What difference do we find? That the former has the more poetic touch,
the latter the greater truth. The former has just lost the one precious
thing in the psalm; the latter has kept it: that care is as useless as
painful, for God gives us while we sleep, and not while we labour.
CHAPTER XII.
WITHER, HERRICK, AND QUARLES.
George Wither, born in 1588, therefore about the same age as Giles
Fletcher, was a very different sort of writer indeed. There could hardly
be a greater contrast. Fancy, and all her motley train, were scarcely
known to Wither, save by the hearing of the ears.
He became an eager Puritan towards the close of his life, but his poetry
chiefly belongs to the earlier part of it. Throughout it is distinguished
by a certain straightforward simplicity of good English thought and
English word. His hymns remind me, in the form of their speech, of
Gascoigne. I shall quote but little; for, although there is a sweet calm
and a great justice of reflection and feeling, there is hardly anything
of that warming glow, that rousing force, that impressive weight in his
verse, which is the chief virtue of the lofty rhyme.
The best in a volume of ninety _Hymns and Songs of the Church_, is, I
think, _The Author's Hymn_ at the close, of which I give three stanzas.
They manifest the simplicity and truth of the man, reflecting in their
very tone his faithful, contented, trustful nature.
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