Ye hermits blest, ye holy maids,
          The nearest heaven on earth,
        Who talk with God in shadowy glades,
          Free from rude care and mirth;
        To whom some viewless teacher brings
        The secret lore of rural things,
    The moral of each fleeting cloud and gale,
  The whispers from above, that haunt the twilight vale: 

        Say, when in pity ye have gazed
          On the wreath’d smoke afar,
        That o’er some town, like mist upraised,
          Hung hiding sun and star;
        Then as ye turned your weary eye
        To the green earth and open sky,
    Were ye not fain to doubt how Faith could dwell
  Amid that dreary glare, in this world’s citadel?

        But Love’s a flower that will not die
          For lack of leafy screen,
        And Christian Hope can cheer the eye
          That ne’er saw vernal green: 
        Then be ye sure that Love can bless
        Even in this crowded loneliness,
    Where ever-moving myriads seem to say,
  Go—­thou art nought to us, nor we to thee—­away!

        There are in this loud stunning tide
          Of human care and crime,
        With whom the melodies abide
          Of the everlasting chime;
        Who carry music in their heart
        Through dusky lane and wrangling mart,
    Plying their daily task with busier feet,
  Because their secret souls a holy strain repeat.

There are here some indications of that strong reaction of the present century towards ancient forms of church life.  This reaction seems to me a further consequence of that admiration of power of which I have spoken.  For, finding the progress of discovery in the laws of nature constantly bring an assurance most satisfactory to the intellect, men began to demand a similar assurance in other matters; and whatever department of human thought could not be subjected to experiment or did not admit of logical proof began to be regarded with suspicion.  The highest realms of human thought—­where indeed only grand conviction, and that the result not of research, but of obedience to the voice within, can be had—­came to be by such regarded as regions where, no scientific assurance being procurable, it was only to his loss that a man should go wandering:  the whole affair was unworthy of him.  And if there be no guide of humanity but the intellect, and nothing worthy of its regard but what that intellect can isolate and describe in the forms peculiar to its operations,—­that is, if a man has relations to nothing beyond his definition, is not a creature of the immeasurable,—­then these men are right.  But there have appeared along with them other thinkers who could not thus be satisfied—­men who had in their souls a hunger which the neatest laws of nature could not content, who could not live on chemistry, or mathematics, or even on geology,