He was nailéd to the tree,
With scourges y-swongen. _lashed._
All for man he tholed shame, _endured._
Withouten guilt, withouten blame,
Bothé day and other[8].
Man, full muchel he loved thee, _much._
When he woldé make thee free,
And become thy brother.


The simplicity, the tenderness, the devotion of these lyrics is to me
wonderful. Observe their realism, as, for instance, in the words: "The
stones beoth al wete;" a realism as far removed from the coarseness of a
Rubens as from the irreverence of too many religious teachers, who will
repeat and repeat again the most sacred words for the merest logical ends
until the tympanum of the moral ear hears without hearing the sounds that
ought to be felt as well as held holiest. They bear strongly, too, upon
the outcome of feeling in action, although doubtless there was the same
tendency then as there is now to regard the observance of
church-ordinances as the service of Christ, instead of as a means of
gathering strength wherewith to serve him by being in the world as he was
in the world.

From a poem of forty-eight stanzas I choose five, partly in order to
manifest that, although there is in it an occasional appearance of what
we should consider sentimentality, allied in nature to that worship of
the Virgin which is more a sort of French gallantry than a feeling of
reverence, the sense of duty to the Master keeps pace with the profession
of devotedness to him. There is so little continuity of thought in it,
that the stanzas might almost be arranged anyhow.