thee
   Though thou a yawling bawling Cuckoo be. 
   When thou dost cease among us to appear,
   Then doth our harvest bravely crown our year. 
   But thou hast fellows, some like thee can do
   Little but suck our eggs, and sing Cuckoo.

   Since Cuckoos forward not our early spring
   Nor help with notes to bring our harvest in,
   And since while here, she only makes a noise
   So pleasing unto none as girls and boys,
   The Formalist we may compare her to,
   For he doth suck our eggs and sing Cuckoo.”

A perusal of this little volume with its roughness and quaintness, sometimes grating on the ear but full of strong thought and picturesque images, cannot fail to raise Bunyan’s pretensions as a poet.  His muse, it is true, as Alexander Smith has said, is a homely one.  She is “clad in russet, wears shoes and stockings, has a country accent, and walks along the level Bedfordshire roads.”  But if the lines are unpolished, “they have pith and sinew, like the talk of a shrewd peasant,” with the “strong thought and the knack of the skilled workman who can drive by a single blow the nail home to the head.”

During his imprisonment Bunyan’s pen was much more fertile in prose than in poetry.  Besides his world-famous “Grace Abounding,” he produced during the first six years of his gaol life a treatise on prayer, entitled “Praying in the Spirit;” a book on “Christian Behaviour,” setting forth with uncompromising plainness the relative duties of husbands and wives, parents and children, masters and servants, by which those who profess a true faith are bound to show forth its reality and power; the “Holy City,” an exposition of the vision in the closing chapters of the Book of Revelation, brilliant with picturesque description and rich in suggestive thought, which, he tells us, had its origin in a sermon preached by him to his brethren in bonds in their prison chamber; and a work on the “Resurrection of the Dead and Eternal Judgment.”  On these works we may not linger.  There is not one of them which is not marked by vigour of thought, clearness of language, accuracy of arrangement, and deep spiritual experience.  Nor is there one which does not here and there exhibit specimens of Bunyan’s picturesque imaginative power, and his command of forcible and racy language.  Each will reward perusal.  His work on “Prayer” is couched in the most exalted strain, and is evidently the production of one who by long and agonizing experience had learnt the true nature of prayer, as a pouring out of the soul to God, and a wrestling with Him until the blessing, delayed not denied, is granted.  It is, however, unhappily deformed by much ignorant reviling of the Book of Common Prayer.  He denounces it as “taken out of the papistical mass-book, the scraps and fragments of some popes, some friars, and I know not what;” and ridicules the order of service it propounds to the worshippers.  “They have the matter and the manner of their