Locked up within the casket of thy breast?
What jewels and what riches hast thou there!
What heavenly treasure in so weak a chest!

Think of her worth, and think that God did mean
This worthy mind should worthy things embrace:
Blot not her beauties with thy thoughts unclean,
Nor her dishonour with thy passion base.

Kill not her quickening power with surfeitings;
Mar not her sense with sensuality;
Cast not her serious wit on idle things;
Make not her free-will slave to vanity.

And when thou think'st of her eternity,
Think not that death against our nature is;
Think it a birth; and when thou go'st to die,
Sing like a swan, as if thou went'st to bliss.

And if thou, like a child, didst fear before,
Being in the dark where thou didst nothing see;
Now I have brought thee torch-light, fear no more;
Now when thou diest thou canst not hood-wink'd be.

And thou, my soul, which turn'st with curious eye
To view the beams of thine own form divine,
Know, that thou canst know nothing perfectly,
While thou art clouded with this flesh of mine.

Take heed of over-weening, and compare
Thy peacock's feet with thy gay peacock's train:
Study the best and highest things that are,
But of thyself an humble thought retain.

Cast down thyself, and only strive to raise
The story of thy Maker's sacred name:
Use all thy powers that blessed Power to praise,
Which gives the power to be, and use the same.

In looking back over our path from the point we have now reached, the
first thought that suggests itself is--How much the reflective has
supplanted the emotional! I do not mean for a moment that the earliest
poems were without thought, or that the latest are without emotion; but
in the former there is more of the skin, as it were--in the latter, more
of the bones of worship; not that in the one the worship is but
skin-deep, or that in the other the bones are dry.

To look at the change a little more closely: we find in the earliest
time, feeling working on historic fact and on what was received as such,
and the result simple aspiration after goodness. The next stage is good
_doctrine_--I use the word, as St. Paul uses it, for instruction in
righteousness--chiefly by means of allegory, all attempts at analysis
being made through personification of qualities. Here the general form is
frequently more poetic than the matter. After this we ha