“Ah, dearest Jesus, I have grown Childish with love of Thee,” is sheer blasphemy. It is the sin of Uzziah! The following verses from one of Charles Wesley’s hymns combine the two faults of extravagance and too-intense individualism: “On the wings of His love I was carried above All sin and temptation and pain; I could not believe that I ever should grieve, That I ever should suffer again. I rode in the sky (freely justified I), Nor envied Elijah his seat; My soul mounted higher in a chariot of fire, And the moon it was under my feet.” _Distracting Figures and Forms of Expression._ Other poems are so full of imagination, so crowded with unusual and almost bizarre figures of speech, that they fail to be the natural expression of the religious emotion of an assembly of religious people. George Herbert wrote a great many religious poems whose beauty and charm are only enhanced by their quaint and unusual imagery. Occasionally a hymnal editor ventures on a selection, but it is so foreign to the methods of thought and expression of the churches as not to appeal to their taste and feeling. Take the beautiful poem on the Sabbath day, “O day most calm, most bright.” The first line is spontaneous, expressive, and musical, and appropriate for a hymn. The second line, “The fruit of this, the next world’s bud,” with its antithetical structure, is already somewhat formal and forced. But when the third and fourth lines, “The indorsement of supreme delight, Writ by a Friend and with His blood,” offer a purely legal and unpoetical figure, one’s sense of song is entirely obscured. Yet, when Herbert’s imagery is most matter-of-fact and ungenial, there is a body of thought and there are a certain fitness and a clearness of relation that command admiration. _Verses Must Be Complete in Themselves._ Hymns that have long, intricate sentences extending through two or more verses are impracticable for use in a song service, as the break between the stanzas dislocates the development of the idea. Every verse must be practically complete in itself, no matter what its relation to the development of the general idea of the hymn may be. _Musical Limitations._ It must also be recognized that there are limits to the expression congregational music can give. A poem that is vividly descriptive, or is in part intensely dramatic, cannot be recognized as a practicable hymn, since all stanzas have the same tune, a tune which cannot vary its musical effect to suit the differing stanzas. Then there are hymns that are too majestic, too glowing, for a hymn-tune composer to write a fitting tune out of the limited resources of musical effects available to him. Such a hymn is that one of Henry Kirke White, of lamented memory: “The Lord our God is clothed with might, The winds obey His will; He speaks, and in His heavenly height The rolling sun stands still.