thou art near.

* * * * *

When wilt thou come unto me, Lord?
For, till thou dost appear,
I count each moment for a day,
Each minute for a year.

* * * * *

There's no such thing as pleasure here;
My Jesus is my all:
As thou dost shine or disappear,
My pleasures rise and fall.
Come, spread thy savour on my frame--
No sweetness is so sweet;
Till I get up to sing thy name
Where all thy singers meet.

In the writings of both we recognize a straight-forwardness of expression
equal to that of Wither, and a quaint simplicity of thought and form like
that of Herrick; while the very charm of some of the best lines is their
spontaneity. The men have just enough mysticism to afford them homeliest
figures for deepest feelings.

I turn to the accomplished Joseph Addison.

He was born in 1672. His religious poems are so well known, and are for
the greater part so ordinary in everything but their simplicity of
composition, that I should hardly have cared to choose one, had it not
been that we owe him much gratitude for what he did, in the reigns of
Anne and George I., to purify the moral taste of the English people at a
time when the influence of the clergy was not for elevation, and to teach
the love of a higher literature when Milton was little known and less
esteemed. Especially are we indebted to him for his modest and admirable
criticism of the _Paradise Lost_ in the _Spectator_.

Of those few poems to which I have referred, I choose the best known,
because it is the best. It has to me a charm for which I can hardly
account.

Yet I imagine I see in it a sign of the poetic times: a flatness of
spirit, arising from the evanishment of the mystical element, begins to
result in a worship of power. Neither power nor wisdom, though infinite
both, could constitute a God worthy of the worship of a human soul; and
the worship of such a God must sink to the level of that fancied
divinity. Small wonder is it then that the lyric should now droop its
wings and moult the feathers of its praise. I do not say that God's more
glorious attributes are already forgotten, but that the tendency of the
Christian lyric is now to laudation of power--and knowledge, a form of
the same--as _the_ essential of Godhead. This indicates no recalling of
metaphysical questions, such as we have met in foregoing verse, but a
decline towards system; a ris