* * * * *

  There’s no such thing as pleasure here;
    My Jesus is my all: 
  As thou dost shine or disappear,
    My pleasures rise and fall. 
  Come, spread thy savour on my frame—­
    No sweetness is so sweet;
  Till I get up to sing thy name
    Where all thy singers meet.

In the writings of both we recognize a straight-forwardness of expression equal to that of Wither, and a quaint simplicity of thought and form like that of Herrick; while the very charm of some of the best lines is their spontaneity.  The men have just enough mysticism to afford them homeliest figures for deepest feelings.

I turn to the accomplished Joseph Addison.

He was born in 1672.  His religious poems are so well known, and are for the greater part so ordinary in everything but their simplicity of composition, that I should hardly have cared to choose one, had it not been that we owe him much gratitude for what he did, in the reigns of Anne and George I., to purify the moral taste of the English people at a time when the influence of the clergy was not for elevation, and to teach the love of a higher literature when Milton was little known and less esteemed.  Especially are we indebted to him for his modest and admirable criticism of the Paradise Lost in the Spectator.

Of those few poems to which I have referred, I choose the best known, because it is the best.  It has to me a charm for which I can hardly account.

Yet I imagine I see in it a sign of the poetic times:  a flatness of spirit, arising from the evanishment of the mystical element, begins to result in a worship of power.  Neither power nor wisdom, though infinite both, could constitute a God worthy of the worship of a human soul; and the worship of such a God must sink to the level of that fancied divinity.  Small wonder is it then that the lyric should now droop its wings and moult the feathers of its praise.  I do not say that God’s more glorious attributes are already forgotten, but that the tendency of the Christian lyric is now to laudation of power—­and knowledge, a form of the same—­as the essential of Godhead.  This indicates no recalling of metaphysical questions, such as we have met in foregoing verse, but a decline towards system; a rising passion—­if anything so cold may be called a passion—­for the reduction of all things to the forms of the understanding, a declension which has prepared the way for the present worship of science, and its refusal, if not denial, of all that cannot be proved in forms of the intellect.

The hymn which has led to these remarks is still good, although, like the loveliness of the red and lowering west, it gives sign of a gray and cheerless dawn, under whose dreariness the child will first doubt if his father loves him, and next doubt if he has a father at all, and is not a mere foundling that Nature has lifted from her path.