England's Antiphon Part 19

If G.o.d build not the house, and lay The groundwork sure--whoever build, It cannot stand one stormy day.

If G.o.d be not the city's s.h.i.+eld, If he be not their bars and wall, In vain is watch-tower, men, and all.

Though then thou wak'st when others rest, Though rising thou prevent'st the sun, Though with lean care thou daily feast, Thy labour's lost, and thou undone; But G.o.d his child will feed and keep, And draw the curtains to his sleep.

Compare this with a version of the same portion by Dr. Henry King, Bishop of Chichester, who, no great poet, has written some good verse. He was about the same age as Phineas Fletcher.

Except the Lord the house sustain, The builder's labour is in vain; Except the city he defend, And to the dwellers safety send, In vain are sentinels prepared, Or armed watchmen for the guard.

You vainly with the early light Arise, or sit up late at night To find support, and daily eat Your bread with sorrow earned and sweat; When G.o.d, who his beloved keeps, This plenty gives with quiet sleeps.

What difference do we find? That the former has the more poetic touch, the latter the greater truth. The former has just lost the one precious thing in the psalm; the latter has kept it: that care is as useless as painful, for G.o.d gives us while we sleep, and not while we labour.

CHAPTER XII.

WITHER, HERRICK, AND QUARLES.

George Wither, born in 1588, therefore about the same age as Giles Fletcher, was a very different sort of writer indeed. There could hardly be a greater contrast. Fancy, and all her motley train, were scarcely known to Wither, save by the hearing of the ears.

He became an eager Puritan towards the close of his life, but his poetry chiefly belongs to the earlier part of it. Throughout it is distinguished by a certain straightforward simplicity of good English thought and English word. His hymns remind me, in the form of their speech, of Gascoigne. I shall quote but little; for, although there is a sweet calm and a great justice of reflection and feeling, there is hardly anything of that warming glow, that rousing force, that impressive weight in his verse, which is the chief virtue of the lofty rhyme.

The best in a volume of ninety _Hymns and Songs of the Church_, is, I think, _The Author's Hymn_ at the close, of which I give three stanzas.

They manifest the simplicity and truth of the man, reflecting in their very tone his faithful, contented, trustful nature.

By thy grace, those pa.s.sions, troubles, And those wants that me opprest, Have appeared as water-bubbles, Or as dreams, and things in jest: For, thy leisure still attending, I with pleasure saw their ending.

Those afflictions and those terrors, Which to others grim appear, Did but show me where my errors And my imperfections were; But distrustful could not make me Of thy love, nor fright nor shake me.

Those base hopes that would possess me, And those thoughts of vain repute Which do now and then oppress me, Do not, Lord, to me impute; And though part they will not from me, Let them never overcome me.

He has written another similar volume, but much larger, and of a somewhat extraordinary character. It consists of no fewer than two hundred and thirty-three hymns, mostly long, upon an incredible variety of subjects, comprehending one for every season of nature and of the church, and one for every occurrence in life of which the author could think as likely to confront man or woman. Of these subjects I quote a few of the more remarkable, but even from them my reader can have little conception of the variety in the book: _A Hymn whilst we are was.h.i.+ng_; _In a clear starry Night_; _A Hymn for a House-warming_; _After a great Frost or Snow_; _For one whose Beauty is much praised_; _For one upbraided with Deformity_; _For a Widower or a Widow delivered from a troublesome Yokefellow_; _For a Cripple_; _For a Jailor_; _For a Poet_.

Here is a portion of one which I hope may be helpful to some of my readers.

WHEN WE CANNOT SLEEP.

What ails my heart, that in my breast It thus unquiet lies; And that it now of needful rest Deprives my tired eyes?

Let not vain hopes, griefs, doubts, or fears, Distemper so my mind; But cast on G.o.d thy thoughtful cares, And comfort thou shalt find.

In vain that soul attempteth ought, And spends her thoughts in vain, Who by or in herself hath sought Desired peace to gain.

On thee, O Lord, on thee therefore, My musings now I place; Thy free remission I implore, And thy refres.h.i.+ng grace.

Forgive thou me, that when my mind Oppressed began to be, I sought elsewhere my peace to find, Before I came to thee.

And, gracious G.o.d, vouchsafe to grant, Unworthy though I am, The needful rest which now I want, That I may praise thy name.

Before examining the volume, one would say that no man could write so many hymns without frequent and signal failure. But the marvel here is, that the hymns are all so very far from bad. He can never have written in other than a gentle mood. There must have been a fine harmony in his nature, that _kept_ him, as it were. This peacefulness makes him interesting in spite of his comparative flatness. I must restrain remark, however, and give five out of twelve stanzas of another of his hymns.

