to raise himself a step toward an approximately adequate conception of
the Most High. So in religious poetry. We cannot add to, or exalt God,
but we can raise ourselves up nearer to Him, and attain, if not a full
understanding, a deeper feeling of the elements of His surpassing
excellence and glory. Indeed, as the highest poetry (in Milton, for
instance) blossoms into prayer, so the truest prayer, often by
insensible gradation, becomes poetry.

Dr. Johnson says, that "of sentiments purely religious, the most simple
expression is the most sublime." True, and hence, the best religious
poetry is at once sublime and simple. He adds, "Poetry loses its lustre
and its power, because it is applied to the decoration of something more
excellent than itself." On this principle, poets should never sing of
God's works in nature--of the ocean, or the sun, or the stars--no, nor
of the heroic achievements of man's courage, or of the self-sacrifices
of his love--for are not all these more excellent than poetry? Dr
Johnson's theory would hush the "New Song" itself, and perpetuate that
silence which was once in heaven "for half-an-hour."

Long before the Doctor vented this paradox, Cowley, in his preface to
his poems, had written the following eloquent and memorable sentences on
this subject:--"When I consider how many bright and magnificent subjects
Scripture affords, and proffers, as it were, to poesy, in the wise
managing and illustrating whereof the glory of God Almighty might be
joined with the singular utility and noblest delight of mankind, it is
not without grief and indignation that I behold that divine science
employing all her inexhaustible riches of wit and eloquence, either in
the wicked and beggarly flattering of great persons, or the unmanly
idolising of foolish women, or the wretched affectation of scurril
laughter, or the confused dreams of senseless fables and metamorphoses.