But a new life, or quite to expire. 
  Could I demolish with mine eye
  Strong towers, stop the fleet stars in sky,
  Bring down to earth the pale-faced moon,
  Or turn black midnight to bright noon;
  Though all things were put in my hand—­
  As parched, as dry as the Libyan sand
  Would be my life, if charity
  Were wanting.  But humility
  Is more than my poor soul durst crave
  That lies entombed in lowly grave;
  But if ’twere lawful up to send
  My voice to heaven, this should it rend: 
  “Lord, thrust me deeper into dust,
  That thou may’st raise me with the just.”

There are strange things and worth pondering in all these.  An occasional classical allusion seems to us quite out of place, but such things we must pass.  The poems are quite different from any we have had before.  There has been only a few of such writers in our nation, but I suspect those have had a good deal more influence upon the religious life of it than many thinkers suppose.  They are in closest sympathy with the deeper forms of truth employed by St. Paul and St. John.  This last poem, concerning humility as the house in which charity dwells, is very truth.  A repentant sinner feels that he is making himself little when he prays to be made humble:  the Christian philosopher sees such a glory and spiritual wealth in humility that it appears to him almost too much to pray for.

The very essence of these mystical writers seems to me to be poetry.  They use the largest figures for the largest spiritual ideas—­light for good, darkness for evil.  Such symbols are the true bodies of the true ideas.  For this service mainly what we term nature was called into being, namely, to furnish forms for truths, for without form truth cannot be uttered.  Having found their symbols, these writers next proceed to use them logically; and here begins the peculiar danger.  When the logic leaves the poetry behind, it grows first presumptuous, then hard, then narrow and untrue to the original breadth of the symbol; the glory of the symbol vanishes; and the final result is a worship of the symbol, which has withered into an apple of Sodom.  Witness some of the writings of the European master of the order—­Swedenborg:  the highest of them are rich in truth; the lowest are poverty-stricken indeed.

In 1615 was born Richard Baxter, one of the purest and wisest and devoutest of men—­and no mean poet either.  If ever a man sought between contending parties to do his duty, siding with each as each appeared right, opposing each as each appeared wrong, surely that man was Baxter.  Hence he fared as all men too wise to be partisans must fare—­he pleased neither Royalists nor Puritans.  Dull of heart and sadly unlike a mother was the Church when, by the Act of Uniformity of Charles II., she drove from her bosom such a son, with his two thousand brethren of the clergy!