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represent a whole life.... "One great hope may come to fruit only at the end of many years, and as the ripening of a hundred experiences. As there be flowers that drink the dews of spring and summer, and feed upon all the rains, and only just before the winter comes burst forth into bloom, so it is with some of the noblest blossoms of the soul. The bolt that prostrated Saul gave him the exceeding brightness of Christ; and so some hymns could never have been written but for a heart-stroke that well-nigh crushed out the life. It is cleft in two by bereavement, and out of the rift comes forth, as by resurrection, the form and voice that shall never die out of the world. Angels sat at the grave's mouth; and so hymns are the angels that rise up out of our griefs and darkness and dismay. "Thus born, a hymn is one of those silent ministers which God sends to those who are to be heirs of salvation. It enters into the tender imagination of childhood, and casts down upon the chambers of its thought a holy radiance which shall never quite depart. It goes with the Christian, singing to him all the way, as if it were the airy voice of some guardian spirit. When darkness of trouble, settling fast, is shutting out every star, a hymn bursts through and brings light like a torch. It abides by our side in sickness. It goes forth with us in joy to syllable that joy. "And thus, after a time, we clothe a hymn with the memories and associations of our own life. It is garlanded with flowers which grew in our hearts. Born of the experience of one mind, it becomes the unconscious record of many minds.... Thus sprung from a wondrous life, hymns lead a life yet more wonderful. When they first come to us they are like the single strokes of a bell ringing down to us from above; but, at length, a single hymn becomes a whole chime of bells, mingling and discoursing to us the harmonies of a life's Christian experience." Passing from this very human and sympathetic view of the profoundest use of poetry, note how the veteran Bryant confirms it. In treating of the beautiful mythologies of Greece and Rome, so much of which entered into the warp and woof of ancient poetry, he grants their poetical quality, but doubts whether, on the whole, the art gained more than it lost by them, because, having a god for every operation of nature, they left nothing in obscurity; everything was accounted for; mystery--a prime element of poetry--existed no longer.
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