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proach, at least, great abysses of discovery), may be found in Herbert's verses. "Man," Herbert says, "is everything and more." He is "a beast, yet is or should be more." He is "all symmetry-full of proportions, one limb to another, and all to all the world besides."

"Head with foot hath private amity,

And both with moons and tides."

"His eyes dismount the highest star :
He is in little all the sphere.

Herbs gladly cure our flesh, because that they
Find their acquaintance there.”

"Each thing is full of duty."

"More servants wait on Man,

Than he'll take notice of: in every path

He treads down that which doth befriend him,
When sickness makes him pale and wan.
Oh, mighty love! Man is one world, and hath
Another to attend him.”

How strikingly do these words bring before us the thought of Man the Mystery! "What a piece of workmanship" verily he is! He is formed as of a thousand lights and shadows. He is compacted out of all contradictions. While his feet touch the dust, and are of miry clay, his head is of gold, and strikes the Empyrean. He is mysteriously linked on the one side to the beasts that perish, and has an affinity as mysterious, on the other, to the angels of God. Nay, inanimate nature itself claims "acquaintance" with this "quintessence of dust." The periods of his life bear a striking analogy to the seasons; his brain at times moves to the moon; his heart, as well as cheek, is coloured by the sun; his advancement as a species bears a distinct relation to the changes of the earth's surface and to its place in the heavens; he is the representative of the universe, has imbibed at once its glories and its glooms, has snatched from the star its fire and its mystery, and vibrates like the string of a harp to every breath of the great system with which he is indissolubly connected. Made in the image of God, and having notions of and aspirations

after absolute perfection, he is, and in some measure knows himself to be, a vile sinner. Lord of earth, sea, air, and alk their riches, he is a fretful, discontented, hating, hateful, and, on the whole, so far as his present life goes, miserable wretch. He is in one view a whole, and in another a yawning fragment; and, according to the angle at which you see him, resembles now a full moon, now a crescent, and now a waning orb. Able to "weigh the sun," span the fields of space, acquainted with the times and seasons of the heavenly bodies, full of "thoughts that wander through eternity," he is yet doomed to sicken, to die, and to have his low grave kissed, in scorn or pity, by the orbs whose spots he has numbered and whose eclipses he has foretold.. Humboldt speaks of the Andes as including the world in their vast sweep, all climates, and seasons, and productions of earth being found between their base and their summit, betweenthe ocean below and the hoary head of Chimborazo above; thus man rises from his dim embryo up to his grey head in age, touching, as he ascends, all conditions of being, and rising in parallel to all gradations of the universe, and remaining in each and all a mystery, having, indeed, all mysteries compounded and compressed in his one mysterious self. "When I consider the heavens," says David, "what is man?" But may we not with all reverence invert David's statement, although not his spirit, and say, "When we consider man, what (in grandeur, incomprehensibility, and terror) are the heavens ?"

"For us the winds do blow;

The earth doth rest, heaven move, and fountains flow.”

Many of Herbert's modern admirers, while quoting the rest of these verses on "Man," omit its last stanza, although it seems to contain the moral of the wondrous Fable he had told, the solution of the Great Riddle he had propounded. Man is in a great measure a mystery, because he has forsaken his God; he is a wondrous Palace untenanted by the only Being whose presence can fill the crevices, supply the deficiencies, occupy the vast rooms, glorify the gloomy places, explain the mysteriousness, and fulfil the destiny of the fabric; and when

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xxvi ON THE POETICAL WORKS OF G. HERBERT.

ever He shall return to it, Man's contradictions shall be reconciled, his controversies ended, all that is now ambiguous about him shall be explained, and while his microcosmal character shall continue, it shall assume a diviner meaning, and become as pure as it is universal.

"Since then, my God, thou hast

So brave a Palace built; O dwell in it,
That it may dwell with thee at last!

Till then, afford us so much wit

That as the world serves us, we may serve thee,
And both thy Servants be."

We need not dwell on his minor productions. His Latin poems we have decided to omit, as not calculated to interest the general reader, preferring, rather, to give his collection of "Proverbs," on account of their exceeding richness and point. The Latin poems of Milton, on the other hand, stand in the very first category, and far excel those of Herbert. We have, with former editors, annexed "The Synagogue," a poem written in imitation of "The Temple," by Christopher Harvey, which, in piety, if not altogether in poetic genius, forms a proper pendant to Herbert's works, and ranks to it as the "History of Tender Conscience" does to the "Pilgrim's Progress. Herbert has, besides, written a prose work, entitled, The Priest to the Temple; or, The Country Parson, full of childlike piety and pithy advice, bordering sometimes, indeed, on the superstitious, and sometimes on the austere. Altogether, there are few places on earth nearer Heaven, filled with a richer and holier light, adorned with chaster and nobler ornaments, or where our souls can worship with a more entire forgetfulness of self, and a more thorough realisation of the things unseen and eternal, than in "The Temple" of George Herbert. You say, as you stand breathless below its solemn arches, "This is none other than the house of God, it is the gate of Heaven. How dreadful, yet how dear is this place!"

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A Paradox

THE CHURCH MILITANT

L'Envoy

MISCELLANEOUS:

New Year's Gift to his Mother

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To his Successor at Bemerton

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On Lord Danvers

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THE SYNAGOGUE, by the REV. C. HARVEY, M.A. :-

A Stepping-stone to the Thres

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hold of Mr George Herbert's

The Circumcision, or New

"Church-porch"

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Church Festivals

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JACULA PRUDENTUM; or, OUTLANDISH PROVERBS, SENTENCES, &c.

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