A ROCKING HYMN.

Sweet baby, sleep; what ails my dear?

What ails my darling thus to cry?

Be still, my child, and lend thine ear To hear me sing thy lullaby.

My pretty lamb, forbear to weep; Be still, my dear; sweet baby, sleep.

Whilst thus thy lullaby I sing, For thee great blessings ripening be; Thine eldest brother is a king, And hath a kingdom bought for thee.

Sweet baby, then forbear to weep; Be still, my babe; sweet baby, sleep.

A little infant once was he, And strength in weakness then was laid Upon his virgin mother's knee, That power to thee might be conveyed.

Sweet baby, then forbear to weep; Be still, my babe; sweet baby, sleep.

Within a manger lodged thy Lord, Where oxen lay, and a.s.ses fed; Warm rooms we do to thee afford, An easy cradle or a bed.

Sweet baby, then forbear to weep; Be still, my babe; sweet baby, sleep.

Thou hast, yet more to perfect this, A promise and an earnest got, Of gaining everlasting bliss, Though thou, my babe, perceiv'st it not.

Sweet baby, then forbear to weep; Be still, my babe; sweet baby, sleep.

I think George Wither's verses will grow upon the reader of them, tame as they are sure to appear at first. His _Hallelujah, or Britain's Second Remembrancer_, from which I have been quoting, is well worth possessing, and can be procured without difficulty.

We now come to a new sort, both of man and poet--still a clergyman. It is an especial pleasure to write the name of Robert Herrick amongst the poets of religion, for the very act records that the jolly, careless Anacreon of the church, with his head and heart crowded with pleasures, threw down at length his wine-cup, tore the roses from his head, and knelt in the dust.

Nothing bears Herrick's name so unrefined as the things Dr. Donne wrote in his youth; but the impression made by his earlier poems is of a man of far shallower nature, and greatly more absorbed in the delights of the pa.s.sing hour. In the year 1648, when he was fifty-seven years of age, being prominent as a Royalist, he was ejected from his living by the dominant Puritans; and in that same year he published his poems, of which the latter part and later written is his _n.o.ble Numbers_, or religious poems. We may wonder at his publis.h.i.+ng the _Hesperides_ along with them, but we must not forget that, while the manners of a time are never to be taken as a justification of what is wrong, the judgment of men concerning what is wrong will be greatly influenced by those manners--not necessarily on the side of laxity. It is but fair to receive his own testimony concerning himself, offered in these two lines printed at the close of his _Hesperides_:

To his book's end this last line he'd have placed: _Jocund his muse was, but his life was chaste_.

We find the same artist in the _n.o.ble Numbers_ as in the _Hesperides_, but hardly the same man. However far he may have been from the model of a clergyman in the earlier period of his history, partly no doubt from the society to which his power of song made him acceptable, I cannot believe that these later poems are the results of mood, still less the results of mere professional bias, or even sense of professional duty.

In a good many of his poems he touches the heart of truth; in others, even those of epigrammatic form, he must be allowed to fail in point as well as in meaning. As to his art-forms, he is guilty of great offences, the result of the same pa.s.sion for lawless figures and similitudes which Dr. Donne so freely indulged. But his verses are brightened by a certain almost childishly quaint and innocent humour; while the tenderness of some of them rises on the reader like the aurora of the coming sun of George Herbert. I do not forget that, even if some of his poems were printed in 1639, years before that George Herbert had done his work and gone home: my figure stands in relation to the order I have adopted.

Some of his verse is homelier than even George Herbert's homeliest. One of its most remarkable traits is a quaint thanksgiving for the commonest things by name--not the less real that it is sometimes even queer. For instance:

G.o.d gives not only corn for need, But likewise superabundant seed; Bread for our service, bread for show; Meat for our meals, and fragments too: He gives not poorly, taking some Between the finger and the thumb, But for our glut, and for our store, Fine flour pressed down, and running o'er.

Here is another, delightful in its oddity. We can fancy the merry yet gracious poet chuckling over the vision of the child and the fancy of his words.

A GRACE FOR A CHILD.

Here a little child I stand, Heaving up my either hand; Cold as paddocks though they be, _frogs._ Here I lift them up to thee, For a benison to fall On our meat, and on us all. _Amen_.

I shall now give two or three of his longer poems, which are not long, and then a few of his short ones. The best known is the following, but it is not so well known that I must therefore omit it.