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 direction, even to the putting in
abeyance of that from which song takes its rise,--namely, feeling itself.
As to the former, amongst the verse of the period I have given, there is
hardly anything to be called song but Sir Philip Sidney's Psalms, and for
them we are more indebted to King David than to Sir Philip. As to the
latter, even in the case of that most mournful poem of the Countess of
Pembroke, it is, to quite an unhealthy degree, occupied with the attempt
to work upon her own feelings by the contemplation of them, instead of
with the utterance of those aroused by the contemplation of truth. In her
case the metaphysics have begun to prey upon and consume the emotions.
Besides, that age was essentially a dramatic age, as even its command of
language, especially as shown in the pranks it plays with it, would
almost indicate; and the dramatic impulse is less favourable, though not
at all opposed, to lyrical utterance. In the cases of Sir Fulk Grevill
and Sir John Davies, the feeling is assuredly profound; but in form and
expression the philosophy has quite the upper hand.