A few words from the gifted William Ellery Channing the elder
epitomize some striking thoughts on this subject:

"We believe that poetry, far from injuring society, is one of the
great instruments of its refinement and exaltation. It lifts the mind
above ordinary life, gives it a respite from depressing cares, and
awakens the consciousness of its affinity with what is pure and noble.
In its legitimate and highest efforts it has the same tendency and
aim with Christianity,--that is, to spiritualize our nature.... The
present life, which is the first stage of the immortal mind, abounds
in the materials of poetry, and it is the highest office of the bard,
to detect this divine element among the grosser pleasures and labors
of our earthly being. The present life is not wholly prosaic, precise,
tame, and finite. To the gifted eye it abounds in the poetic....

"It is not true that the poet paints a life which does not exist. He
only extracts and concentrates, as it were, life's ethereal essence,
arrests and condenses its volatile fragrance, brings together its
scattered beauties, and prolongs its more refined but evanescent joys:
and in this he does well; for it is good to feel that life is not
wholly usurped by cares for subsistence and physical gratifications,
but admits, in measures which may be indefinitely enlarged, sentiments
and delights worthy of a higher being."

In his Introduction to the "Plymouth Collection of Hymns and
Tunes"--the pioneer book of all such aids to church congregational
singing--Henry Ward Beecher gave a noble view of the power of a hymn
arising out of experience:

"No other composition is like an experimental hymn. It is not a mere