y
philosophical discussion could give him. For this poetry is an attempt
to express life, not to explain it. It offers pictures or reports
rather than analyses of religious experience. It gives utterance
to the real life of religion in the individual soul, and is not a
generalization of religious thoughts and feelings.

The sources from which this collection has been drawn are abundant
and varied. The psalmody and hymnology of the church furnish a vast
preserve, the exploration of which would be a large undertaking. It
must be confessed that the pious people who had in their hands some
of the ancient hymn-books were justified in feeling that religion and
poetry were not closely related, for many of the hymns they were
wont to sing were guiltless of any poetic character. It was too often
evident that the hymn-writer had been more intent on giving metrical
form to proper theological concepts than on giving utterance to his
own religious life. But the feeling has been growing that in hymns, at
any rate, life is more than dogma; and we have now some collections of
hymns that come pretty near being books of poetry. The improvement in
this department of literature within the past twenty-five years has
been marked. There is still, indeed, in many hymnals, and especially
in hymnals for Sunday schools and social meetings, much doggerel; but
large recent contributions of hymns which are true poetry, many of the
best of them from American sources, have made it possible to furnish
our congregations with admirable manuals of praise.

The indebtedness of religion to poetry which is thus expressed in
the hymnology of the church is very large. Probably many of us
are indebted for definite and permanent religious conceptions and
impressions quite as much to felicitous phrases of hymns as to
any words of sermon or catechism. Our most positive convictions of
religious truth are apt to come to us in some line or stanza that
tells the whole story. The rhythm and the rhyme have helped to fix it
and hold it in the memory.

This is true not only of the hymns of the church but of many poems
that are not suitable for singing. English poetry is especially rich
in meditative and devotional elements, and of no period has this
been more true than of the nineteenth century. Cowper, Wordsworth,
Coleridge, the Brownings, Tennyson and Matthew Arnold, on the other
side of the sea, with Bryant, Longfellow, Emerson, Whittier,
Lowell, Holmes, Lanier, Si