times, judg
  The want of feeling seemed the want of crimes? 
  If solid virtues dwell not but in pain,
  I will not wish that golden age again
  Because it flowed with sensible delights
  Of heavenly things:  God hath created nights
  As well as days, to deck the varied globe;
  Grace comes as oft clad in the dusky robe
  Of desolation, as in white attire,
  Which better fits the bright celestial choir. 
  Some in foul seasons perish through despair,
  But more through boldness when the days are fair. 
  This then must be the medicine for my woes—­
  To yield to what my Saviour shall dispose;
  To glory in my baseness; to rejoice
  In mine afflictions; to obey his voice,
  As well when threatenings my defects reprove,
  As when I cherished am with words of love;
  To say to him, in every time and place,
  “Withdraw thy comforts, so thou leave thy grace.”

Surely this is as genuine an utterance, whatever its merits as a poem—­and those I judge not small—­as ever flowed from Christian heart!

Chiefly for the sake of its beauty, I give the last passage of a poem written upon occasion of the feasts of the Annunciation and the Resurrection falling on the same day.

  Let faithful souls this double feast attend
  In two processions.  Let the first descend
  The temple’s stairs, and with a downcast eye
  Upon the lowest pavement prostrate lie: 
  In creeping violets, white lilies, shine
  Their humble thoughts and every pure design. 
  The other troop shall climb, with sacred heat,
  The rich degrees of Solomon’s bright seat:  steps

  In glowing roses fervent zeal they bear,
  And in the azure flower-de-lis appear
  Celestial contemplations, which aspire
  Above the sky, up to the immortal choir.

William Drummond of Hawthornden, a Scotchman, born in 1585, may almost be looked upon as the harbinger of a fresh outburst of word-music.  No doubt all the great poets have now and then broken forth in lyrical jubilation.  Ponderous Ben Jonson himself, when he takes to song, will sing in the joy of the very sound; but great men have always so much graver work to do, that they comparatively seldom indulge in this kind of melody.  Drummond excels in madrigals, or canzonets—­baby-odes or songs—­which have more of wing and less of thought than sonnets.  Through the greater part of his verse we hear a certain muffled tone of the sweetest, like the music that ever threatens to break out clear from the brook, from the pines, from the rain-shower,—­never does break out clear, but remains a suggested, etherially vanishing tone.  His is a voix voilee, or veiled voice of song.  It is true that in the time we are now approaching far more attention was paid not merely to the smoothness but to the melody of verse than any except the great masters had paid before; but some are at the door, who, not being great