He attended no church in his later years, finding none in absolute agreement with his beliefs; sympathizing with the Quakers to a certain degree, with the orthodox Independents too; but flaming up at any procrustean laws for faith; never giving over a certain tender love, I think, for the organ-music and storied splendors of the Anglican Church; but with a wild, broad freedom of thought chafing at any ecclesiastic law made by man, that galled him or checked his longings. His clear, clean intellect--not without its satiric jostlings and wrestlings--its petulancies and caprices--sought and maintained, independently, its own relation with God and the mysterious future. Our amiable Dr. Channing, with excellent data before him, demonstrated his good Unitarian faith; but though Milton might have approved his nice reasonings, I doubt if he would have gone to church with him. He loved liberty; he could not travel well in double harness, not even in his household or with the elders. His exalted range of vision made light of the little aids and lorgnettes which the conventional teachers held out to him. Creeds and dogmas and vestments and canons, and all humanly consecrated helps, were but Jack-o’-lanterns to him, who was swathed all about with the glowing clouds of glory that rolled in upon his soul from the infinite depths. In the year 1674--he being then sixty-five years old--on a Sunday, late at night, he died; and with so little pain that those who were with him did not know when the end came. He was buried--not in the great cemetery of Bunhill Fields, close by his house--but beside his father, in the old parish church of St. Giles, Cripplegate, where he had been used to go as a boy, and where he had been used to hear the old burial Office for the Dead--now intoned over his grave--“_Ashes to ashes, dust to dust_.” There was no need for the monument erected to him there in recent years. His poems make a monument that is read of all the world, and will be read in all times of the world. CHAPTER V. As we launched upon the days of Charles I., in our last talk, we had somewhat to say of the King’s advisers, lay and ecclesiastic; we came to quick sense of the war-clouds, fast gathering, through which Jeremy Taylor shot his flashes of pious eloquence; we heard a strain of Suckling’s verse, to which might have been added other, and may be better, from such Royalist singers as Carew or Lovelace;[69] but we cannot swoop all the birds into our net. We had glimpse of the crop-eared Prynne of the _Histriomastix_; and from Cowley, that sincere friend of both King and Queen in the days of their misfortunes, we plucked some “Poetical Blossoms;” also a charming “Rose,” from the orderly parterres of that great gardener, and pompous, time-serving man, Edmund Waller.