England's Antiphon

We have now arrived at the period of English history in every way fullest of marvel--the period of Elizabeth. As in a northern summer the whole region bursts into blossom at onc...

We have now arrived at the borders of a long, dreary tract, which, happily for my readers, I can shorten for them in this my retrospect. From the heights of Henry Vaughan's vers...

The oldest form of regular dramatic representation in England was the Miracle Plays, improperly called Mysteries, after the French. To these plays the people of England, in the...

Except it be Milton's, there is not any prose fuller of grand poetic embodiments than Lord Bacon's. Yet he always writes contemptuously of poetry, having in his eye no doubt the...

But, with my hand on the lock, I shrink from opening the door. Here comes a poet indeed! and how am I to show him due honour? With his book humbly, doubtfully offered, with the...

And now I turn to the other class--that which, while the former has fled to tradition for refuge from doubt, sets its face towards the spiritual east, and in prayer and sorrow a...

John Milton, born in 1608, was twenty-four years of age when George Herbert died. Hardly might two good men present a greater contrast than these. In power and size, Milton grea...

In the midst of wars and rumours of wars, the strife of king and barons, and persistent efforts to subdue neighbouring countries, the mere effervescence of the life of the natio...

The late Dean Milman, born in 1791, best known by his very valuable labours in history, may be taken as representing a class of writers in whom the poetic fire is ever on the po...

Dr. Henry More was born in the year 1614. Chiefly known for his mystical philosophy, which he cultivated in retirement at Cambridge, and taught not only in prose, but in an elab...

George Wither, born in 1588, therefore about the same age as Giles Fletcher, was a very different sort of writer indeed. There could hardly be a greater contrast. Fancy, and all...

We now come to Dr. John Donne, a man of justly great respect and authority, who, born in the year 1573, the fifteenth of Queen Elizabeth, died Dean of St. Paul's in the year 163...

I come now to one of the loveliest of our angel-birds, Richard Crashaw. Indeed he was like a bird in more senses than one; for he belongs to that class of men who seem hardly ev...

From the nature of their adopted mode, we cannot look for much poetry of a devotional kind from the dramatists. That mode admitting of no utterance personal to the author, and r...

But Addison's tameness is wonderfully lovely beside the fervours of a man of honoured name,--Dr. Isaac Watts, born in 1674. The result must be dreadful where fervour will poetiz...

After the birth of a Chaucer, a Shakspere, or a Milton, it is long before the genial force of a nation can again culminate in such a triumph: time is required for the growth of...

William Blake, the painter of many strange and fantastic but often powerful--sometimes very beautiful pictures--wrote poems of an equally remarkable kind. Some of them are as lo...

Edmund Waller, born in 1605, was three years older than Milton; but I had a fancy for not dividing Herbert and Milton. As a poet he had a high reputation for many years, gained...

In the poems of James Thomson, we find two hymns to the God of Creation--one in blank verse, the other in stanzas. They are of the kind which from him we should look for. The on...

I now come to make mention of two gifted brothers, Giles and Phineas Fletcher, both clergymen, the sons of a clergyman and nephews to the Bishop of Bristol, therefore the cousin...

Sir John Beaumont, born in 1582, elder brother to the dramatist who wrote along with Fletcher, has left amongst his poems a few fine religious ones. From them I choose the follo...

Poets now began to write more smoothly--not a great virtue, but indicative of a growing desire for finish, which, in any art, is a great virtue. No doubt smoothness is often con...

Joseph Hall, born in 1574, a year after Dr. Donne, bishop, first of Exeter, next of Norwich, is best known by his satires. It is not for such that I can mention him: the most ho...

If the act of worship be the highest human condition, it follows that the highest human art must find material in the modes of worship. The first poetry of a nation will not be...