represent a whole life....

"One great hope may come to fruit only at the end of many years, and
as the ripening of a hundred experiences. As there be flowers that
drink the dews of spring and summer, and feed upon all the rains, and
only just before the winter comes burst forth into bloom, so it
is with some of the noblest blossoms of the soul. The bolt that
prostrated Saul gave him the exceeding brightness of Christ; and so
some hymns could never have been written but for a heart-stroke that
well-nigh crushed out the life. It is cleft in two by bereavement, and
out of the rift comes forth, as by resurrection, the form and voice
that shall never die out of the world. Angels sat at the grave's
mouth; and so hymns are the angels that rise up out of our griefs and
darkness and dismay.

"Thus born, a hymn is one of those silent ministers which God sends
to those who are to be heirs of salvation. It enters into the tender
imagination of childhood, and casts down upon the chambers of its
thought a holy radiance which shall never quite depart. It goes with
the Christian, singing to him all the way, as if it were the airy
voice of some guardian spirit. When darkness of trouble, settling
fast, is shutting out every star, a hymn bursts through and brings
light like a torch. It abides by our side in sickness. It goes forth
with us in joy to syllable that joy.

"And thus, after a time, we clothe a hymn with the memories and
associations of our own life. It is garlanded with flowers which grew
in our hearts. Born of the experience of one mind, it becomes the
unconscious record of many minds.... Thus sprung from a wondrous life,
hymns lead a life yet more wonderful. When they first come to us they
are like the single strokes of a bell ringing down to us from above;
but, at length, a single hymn becomes a whole chime of bells, mingling
and discoursing to us the harmonies of a life's Christian experience."

Passing from this very human and sympathetic view of the profoundest
use of poetry, note how the veteran Bryant confirms it. In treating of
the beautiful mythologies of Greece and Rome, so much of which entered
into the warp and woof of ancient poetry, he grants their poetical
quality, but doubts whether, on the whole, the art gained more than
it lost by them, because, having a god for every operation of
nature, they left nothing in obscurity; everything was accounted for;
mystery--a prime element of poetry--existed no longer.