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passion and emotion it is what they themselves spoke and heard in moments of exultation, indignation, &c. But to hear an evolving roll, or a succession of leaves, talk continually the language of deliberate reason in a form of continued preconception, of a Z already possessed when A was being uttered—this must have appeared godlike. I feel myself in the same state, when in the perusal of a sober, yet elevated and harmonious succession of sentences and periods, I abstract my mind from the particular passage and sympathize with the wonder of the common people, who say of an eloquent man :- He talks like a book!'

NOTES ON HERBERT'S TEMPLE AND HARVEY'S SYNAGOGUE.

G. HERBERT is a true poet, but a poet sui generis, the merits of whose poems will never be felt without a sympathy with the mind and character of the man. To appreciate this volume, it is not enough that the reader possesses a cultivated judgment, classical taste, or even poetic sensibility, unless he be likewise a Christian, and both a zealous and an orthodox, both a devout and a devotional Christian. But even this will not quite suffice. He must be an affectionate and dutiful child of the Church, and from habit, conviction, and a constitutional predisposition to ceremoniousness, in piety as in manners, find her forms and ordinances aids of religion, not sources of formality; for religion is the element in which he lives, and the region in which he moves.

The Church, say rather the Churchmen of England, under the two first Stuarts, has been charged with a yearning after the Romish fopperies, and even the papistic usurpations; but we shall decide more correctly, as well as more charitably, if for the Romish and papistic we substitute the patristic leaven. There even was (natural enough from their distinguished learning, and knowledge of ecclesiastical antiquities) an overrating of the Church and of the Fathers, for the first five or even six centuries; these lines on the Egyptian monks, "Holy Macarius and great Anthony" (p. 205) supply a striking instance and illustration of this.

P. 10.

If thou be single, all thy goods and ground
Submit to love but yet not more than all

Give one estate as one life. None is bound
To work for two, who brought himself to thrall.
God made me one man; love makes me no more,
Till labor come, and make my weakness score.

I do not understand this stanza.

P. 41.

My flesh began unto my soul in pain,
Sicknesses clave my bones, &c.

Either a misprint, or a noticeable idiom of the word 'began?' Yes! and a very beautiful idiom it is the first colloquy or address of the flesh.

P. 46.

What though my body run to dust?

Faith cleaves unto it, counting every grain,
With an exact and most particular trust,
Reserving all for flesh again.

I find few historical facts so difficult of solution as the continuance, in Protestantism, of this anti-scriptural superstition. P. 54. Second poem on The Holy Scriptures.

This verse marks that, and both do make a motion

Unto a third that ten leaves off doth lie.

The spiritual unity of the Bible = the order and connection of organic forms in which the unity of life is shown, though as widely dispersed in the world of sight as the text.

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Each thing is full of duty:

Waters united are our navigation:

Distinguished, our habitation;

Below, our drink; above, our meat:

Both are our cleanliness. Hath one such beauty!

Then how are all things neat!

'Distinguished.' I understand this but imperfectly. Did they

form an island? and the next lines refer perhaps to the then belief that all fruits grow and are nourished by water. But then how is the ascending sap our cleanliness?' Perhaps, therefore, the rains.

P. 140.

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But he doth bid us take his blood for wine.

Nay, the contrary; take wine to be blood, and the blood of a man who died 1800 years ago. This is the faith which even the Church of England demands ;* for consubstantiation only adds a mystery to that of transubstantiation, which it implies. P. 175. The Flower.

A delicious poem.

Ib.

How fresh, O Lord, how sweet and clear
Are thy returns! e'en as the flowers in spring;
To which, besides their own demean,
The late past frosts tributes of pleasure bring.
Grief melts away

Like snow in May,

As if there were no such cold thing.

"The late past frosts tributes of pleasure bring."

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Epitritus primus + Dactyl + Trochee a long word table, which, together with the pause intervening between it and the word—trochee, equals u uu- form a pleasing variety in the Pentameter Iambic with rhymes. Ex. gr.

* This is one of my Father's marginalia, which I can hardly persuade myself he would have re-written just as it stands. Where does the Church of England affirm that the wine per se literally is the blood shed 1800 years ago? The language of our Church is that "we receiving these creatures of bread and wine, &c. may be partakers of His most blessed body and blood:" that "to such as rightly receive the same, the cup of blessing is a partaking of the blood of Christ." Does not this language intimate, that the blood of Christ is spiritually produced in the soul through a faithful reception of the appointed symbols, rather than that the wine itself, apart from the soul, has become the blood? In one sense, indeed, it is the blood of Christ to the soul: it may be metaphorically called so, if, by means of it, the blood is really, though spiritually, partaken. More than this is surely not affirmed in our formularies, nor taught by our great divines in general. I do not write these words by way of argument, but because I can not re-print such a note of my Father's, which has excited surprise in some of his studious readers, without a protest.-S. C.

The late past frosts | tributes of | pleasure | bring.

N.B. First, the difference between -1

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and an amphima

| and this not always or necessarily arising out of the latter being one word. It may even consist of three words, yet the effect be the same. It is the pause that makes the difference. Secondly, the expediency, if not necessity, that the first syllable both of the Dactyl and the Trochee should be short by quantity, and only - by force of accent or position—the Epitrite being true lengths.—Whether the last syllable be the force of the rhymes renders indifferent. "As if there were no such cold thing."

thing.
P. 181.

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Thus,

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Had been no such

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▲ should not have expected from Herbert so open an avowal of Romanism in the article of merit. In the same spirit is "Holy Macarius, and great Anthony," p. 205.*

*Herbert, however, adds:

But I resolve, when thou shalt call for mine,

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There thou shalt find my faults are thine.

Martin Luther himself might have penned this concluding stanza. Since I wrote the above, a note in Mr. Pickering's edition of Herbert has Deen pointed out to me:

P. 237 The Communion Table.

And for the matter whereof it is made,
The matter is not much,

Although it be of tuch,

Or wood, or metal, what will last, or fade;
So vanity

And superstition avoided be.

Tuch rhyming to much, from the German tuch, cloth, I never met with before, as an English word. So I find platt for foliage in Stanley's Hist. of Philosophy, p. 22.

P. 252. The Synagogue, by Christopher Harvey. The Bishop.
But who can show of old that ever any
Presbyteries without their bishops were:

Though bishops without presbyteries many, &c.

An instance of proving too much. If Bishop without Presb. B. Presb. i. e. no Bishop.

P. 253.

The Bishop.

To rule and to be ruled are distinct,
And several duties, severally belong

To several persons.

Functions of times, but not persons, of necessity? Ex. Bishop to Archbishop.

P. 255.

Church Festivals.

Who loves not you, doth but in vain profess
That he loves God, or heaven, or happiness.

"The Rev. Dr. Bliss has kindly furnished the following judicious remark, and which is proved to be correct, as the word is printed 'heare' in the first edition (1633). He says: 'Let me take this opportunity of mentioning what a very learned and able friend pointed out on this note. The fact is, Coleridge has been misled by an error of the press.

What others mean to do, I know not well,
Yet I here tell, &c. &c.

should be hear tell. The sense is then obvious, and Herbert is not made to do that which he was the last man in the world to have done, namely, to avow Romanism in the article of merit.'

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This suggestion once occurred to myself, and appears to be right, as it is verified by the first edition: but at the time it seemed to me so obvious, that surely the correction would have been made before if there had not been some reason against it.-S. C.

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