ead;
Defects and darkness in my breast;
A noise of passions ringing me for dead
Unto a place where is no rest--
Poor priest, thus am I drest!

Only another head
I have, another heart and breast,
Another music, making live, not dead,
Without whom I could have no rest--
In him I am well drest.

Christ is my only head,
My alone only heart and breast,
My only music, striking me even dead,
That to the old man I may rest,
And be in him new drest.

So, holy in my head,
Perfect and light in my dear breast,
My doctrine turned by Christ, who is not dead,
But lives in me while I do rest--
Come, people: Aaron's drest.

Note the flow and the ebb of the lines of each stanza--from six to eight
to ten syllables, and back through eight to six, the number of stanzas
corresponding to the number of lines in each; only the poem itself begins
with the ebb, and ends with a full spring-flow of energy. Note also the
perfect antithesis in their parts between the first and second stanzas,
and how the last line of the poem clenches the whole in revealing its
idea--that for the sake of which it was written. In a word, note the
_unity_.

Born in 1593, notwithstanding his exquisite art, he could not escape
being influenced by the faulty tendencies of his age, borne in upon his
youth by the example of his mother's friend, Dr. Donne. A man must be a
giant like Shakspere or Milton to cast off his age's faults. Indeed no
man has more of the "quips and cranks and wanton wiles" of the poetic
spirit of his time than George Herbert, but with this difference from the
rest of Dr. Donne's school, that such is the indwelling potency that it
causes even these to shine with a radiance such that we wish them still
to burn and not be consumed. His muse is seldom other than graceful, even
when her motions are grotesque, and he is always a gentleman, which
cannot be said of his master. We could not bear to part with his most
fantastic oddities, they are so interpenetrated with his genius as well
as his art.

In relation to the use he makes of these faulty forms, and to show that
even herein he has exercised a refraining judgment, though indeed
fancying he has quite discarded in only somewhat reforming it, I
recommend the study of two poems, each of which he calls _Jordan_, though
why I have not yet with certainty discovered.

It is possible that not many of