To work upon the heart, and make divorce
There from the evil which preventeth it,
In judgment of the truth we should not doubt
Good life would find a good religion out.

If a fair proportion of it were equal to this, the poem would be a fine
one, not for its poetry, but for its spiritual metaphysics. I think the
fourth and fifth of the stanzas I have given, profound in truth, and
excellent in utterance. They are worth pondering.

We now descend a decade of the century, to find another group of names
within the immediate threshold of the sixties.




CHAPTER VI.

LORD BACON AND HIS COEVALS.


Except it be Milton's, there is not any prose fuller of grand poetic
embodiments than Lord Bacon's. Yet he always writes contemptuously of
poetry, having in his eye no doubt the commonplace kinds of it, which
will always occupy more bulk, and hence be more obtrusive, than that
which is true in its nature and rare in its workmanship. Towards the
latter end of his life, however, being in ill health at the time, he
translated seven of the Psalms of David into verse, dedicating them to
George Herbert. The best of them is Psalm civ.--just the one upon which
we might suppose, from his love to the laws of Nature, he would dwell