obtrusive, than that which is true in its nature and rare in its workmanship. Towards the latter end of his life, however, being in ill health at the time, he translated seven of the Psalms of David into verse, dedicating them to George Herbert. The best of them is Psalm civ.-just the one upon which we might suppose, from his love to the laws of Nature, he would dwell with the greatest sympathy. Partly from the wish to hear his voice amongst the rest of our singers, partly for the merits of the version itself, which has some remarkable lines, I have resolved to include it here. It is the first specimen I have given in the heroic couplet.

Father and King of Powers both high and low,
Whose sounding fame all creatures serve to blow;
My soul shall with the rest strike up thy praise,
And carol of thy works, and wondrous ways.

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