ST. PETER'S COMPLAINT.

At Sorrow's door I knocked: they craved my name.

66

I answered, "One unworthy to be known.”

What one?" say they. "One worthiest of blame."

"But who?" "A wretch not God's, nor yet his own."

99

"A man?" "Oh, no!" "A beast?" "Much worse." "What creature?" "A rock." "How called?" "The rock of scandal, Peter."

Christ! health of fevered soul, heaven of the mind,

Force of the feeble, nurse of infant loves,

Guide to the wandering foot, light to the blind,

Whom weeping wins, repentant sorrow moves!
Father in care, mother in tender heart,
Revive and save me, slain with sinful dart!

If King Manasseh, sunk in depth of sin,

With plaints and tears recovered grace and crown,
A worthless worm some mild regard may win,
And lowly creep where flying threw it down.

A poor desire I have to mend my ill;
I should, I would, I dare not say I will.

I dare not say I will, but wish I may;

My pride is checked: high words the speaker spilt. My good, O Lord, thy gift-thy strength, my stayGive what thou bidst, and then bid what thou wilt. Work with me what of me thou dost request;

Then will I dare the worst and love the best.

Here, from another poem, are two little stanzas worth preserving:

Yet God's must I remain,

By death, by wrong, by shame ;

I cannot blot out of my heart

That grace wrought in his name.

I cannot set at nought,

Whom I have held so dear; ¦
I cannot make Him seem afar
That is indeed so near.

The following poem, in style almost as simple as

a ballad, is at once of the quaintest and truest. Common minds, which must always associate a certain conventional respectability with the forms of religion, will think it irreverent. I judge its reverence profound, and such none the less that it is pervaded by a sweet and delicate tone of holy humour. The very title has a glimmer of the glowing heart of Christianity :

NEW PRINCE, NEW POMP.

Behold a silly,1 tender babe,

In freezing winter night,

In homely manger trembling lies;
Alas! a piteous sight.

The inns are full; no man will yield

This little pilgrim bed;

But forced he is with silly beasts

In crib to shroud his head.

Despise him not for lying there;
First what he is inquire:
An orient pearl is often found
In depth of dirty mire.

Weigh not his crib, his wooden dish,

Nor beasts that by him feed ;
Weigh not his mother's poor attire,
Nor Joseph's simple weed.

This stable is a prince's court,

The crib his chair of state;
The beasts are parcel of his pomp,

The wooden dish his plate.

1 Silly means innocent, and therefore blessed; ignorant of evil, and in so far helpless. It is easy to see how affection came to apply it to idiots. It is applied to the ox and ass in the next stanza, and is often an epithet of shepherds.

ST. PETER'S REMORSE.

The persons in that poor attire

His royal liveries wear;

The Prince himself is come from heaven:
This pomp is praised there.

With joy approach, O Christian wight;
Do homage to thy King;

And highly praise this humble pomp,

Which he from heaven doth bring.

ΙΟΙ

Another, on the same subject, he calls New Heaven, New War. It is fantastic to a degree.

however, I like much :

This little babe, so few days old,

Is come to rifle Satan's fold;

All hell doth at his presence quake,
Though he himself for cold do shake;

For in this weak, unarmed wise,

The gates of hell he will surprise.

One stanza,

There is profoundest truth in the symbolism of this. Here is the latter half of a poem called St. Peter's Remorse:

All thoughts of passed hopes
Increase my present cross;
Like ruins of decayed joys,

They still upbraid my loss.

O mild and mighty Lord!
Amend that is amiss;

My sin my sore, thy love my salve,
Thy cure my comfort is.

Confirm thy former deed;
Reform that is defiled;
I was, I am, I will remain

Thy charge, thy choice, thy child.

Here are some neat stanzas from a poem he calls

CONTENT AND RICH.

My conscience is my crown,
Contented thoughts my rest;

My heart is happy in itself,
My bliss is in my breast.

My wishes are but few,

All easy to fulfil;

I make the limits of my power
The bounds unto my will.

Sith sails of largest size

The storm doth soonest tear,
I bear so small and low a sail
As freeth me from fear.

And taught with often proof,
A tempered calm I find
To be most solace to itself,
Best cure for angry mind.

No chance of Fortune's calms
Can cast my comforts down;
When Fortune smiles I smile to think
How quickly she will frown.

DANIEL-SIR HENRY WOTTON.

103

And when in froward mood

She proves an angry foe :

Small gain I found to let her come,

Less loss to let her go.

There is just one stanza in a poem of Daniel, who belongs by birth to this group, which I should like to print by itself, if it were only for the love Coleridge had to the last two lines of it. It needs little stretch of scheme to let it show itself amongst religious poems. It occurs in a fine epistle to the Countess of Cumberland. Daniel's writing is full of 'the practical wisdom of the inner life, and the stanza which I quote has a certain Wordsworthian flavour about it. It will not make a complete sentence, but must yet stand by itself:

Knowing the heart of man is set to be

The centre of this world, about the which
These revolutions of disturbances

Still roll; where all th' aspects of misery
Predominate; whose strong effects are such
As he must bear, being powerless to redress;
And that unless above himself he can

Erect himself, how poor a thing is man!

Later in the decade, comes Sir Henry Wotton. It will be seen that I have arranged my singers with reference to their birth, not to the point of time at which this or that poem was written or published. The poetic influences which work on the shaping fantasy are chiefly felt in youth, and hence the predominant mode of a poet's utterance will be determined by what and where and amongst whom he was during that season. The kinds of the various poems will therefore probably fall into natural