Herbert offers us measure pressed down and running
over. But let me speak first of that which first in time or order of
appearance we demand of a poet, namely music. For inasmuch as verse is
for the ear, not for the eye, we demand a good hearing first. Let no one
undervalue it. The heart of poetry is indeed truth, but its garments are
music, and the garments come first in the process of revelation. The
music of a poem is its meaning in sound as distinguished from word--its
meaning in solution, as it were, uncrystallized by articulation. The
music goes before the fuller revelation, preparing its way. The sound of
a verse is the harbinger of the truth contained therein. If it be a right
poem, this will be true. Herein Herbert excels. It will be found
impossible to separate the music of his words from the music of the
thought which takes shape in their sound.

I got me flowers to strow thy way,
I got me boughs off many a tree;
But thou wast up by break of day,
And brought'st thy sweets along with thee.

And the gift it enwraps at once and reveals is, I have said, truth of the
deepest. Hear this song of divine service. In every song he sings a
spiritual fact will be found its fundamental life, although I may quote
this or that merely to illustrate some peculiarity of mode.

_The Elixir_ was an imagined liquid sought by the old physical
investigators, in order that by its means they might turn every common
metal into gold, a pursuit not quite so absurd as it has since appeared.
They called this something, when regarded as a solid, _the Philosopher's
Stone_. In the poem it is also called a _tincture_.

THE ELIXIR.

Teach me, my God and King,
In all things thee to see;
And what I do in anything,
To do it as for thee;

Not rudely, as a beast,
To run into an action;
But still to make thee prepossest,
And give it his perfection. _its._

A man that looks on glass,
On it may stay his eye;
Or, if he pleaseth, through it pass,
And then the heaven spy.

All may of thee partake:
Nothing can be so mean,
Which with his tincture--_for thy sake_-- _its._
Will not grow bright and clean.

A servant with this clause
Makes drudgery divine:
Who sweeps a room as for thy laws,
Makes that and the action fine.

This is the famous stone
That turneth all to gold;
For that which God doth touch and own
Cannot for less b