Of Divine wisdom being hidden to a presumptuous intellect : Then by affecting power, we cannot know Him; By knowing all things else, we know Him less; Then, man, rest on this feeling from above: : The heaven for joy. Desire thou that it may In the last year of the sixteenth century, Sir John Davies (1570-1626) published his poem on the immortality of the soul, under the title Nosce Teipsum. It was the first philosophical poem which had hitherto been produced in England, and immediately attracted much attention. He had previously been rather under a cloud, having been expelled from the Middle Temple, whither he had passed from Queen's College, Oxford, on account of a violent quarrel at dinner-time in the common hall. He was now restored to his place as barrister, became a most active and useful member of the House of Commons, was sent as Solicitor-General to Ireland, and won a lasting name there both by his administration and by his valuable writings on the condition of that country. He was knighted, and was chosen Speaker of the First House of Commons in Ireland. He returned to England in 1620, and six years after, just before his sudden death by apoplexy, was appointed Lord Chief Justice of England. It would ill become a writer of this age to find fault with a conjunction of poetry and philosophic reasonings. We owe a debt of gratitude to some of our best 1 Lord Brooke's Works: Of Religion, ed. by Grosart, vol. i. 7. poets for the deep and meditative thought which they have bestowed upon religious subjects, and upon the spiritual aspirations of the human soul. But it must be acknowledged that Sir John Davies's poem is rather too much of an argument trammelled by verse, and that consequently it is a little tedious. Some of its finest passages carry with them a reminiscence of Cicero, and in doing so are apt to remind the reader of them that their poetical form does not compare favourably with the noble prose of the Latin author. Still it is a poem of great merit, and inaugurated in a very worthy manner a fresh field for religious poetry in England. There is no consecutive passage in it better adapted for quotation than the concluding section of it :— O ignorant poor man! what dost thou bear Think of her worth, and think that God did mean And when thou think'st of her eternity, Think not that death against her nature is ; And if thou, like a child, didst fear before Being in the dark, where thou didst nothing see, But of thyself an humble thought retain. Cast down thyself, and only strive to raise The glory of thy Maker's sacred name : Use all thy powers, that blesséd Power to praise The following is from John Danyel's Songs for the Lute and Viol (1600): If I could shut the gate against my thoughts, Of my misdeeds, and I unthink my sin; How free, how clear, how clean my soul should lie, But, O my Saviour, who my refuge art, Let Thy dear mercies stand 'twixt them and me, So that I may at length repose me free; The life of Sir Walter Raleigh (1552-1618) is so intimately associated with the memories of Queen Elizabeth's reign, that although his Pilgrimage was, in all likelihood, not written in the sixteenth century, it may be mentioned here. His long imprisonment began in 1603. It was most likely at this time, when he was in daily expectation of death, that he wrote these verses. He had long been accustomed to look death in the face bravely and fearlessly, yet with a tinge of sadness in his reflections upon it. And now, in the stillness of his dungeon, he could almost toy with the probability of execution on the morrow, and clothe a religious hope in gay hues of fancy through which runs a scarcely perceptible thread of melancholy: Give me my scallop shell of quiet, My staff of faith to walk upon, My scrip of joy, immortal diet, My bottle of salvation, My gown of glory, hope's true gage; And thus I'll take my pilgrimage. 1 Sir John Davies's Nosce Teipsum, sect. xxxiv, Anderson's B. Poets, ii. 2 Bullen's More Songs from Elizabethan Song-Books, 1888, p. 52. Blood must be my body's balmer; Travelleth toward the land of heaven; Over the silver mountains Where spring the nectar fountains : The bowl of bliss, And drink mine everlasting fill My soul will be a-dry before; More peaceful pilgrims I shall see To quench their thirst And taste of nectar suckets At those clear wells Where sweetness dwells Drawn up by saints in crystal buckets. And when our bottles and all we No cause deferred, no vain spent journey, Be thou my speaker, taintless pleader, To Him that made heaven, earth, and sea, M That since my flesh must die so soon, And want a head to dine next noon, Just at the stroke when my veins start and spread, Then am I ready, like a palmer fit, To tread those blest paths which before I writ. Sir Walter was released in 1614, and went, under a Royal Commission, to Guiana, but on his return, in 1618, was again thrown into the Tower, and capital sentence was quickly passed. The following verses, written, it is said, the night before his death, were found in his Bible : Even such is time, that takes in trust But from this earth, this grave, this dust, To the latter part of the sixteenth century belongs a very familiar hymn, which in the next two centuries passed through many variations. The original of Jerusalem, my Happy Home, is in a quarto volume, dating probably from about 1616, and entitled A Song by F. B. P. The hymn itself is considered to be of Queen Elizabeth's time. Fourteen out of the twentysix stanzas will be found in Lord Selborne's Book of Praise. I extract a few verses : Jerusalem, my happy home, When shall I come to thee? When shall my sorrows have an end- O happy harbour of the saints ! O sweet and pleasant soil! In thee no sorrow may be found, There lust and lucre cannot dwell, |