and profitable use of the volume, will be the want of a devotional disposition. It is not in every mood that religious poetry can be relished. Those who take it up in the lax and listless state of mind which best befits the perusal of a novel, or a glance at the last sparkling bubble of inflated versification, which floated by upon the stream of contemporary literature, and has already vanished, will lay it down again with disappointment. Only the pure and the pious can be expected to delight in pure and pious strains. Like the Scriptures, of which they present no unworthy reflex, the poems here collected require, for their profitable perusal, a mind prepared for the employment. They should be regarded as at once poetry and divinity. Many of them are, in fact, admirable sermons, and require to be read with the like view, and the same patience, docility, and humbleness. Neither is this a book which readers in general should attempt to go through at once. Presenting poems endlessly varied in structure, pregnant with profound truths, and weighty with grave precepts, it should be perused in portions, and at intervals; such parts being chosen for each reading as appear to the reader most suited to his present need and bent of the mind. With these few remarks the Editor dismisses the second and concluding volume of the "Sacred Poetry of the Seventeenth Century;" not without a hope, that this department of his labours is destined to convey both pleasure and profit to many, for whose profit and whose pleasure he labours with delight;-that he is thereby doing some service to the literature of his country, to the intellectual and religious interests of his contemporaries, and even to the great cause of Christianity itself. R. C. London, Feb. 24, 1836. NOTE. The reader will observe, that some of the poems in this volume are of earlier date than the beginning of the Seventeenth Century. As the Editor could not persuade himself to exclude Spenser and Davies from the former volume, on account of their not falling literally within the period prescribed in the title, so has he in this allowed himself the like liberty, in regard to Gascoigne and Southwell. In fact, by the "Seventeenth Century," he wishes to indicate rather a great era in our literature, beginning and ending, respectively, about the commencement and the close of that century, than the precise period of one hundred years. A similar inaccuracy-a very pardonable one, it is hopedwill likewise be found in the next, or third volume of Select Sacred Poetry, hereafter to be published; which, though appropriated to the first half of the Eighteenth Century, will commence with specimens from several writers who flourished towards the end of the Seventeenth, but for whom no room could be found on the present occasion. The reader is requested to correct with his pen an error in the former volume, in consequence of which, through a false association of ideas, the Editor inadvertently stated the reverse of what he designed. In the short notice of the poet WITHER, instead of his sufferings "in the cause of the Church and Monarchy," it should have been, "for his opposition to the Church and Monarchy." |