of
Westminster Hall and its wigs! Men had not a hammer to begin
with, not a syllabled articulation: they had it all to make;--
and they have made it. What thousand thousand articulate, semi-
articulate, earnest-stammering _Prayers_ ascending up to Heaven,
from hut and cell, in many lands, in many centuries, from the
fervent kindled souls of innumerable men, each struggling to pour
itself forth incompletely as it might, before the incompletest
_Liturgy_ could be compiled! The Liturgy, or adoptable and
generally adopted Set of Prayers and Prayer-Method, was what we
can call the Select Adoptabilities, 'Select Beauties' well-edited
(by Oecumenic Councils and other Useful-Knowledge Societies) from
that wide waste imbroglio of Prayers already extant and
accumulated, good and bad. The good were found adoptable by men;
were gradually got together, well-edited, accredited: the bad,
found inappropriate, unadoptable, were gradually forgotten,
disused and burnt. It is the way with human things. The first
man who, looking with opened soul on this August Heaven and
Earth, this Beautiful and Awful, which we name Nature, Universe
and such like, the essence of which remains forever UNNAMEABLE;
he who first, gazing into this, fell on his knees awestruck, in
silence as is likeliest,--he, driven by inner necessity, the
'audacious original' that he was, had done a thing, too, which
all thoughtful hearts saw straightway to be an expressive,
altogether adoptable thing! To bow the knee was ever since the
attitude of supplication. Earlier than any spoken Prayers,
_Litanias,_ or Leitourgias;_ the beginning of all Worship,--
which needed but a beginning, so rational was it. What a poet
he! Yes, this bold original was a successful one withal. The
wellhead this one, hidden in the primeval dusks and distances,
from whom as from a Nile-source all _Forms of Worship_ flow:--
such a Nile-river (somewhat muddy and malarious now!) of Forms of
Worship sprang there, and flowed, and flows, down to Puseyism,
Rotatory Calabash, Archbishop Laud at St. Catherine Creed's, and
perhaps lower!

Things rise, I say, in that way. The _Iliad_ Poem, and indeed
most other poetic, especially epic things, have risen as the
Liturgy did. The great _Iliad_ in Greece, and the small _Robin
Hood's Garland_ in England, are each, as I understand, the well-
edited 'Select Beauties' of an immeasurable waste imbroglio of
Heroic Ballads in their respective centurie