into a faint and uncertain twilight that magnified every object. In the "Lion-haunted Inland" was still supposed to lie

A mystic city, goal of high emprise.-CHAPMAN.

And its golden towers often flashed through the waking dreams of the poetical enthusiast. Nor think me too ardent in my admiration of this glory of our Church.

Only take one or two specimens from the best known of his works, and say in what they are inferior to the sublimest poetry. The following is a picture :

"All the succession of time, all the changes in nature, all the varieties of light and darkness; the thousand thousand accidents in the world, and every contingency to every man and to every creature, doth preach our funeral sermon, and calls us to look how the old sexton, Time, throws up the earth and digs a grave, where we must lay our sins or our sorrows, and sow our bodies till they rise again in a fair or an intolerable eternity."

The next might have been copied from the notebook of Spenser. The "full eyes of childhood” is one of the finest images in the language.

"Reckon but from the spritefulness of youth, and the fair cheeks and full eyes of childhood, to the loathsomeness and horror of a three days'

burial. For so have I seen a rose newly springing from the clefts of its hood; at first it was fair as the morning, and full with the dew of heaven as a lamb's fleece; but when a ruder breath had forced open its virgin modesty, and dismantled its too youthful and unripe retirements, it began to put on darkness, and decline to softness and the symptoms of a sickly age; it bowed the head, and broke the stalk, and at night, having lost some of its leaves and all its beauty, it fell into the portion of weeds and outworn faces."

What pen has uttered sweeter things on children, or the delights of the domestic hearth. His sermon on the Marriage-Ring is more beautiful than any pastoral.

"No man can tell but he that loves his children, how many delicious accents make a man's heart to dance in the pretty conversation of those dear pledges;-their childishness,—their stammering,— their little angers,—their innocence,—their imperfections, their necessities, are so many little emanations of joy and comfort to him that delights in their persons and society."

He looked out upon nature with the eye and heart of a poet, and in the following passage seems to have anticipated Thomson in one of the most beautiful stanzas of the Castle of Indolence.

"I am fallen into the hands of publicans and

sequestrators, and they have taken all from me. What now? Let me look about me. They have left me sun, and moon, and fire, and water; a loving wife, and many friends to pity me, and some to relieve; and I can still discourse, and unless I list, they have not taken away my merry countenance, and my cheerful spirit, and a good conscience; they have still left me the providence of God, and all the promises of the Gospel, and my religion, and my hopes of heaven, and my charity to them too; and still I sleep, and digest, and eat, and drink; I read and meditate; I can walk in my neighbours' pleasant fields, and see the varieties of natural beauties, and delight in all that in which God delights; that is, in virtue and wisdom, in the whole creation, and in God himself."

Thomson has all the fervour of the poet, without the chastened submission of the Christian :→→

I care not, Fortune, what you me deny;

You cannot rob me of free nature's grace, You cannot shut the windows of the sky,

Through which Aurora shows her brightening face. You cannot bar my constant feet to trace

The woods and lawns, by living streams, at eve; Let health my nerves and finer fibres brace, And I their toys to the great children leave : Of fancy, reason, virtue,―nought can me bereave.

How pleasant would it be to go on thus, if my

memory would enable me, gathering choice specimens of his sublimity, pathos, and picturesque truth; collecting the precious stones of which his charms are strung; for even his ornaments are never chosen for their lustre alone; and in the most gorgeous festivals and riotous enjoyments of his imagination, a Hand is perceived writing on the wall. His learning and fancy are only the handmaids and attendants of his piety; and those precious essences which he extracts from the Tree of Knowledge, are all poured over the feet of his Divine Master.

It is only when he shackles his fancy with rhyme, that his vein of poetry ceases to flow. He is a poet everywhere except in verse. Yet how acutely

sensitive was his ear to all sweet sounds. Not even Milton, in the bright and happy days of his youth, when he wrote L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, breathed a more passionate love of the pealing organ, or more deeply lamented the "drowsy dulness in devotion," brought in by the Puritans, or prayed with greater ardour for the "solemn melody and the raptures of warbling sweet voices out of cathedral choirs," which Taylor said were wont to raise the spirit, and as it were, carry it up into heaven *.

I am surprised to find this opinion discountenanced by Bishop Heber, who observes in his Life of Taylor, "that while from many passages of his writings he appears to have been

The inferiority of his verses may, indeed, have resulted from want of practice and study; for, even in the noblest works of the Muse, much of the credit is due to the ingenuity and skill of the architect. His poems are few, but I remember one or two passages which appear to possess considerable merit.

That bright eternity

Where the Great King's transparent throne
Is of an entire jasper-stone;
There the eye

O' the chrysolite,
And a sky

Of diamonds, rubies, chrysophrase,

And above all, Thy holy face,

Make an eternal clarity:

When Thou thy jewels dost bind up,

Remember us, we pray,

That where the beryl lies,

And the crystal 'bove the skies,

There Thou may'st appoint us place

Within the brightness of Thy face.
And our soul

In the scroll

Of life and blissfulness enrol,

That we may praise Thee to eternity.

that day

fond of chanting and psalmody, it may, nevertheless, be suspected, that he had no ear for music. It is singular," he adds,

to compare the reluctant permission which he gives to the use of organs in churches, with the glow of feeling which their majestic tones excited in the breast of Milton."