where
elegance of mind, person, carriage, and utterance is most appreciated,
and having indeed enjoyed something of the life of a courtier, he had
forsaken all in obedience to the voice of his higher nature. Hence the
struggle between his tastes and his duties would come and come again,
augmented probably by such austere notions as every conscientious man
must entertain in proportion to his inability to find God in that in
which he might find him. From this inability, inseparable in its varying
degrees from the very nature of growth, springs all the asceticism of
good men, whose love to God will be the greater as their growing insight
reveals him in his world, and their growing faith approaches to the
giving of thanks in everything.

When we have discovered the truth that whatsoever is not of faith is sin,
the way to meet it is not to forsake the human law, but so to obey it as
to thank God for it. To leave the world and go into the desert is not
thus to give thanks: it may have been the only way for this or that man,
in his blameless blindness, to take. The divine mind of George Herbert,
however, was in the main bent upon discovering God everywhere.

The poem I give next, powerfully sets forth the struggle between liking
and duty of which I have spoken. It is at the same time an instance of
wonderful art in construction, all the force of the germinal thought kept
in reserve, to burst forth at the last. He calls it--meaning by the word,
_God's Restraint_--

THE COLLAR.

I struck the board, and cried "No more!--
I will abroad.
What! shall I ever sigh and pine?
My lines and life are free--free as the road,
Loose as the wind, as large as store.
Shall I be still in suit?
Have I no harvest but a thorn
To let me blood, and not restore
What I have lost with cordial fruit?
Sure there was wine
Before my sighs did dry it! There was corn
Before my tears did drown it!
Is the year only lost to me?
Have I no bays to crown it?
No flowers, no garlands gay? All blasted?
All wasted?
Not so, my heart; but there is fruit,
And thou hast hands.
Recover all thy sigh-blown age
On double pleasures. Leave thy cold dispute
Of what is fit, and not. Forsake thy cage,
Thy rope of sands,
Which petty thoughts have made--and made to thee
Good cable, to enforce and draw,