people producing it.  I have not a word to say against Sir Roundell Palmer’s choice and arrangement of materials for his Book of Praise; I am content to put them on a level (and that is giving them the highest possible rank) with Mr. Palgrave’s choice and arrangement of materials for his Golden Treasury; but yet no sound critic can doubt that, so far as poetry is concerned, while the Golden Treasury is a monument of a nation’s strength, the Book of Praise is a monument of a nation’s weakness.  Only the German race, with its want of quick instinctive tact, of delicate, sure perception, could have invented the hymn as the Germans and we have it; and our non-German turn for style,—­style, of which the very essence is a certain happy fineness and truth of poetical perception,—­could not but desert us when our German nature carried us into a kind of composition which can please only when the perception is somewhat blunt.  Scarcely any one of us ever judges our hymns fairly, because works of this kind have two sides,—­their side for religion and their side for poetry.  Everything which has helped a man in his religious life, everything which associates itself in his mind with the growth of that life, is beautiful and venerable to him; in this way, productions of little or no poetical value, like the German hymns and ours, may come to be regarded as very precious.  Their worth in this sense, as means by which we have been edified, I do not for a moment hold cheap; but there is an edification proper to all our stages of development, the highest as well as the lowest, and it is for man to press on towards the highest stages of his development, with the certainty that for those stages, too, means of edification will not be found wanting.  Now certainly it is a higher state of development when our fineness of perception is keen than when it is blunt.  And if,—­whereas the Semitic genius placed its highest spiritual life in the religious sentiment, and made that the basis of its poetry,—­the Indo-European genius places its highest spiritual life in the imaginative reason, and makes that the basis of its poetry, we are none the better for wanting the perception to discern a natural law, which is, after all, like every natural law, irresistible; we are none the better for trying to make ourselves Semitic, when Nature has made us Indo-European, and to shift the basis of our poetry.  We may mean well; all manner of good may happen to us on the road we go; but we are not on our real right road, the road we must in the end follow.

That is why, when our hymns betray a false tendency by losing a power which accompanies the poetical work of our race on our other more suitable lines, the indication thus given is of great value and instructiveness for us.  One of our main gifts for poetry deserts us in our hymns, and so gives us a hint as to the one true basis for the spiritual work of an Indo-European people, which the Germans, who have not this particular