after absolute perfection, he is, and in some measure knows himself to be, a vile sinner. Lord of earth, sea, air, and all their riches, he is a fretful, discontented, hating, hateful, and, on the whole, so far as his present life goes, miserable wretch. He is in one view a whole, and in another a yawning fragment; and, according to the angle at which you see him, resembles now a full moon, now a crescent, and now a waning orb. Able to "weigh the sun," span the fields of space, acquainted with the times and seasons of the heavenly bodies, full of "thoughts that wander through eternity," he is yet doomed to sicken, to die, and to have his low grave kissed, in scorn or pity, by the orbs whose spots he has numbered and whose eclipses he has foretold. Humboldt speaks of the Andes as including the world in their vast sweep, all climates, and seasons, and productions of earth being found between their base and their summit, between the ocean below and the hoary head of Chimborazo above; thus man rises from his dim embryo up to his grey head in age, touching, as he ascends, all conditions of being, and rising in parallel to all gradations of the universe, and remaining in each and all a mystery, having, indeed, all mysteries compounded and compressed in his one mysterious self. "When I consider the heavens," says David, "what is man?" But may we not with all reverence invert David's statement, although not his spirit, and say, "When we consider man, what (in grandeur, incomprehensibility, and terror) are the heavens?" "For us the winds do blow; The earth doth rest, heaven move, and fountains flow." Many of Herbert's modern admirers, while quoting the rest of these verses on "Man," omit its last stanza, although it seems to contain the moral of the wondrous Fable he had told, the solution of the Great Riddle he had propounded. Man is in a great measure a mystery, because he has forsaken his God; he is a wondrous Palace untenanted by the only Being whose presence can fill the crevices, supply the deficiencies, occupy the vast rooms, glorify the gloomy places, explain the mysteriousness, and fulfil the destiny of the fabric; and when xxvi LIFE AND POETICAL WORKS OF G. HERBERT. ever He shall return to it, Man's contradictions shall be reconciled, his controversies ended, all that is now ambiguous about him shall be explained, and while his microcosmal character shall continue, it shall assume a diviner meaning, and become as pure as it is universal. "Since then, my God, thou hast So brave a Palace built; O dwell in it, Till then, afford us so much wit That as the world serves us, we may serve thee, We need not dwell on his minor productions. His Latin poems we have decided to omit, as not calculated to interest the general reader, preferring, rather, to give his collection of "Proverbs," on account of their exceeding richness. We published, indeed, Milton's, but his was an extraordinary case, and his Latin poems stand in the very first category. We have, with former editors, annexed "The Synagogue," a poem written in imitation of "The Temple," by Christopher Harvey, which, in piety, if not altogether in poetic genius, forms a proper pendant to Herbert's works, and ranks to it as the "History of Tender Conscience" does to the "Pilgrim's Progress." Herbert has, besides, written a prose work, entitled, The Priest to the Temple; or, The Country Parson, full of childlike piety and pithy advice, bordering sometimes, indeed, on the superstitious, and sometimes on the austere. Altogether, there are few places on earth nearer Heaven, filled with a richer and holier light, adorned with chaster and nobler ornaments, or where our souls can worship with a more entire forgetfulness of self, and a more thorough realisation of the things unseen and eternal, than in "The Temple " of George Herbert. You say, as you stand breathless below its solemn arches, "This is none other than the house of God, it is the gate of Heaven. How dreadful, yet how dear is this place!" |