O ignorant poor man! what dost thou bear,
    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 have a period principally of imitation, sometimes good, sometimes indifferent.  Next, with the Reformation and the revival of literature together, come more of art and more of philosophy, to the detriment of the lyrical expression.  People cannot think and sing:  they can only feel and sing.  But the philosophy goes farther in this