tion that which
sickness so often is to the man--a time of refreshing from the Lord. A
nation's life does not lie in its utterance any more than in the things
which it possesses: it lies in its action. The utterance is a result, and
therefore a sign, of life; but there may be life without any _such_ sign.
To do justice, to love mercy, to walk humbly with God, is the highest
life of a nation as of an individual; and when the time for speech comes,
it will be such life alone that causes the speech to be strong at once
and harmonious. When at last there are not ten righteous men in Sodom,
Sodom can neither think, act, nor say, and her destruction is at hand.

While the wave of the dramatic was sinking, the wave of the lyric was
growing in force and rising in height. Especially as regards religious
poetry we are as yet only approaching the lyrical jubilee. Fact and
faith, self-consciousness and metaphysics, all are needful to the lyric
of love. Modesty and art find their grandest, simplest labour in rightly
subordinating each of those to the others. How could we have a George
Herbert without metaphysics? In those poems I have just given, the way of
metaphysics was prepared for him. That which overcolours one age to the
injury of its harmony, will, in the next or the next, fall into its own
place in the seven-chorded rainbow of truth.

CHAPTER VII.

DR. DONNE.

We now come to Dr. John Donne, a man of justly great respect and
authority, who, born in the year 1573, the fifteenth of Queen Elizabeth,
died Dean of St. Paul's in the year 1636. But, although even Ben Jonson
addresses him as "the delight of Phoebus and each Muse," we are too far
beyond the power of his social presence and the influence of his public
utterances to feel that admiration of his poems which was so largely
expressed during his lifetime. Of many of those that were written in his
youth, Izaak Walton says Dr. Donne "wished that his own eyes had
witnessed their funerals." Faulty as they are, however, they are not the
less the work of a great and earnest man.

Bred to the law, but never having practised it, he lost his secretaryship
to the Lord Chancellor Ellesmere through the revenge of Sir George More,
whose daughter Donne had married in secret because of her father's
opposition. Dependent thereafter for years on the generous kindness of
unrelated friends, he yet for conscience' sake refused to take orders
when a good living was offered him; and