But he cried to deaf ears, and the Elizabethan age produced no body of sacred poetry worth a record. The beautiful metrical version of the Psalms, made by Sir Philip Sidney and his sister, remained in manuscript for centuries. Drayton's _Harmonie of the Church_ was suppressed. Robert Southwell, whose lyrics on sacred subjects give him a unique place among the poets of his age, joins in the oft-repeated complaint:-- Stil finest wits are 'stilling Venus' rose, In Paynim toyes the sweetest vaines are spent; To Christian workes few have their talents lent. It was left for George Herbert and his contemporaries to take up the attempt once more--this time with better success--"to reprove the vanity of those many love poems that are daily writ and consecrated to Venus, and to bewail that so few are writ that look towards God and heaven." Cannot thy dove Outstrip their Cupid easily in flight? Or, since thy ways are deep, and still the same, Will not a verse run smooth that bears thy name? But although Herbert and his successors, in their devotional lyrics, gave a whole new province to English poetry, they left the idolatrous government of the older provinces undisturbed. Dramatic and narrative poetry went on in the old way, and drew their inspiration from the old founts. Year by year, as our native poetic wealth increased, it became more and more difficult to break with the past, and to lead poetry back to Zion. Nature and precedent seemed allied against the innovation. The worst of religious poetry, as Johnson more than once pointed out, is its poverty of subject, and its enforced chastity of treatment. You cannot make a picture out of light alone; there must be something to break it on. Then, too, there was Shakespeare to be reckoned with: he had written no hymns nor spiritual songs; among the works of God, he had found man to be deserving of his unremitting attention; yet, while a certain monotony of manner afflicted the singers of good and godly ballads, he had seemed never at a loss for a subject, never at the end of the copious inspiration that he drew from his unsanctified themes.