Imagination makes poems; devotion makes hymns. There can be poetry
without emotion, but a hymn never. A poem may argue; a hymn must not.
In short to be a hymn, what is written must express spiritual feelings
and desires. The music of faith, hope and charity will be somewhere in
its strain.

Philosophy composes poems, but not hymns. "It is no love-symphony we
hear when the lion thinkers roar," some blunt writer has said. "The
moles of Science have never found the heavenly dove's nest, and the Sea
of Reason touches no shore where balm for sorrow grows."

On the contrary there are thousands of true hymns that have no standing
at the court of the muses. Even Cowper's Olney hymns, as Goldwin Smith
has said, "have not any serious value as poetry. Hymns rarely have," he
continues. "There is nothing in them on which the creative imagination
can be exercised. Hymns can be little more than the incense of a
worshipping soul."

A fellow-student of Phillips Brooks tells us that "most of his verse he
wrote rapidly without revising, not putting much thought into it but
using it as the vehicle and outlet of his feelings. It was the sign of
responding love or gratitude and joy."

To produce a hymn one needs something more exalting than poetic fancy;
an influence

"--subtler than the sun-light in the leaf-bud
That thrills thro' all the forest, making May."

It is the Divine Spirit wakening the human heart to lyric language.