Well ought I, wretch, if I were kind-- _natural._
Night and day to work his will,
And ever have that Lord in mind.
But ghostly foes grieve me ill, _spiritual._
And my frail flesh maketh me blind;
Therefore his mercy I take me till, _betake me to._
For better bote can I none find. _aid._

In my choice of stanzas I have to keep in view some measure of
completeness in the result. These poems, however, are mostly very loose
in structure. This, while it renders choice easy, renders closeness of
unity impossible.

From a poem headed--again from the last line of each stanza--_Be my
comfort, Christ Jesus,_ I choose the following four, each possessing some
remarkable flavour, tone, or single touch. Note the alliteration in the
lovely line, beginning "Bairn y-born." The whole of the stanza in which
we find it, sounds so strangely fresh in the midst of its antiquated
tones, that we can hardly help asking whether it can be only the
quaintness of the expression that makes the feeling appear more real, or
whether in very truth men were not in those days nearer in heart, as well
as in time, to the marvel of the Nativity.

In the next stanza, how oddly the writer forgets that Jesus himself was a
Jew, when, embodying the detestation of Christian centuries in one line,
he says,

And tormented with many a Jew!

In the third stanza, I consider the middle quatrain, that is, the four