ie.

And yet how can I hear thee singing go,
When men, incensed with hate, thy death foreset?
Or else, why do I hear thee sighing so,
When thou, inflamed with love, their life dost get,[97]
That love and hate, and sighs and songs are met?
But thus, and only thus, thy love did crave
To send thee singing for us to thy grave,
While we sought thee to kill, and thou sought'st us to save.

When I remember Christ our burden bears,
I look for glory, but find misery;
I look for joy, but find a sea of tears;
I look that we should live, and find him die;
I look for angels' songs, and hear him cry:
Thus what I look, I cannot find so well;
Or rather, what I find I cannot tell,
These banks so narrow are, those streams so highly swell.

We would gladly eliminate the few common-place allusions; but we must
take them with the rest of the passage. Besides far higher merits, it is
to my ear most melodious.

One more passage of two stanzas from Giles Fletcher, concerning the
glories of heaven: I quote them for the sake of earth, not of heaven.

Gaze but upon the house where man embowers:
With flowers and rushes paved is his way;
Where all the creatures are his servitours:
The winds do sweep his chambers every day,
And clouds do wash his rooms; the ceiling gay,
Starred aloft, the gilded knobs embrave:
If such a house God to another gave,
How shine those glittering courts he for himself will have!

And if a sullen cloud, as sad as night,
In which the sun may seem embodied,
Depured of all his dross, we see so white,
Burning in melted gold his watery head,
Or round with ivory edges silvered;
What lustre super-excellent will he
Lighten on those that shall his sunshine see
In that all-glorious court in which all glories be!

These brothers were intense admirers of Spenser. To be like him Phineas
must write an allegory; and such an allegory! Of all the strange poems in
existence, surely this is the strangest. The _Purple Island_ is man,
whose body is anatomically described after the allegory of a city, which
is then peopled with all the human faculties personified, each set in
motion by itself. They say the anatomy is correct: the metaphysics are
certainly good. The action of the poem is just another form of the _Holy
War_ of John Bunyan--all the good and bad powers fighting for the
possessi