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 poetize without the aidful restraints of art and modesty. If any man would look upon absurdity in the garb of sobriety, let him search Dryden's _Annus Mirabilis_: Dr. Watts's _Lyrics_ are as bad; they are fantastic to utter folly. An admiration of "the incomparable Mr. Cowley" did the sense of them more injury than the imitation of his rough-cantering ode could do their rhythm. The sentimentalities of Roman Catholic writers towards our Lord and his mother, are not half so offensive as the courtier-like flatteries Dr. Watts offers to the Most High. To say nothing of the irreverence, the vulgarity is offensive. He affords another instance amongst thousands how little the form in which feeling is expressed has to do with the feeling itself. In him the thought is true, the form of its utterance false; the feeling lovely, the word, often to a degree, repulsive. The ugly web is crossed now and then by a fine line, and even damasked with an occasional good poem: I have found two, and only two, in the whole of his seventy-five _Lyrics sacred to Devotion_. His objectivity and boldness of thought, and his freedom of utterance, cause us ever and anon to lament that he had not the humility and faith of an artist as well as of a Christian. Almost all his symbols indicate a worship of power and of outward show. I give the best of the two good poems I have mentioned, and very good it is. HAPPY FRAILTY. "How meanly dwells the immortal mind! How vile these bodies are! Why was a clod of earth designed To enclose a heavenly star? "Weak cottage where our souls reside! This flesh a tottering wall! With frightful breaches gaping wide, The building bends to fall. "All round it storms of trouble blow, And waves of sorrow roll; Cold waves and winter storms beat through, And pain the tenant-soul. "Alas, how frail our state!" said I, And thus went mourning on; Till sudden from the cleaving sky A gleam of glory shone. My soul all felt the glory come, And breathed her native air; Then she remembered heaven her home, And she a prisoner here. Straight she began to change her key; And, joyful in her pains, She sang the frailty of her clay In pleasurable strains. "How weak the prison is where I dwell! Flesh but a tottering wall! The breaches cheerfully foretell The house must shortly fall. "No more, my friends, shall I complain, Though all my heart-strings ache; Welcome disease, and every pain That makes the cottage shake! "Now let the tempest blow all round, Now swell the surges high, And beat this house of bondage down To let the stranger fly! "I have a mansion built above By the eternal hand; And should the earth's old basis move, My heavenly house must stand.