heavens,
but he did not learn that perfection from the heavens, but from the law
itself, revealed in his own heart through the life-teaching of God. When
he had learned it he saw that the heavens were like it.

To unveil God, only manhood like our own will serve. And he has taken the
form of man that he might reveal the manhood in him from awful eternity.

CHAPTER XIX.

THE PLAIN.

But Addison's tameness is wonderfully lovely beside the fervours of a man
of honoured name,--Dr. Isaac Watts, born in 1674. The result must be
dreadful where fervour will poetize without the aidful restraints of art
and modesty. If any man would look upon absurdity in the garb of
sobriety, let him search Dryden's _Annus Mirabilis_: Dr. Watts's _Lyrics_
are as bad; they are fantastic to utter folly. An admiration of "the
incomparable Mr. Cowley" did the sense of them more injury than the
imitation of his rough-cantering ode could do their rhythm. The
sentimentalities of Roman Catholic writers towards our Lord and his
mother, are not half so offensive as the courtier-like flatteries Dr.
Watts offers to the Most High. To say nothing of the irreverence, the
vulgarity is offensive. He affords another instance amongst thousands how
little the form in which feeling is expressed has to do with the feeling
itself. In him the thought is true, the form of its utterance false; the
feeling lovely, the word, often to a degree, repulsive. The ugly web is
crossed now and then by a fine line, and even damasked with an occasional
good poem: I have found two, and only two, in the whole of his
seventy-five _Lyrics sacred to Devotion_. His objectivity and boldness of
thought, and his freedom of utterance, cause us ever and anon to lament
that he had not the humility and faith of an artist as well as of a
Christian.

Almost all his symbols indicate a worship of power and of outward show.

I give the best of the two good poems I have mentioned, and very good it
is.

HAPPY FRAILTY.

"How meanly dwells the immortal mind!
How vile these bodies are!
Why was a clod of earth designed
To enclose a heavenly star?

"Weak cottage where our souls reside!
This flesh a tottering wall!
With frightful breaches gaping wide,
The building bends to fall.

"All round it storms of trouble blow,
And waves of sorrow roll;
Cold waves and winter storms beat through,
And pain the tenant-soul.

"Alas, how frail our state!"