Even the fallow
times, which we are so ready to call barren, must have their share in
working the one needful work. They may be to the nation that which
sickness so often is to the man--a time of refreshing from the Lord. A
nation's life does not lie in its utterance any more than in the things
which it possesses: it lies in its action. The utterance is a result, and
therefore a sign, of life; but there may be life without any _such_ sign.
To do justice, to love mercy, to walk humbly with God, is the highest
life of a nation as of an individual; and when the time for speech comes,
it will be such life alone that causes the speech to be strong at once
and harmonious. When at last there are not ten righteous men in Sodom,
Sodom can neither think, act, nor say, and her destruction is at hand.
While the wave of the dramatic was sinking, the wave of the lyric was
growing in force and rising in height. Especially as regards religious
poetry we are as yet only approaching the lyrical jubilee. Fact and
faith, self-consciousness and metaphysics, all are needful to the lyric
of love. Modesty and art find their grandest, simplest labour in rightly
subordinating each of those to the others. How could we have a George
Herbert without metaphysics? In those poems I have just given, the way of
metaphysics was prepared for him.
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