That Wilt Not Let Me Go," though he wrote a whole volume of hymns. The author of "Fight the Good Fight" wrote three hundred other hymns. Ray Palmer, author of "My Faith Looks up to Thee," wrote two volumes of hymns. The hymn-book has chosen four out of the 127 hymns published by Bishop Wordsworth; this is a large percentage. William Wordsworth wrote and published a single hymn, "The Laborer's Noonday Hymn." But it was not successful; few of the books have included it. John Newton wrote many hymns for the Olney book; but the really great hymnody called forth by his extraordinary vigor, patience, and religious fervor is comprised in some threescore lines of the hymn-book.

Rudyard Kipling is the author of but one good hymn, one, however, which seems to belong among the fifty best of the language. The present laureate of England, who is a distinguished hymnologist, being an editor and in part author of a hymn-book, the "Yattendon Hymnal," has two or three lyrics which the hymnal may or may not accept as passably good. Still, of the many hymns written so far by Mr. Bridges, not one possesses that surging force and grace of life which bespeaks a sure survival among the elect lyrics.

"A good hymn," said Alfred Tennyson, "is the most difficult thing in the world to write." It was not until his eighty-first year that he himself achieved his single great hymn. He handed to his son, on their return one afternoon from a sail across

the bay, a piece of paper containing a lyric of sixteen lines.

"That," said the son when he read it, "is the crown of your life's work!"

The old poet gave explicit directions that it should be put at the end of all editions of his poems; and this stately and tender lyric, "Crossing the Bar," was sung a little later at the laureate's funeral in Westminster Abbey. Since that time it has taken its place, for the present day at least, among the small group of English hymns commonly sung at the burial of the dead. In some of the hymn-books Tennyson is represented also by certain stanzas from "In Memoriam," which, however, while being included in more and more of the books, do not approach his calmly triumphant death-song.

It is true that Spenser, Shakspere, Milton, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning are, except for one piece by Milton, one by Wordsworth, and two by Tennyson, not in the hymn-book. But it does not follow, as some are quick to assume, that all good poetry is otherwise shut out. That at the funeral of Robert Browning in Westminster Abbey England went back to Isaac Watts for a fitting hymn to sing does not argue either that Browning was not a glorious poet or that Watts's hymn was not both majestic and lovely enough to sing for any poet dead. "O God Our Help in Ages Past," as a lyrical poem, seems to have about it a finality that any perfect piece of art must have. It is no matter that Shakspere did not write it. If Shakspere and Browning

were not inclined or gifted to write hymns, or if Byron and Shelley and Tennyson were not sonneteers, the fact is not disquieting; they merely did not, for reasons easily ascertained, labor within this narrow scope. For the scope is narrow. The hymn is subject to all the limitations of other lyric poetry and to peculiarly rigid restrictions of its own. And one must admit that glowing perfection is rare here as elsewhere. All this being so, it is still a sober assertion that some of the English hymnic verse reaches a poetic height not often reached in our literature at all.

There are clear reasons why but little that the few major poets wrote is admitted into the hymn-book. Why they did not write good hymns is another question. Milton, having the supreme gift of poetry and a profoundly religious nature, and being, perhaps, as Professor William P. Trent says, the best single character of the English race, might have been expected to write the greatest hymns. He had a warm interest in hymns as had his father before him, who of himself has a dim immortality in the hymn-book as the author of the tunes "Norwich" and "York." John Milton did try his hand at hymns; but he is remembered in the hymn-book by but five stanzas, the psalm paraphrase, "Let Us with a Gladsome Mind." The morning hymn in the fifth book of "Paradise Lost," beginning with line 138, is not strictly hymnal; the blank verse, the long periodic structure, the elaboration of figure, and the localization all put it beyond the pale of the hymn-book.

The hymn is a quite definite and distinct type of poetry. Its boundaries as regards both form and content are plainly and narrowly laid down. It is of all types of literature perhaps the most rigorously limited. Merely as a lyric it would of course have narrow limitations; as a religious lyric its limitations are multiplied; but in that it must be the medium of concerted social thought and feeling on the gravest matters, and yet simple enough in form to be sung chorally by an assemblage not assumed to have any special choral practice or skill, it is very much more limited. The hymn must be a lyrical poem, simple of form, easy and smooth of movement; its ideas must be direct, unified, immediately apparent; its manner must have the decorum and gravity befitting public worship.

The intricate form, for example, of Milton's "Hymn on the Nativity" would bar it from the book were it acceptable in every other respect. For its stanzas are long and complex. The hymn stanza must be short enough to fit a simple musical setting, and invariably regular. A sonnet, were it ideal otherwise, could hardly find its way into the hymn-book; it cannot be divided into four-, or three-, or five-line stanzas. Even if it had twelve or sixteen lines so that it could be divided into quatrains to fit a simple musical scheme, its pentameter line would still be a difficulty. Of the scores of superb religious sonnets there is none in any hymn-book.

The severity of the demand for simple form is apparent at a glance through the hymnal. The sim

plest of all poetic forms, the form most easily read and retained in the memory, is the ballad stanza, or what the hymn-book calls common meter. It is the form of "Sir Patrick Spens" and "Robin Hood." Wordsworth and Coleridge went back to it in "Lucy Gray" and "The Ancient Mariner." It is a fourline stanza, the first and third lines, tetrameter, usually riming; the second and fourth, trimeter, always riming. An example is Cowper's

God moves in a mysterious way,
His wonders to perform;

He plants his footsteps in the sea,
And rides upon the storm.

There are more hymns in common meter than in any other measure. As this is the simplest stanza form, so is its tetrameter the simplest line measure for sustained and dignified verse. There are more fourmeasure lines in the hymn-book than all other lines combined.

Next to common meter the favorite stanza form is long meter, four tetrameter lines. Oliver Wendell Holmes's hymn beginning,

Lord of all being, throned afar,

Thy glory flames from sun and star;
Center and source of every sphere,

Yet to each loving heart how near,

is in long meter. Short meter is a stanza of four lines, the third tetrameter, the others trimeter.