it enjoins a sure simplicity of ideas, as well as of form. The good hymn is arrow-like in moving to its mark; its images, however brilliantly they may flash and gleam, must not-any more than the point and feather of an arrow-retard or deflect the movement. A stanza of Sarah Fowler Adams's famous hymn will illustrate this. It suited the purpose of the poem to tell-as a lyric may tell the story in Genesis 28:10-19, of Jacob at Beth-el.

After the successful conspiracy to deceive his dying father who was blind, and to cheat his brother Esau out of his rightful property, Jacob fled for his life into a strange country.

And Jacob went out from Beer-sheba, and went toward Haran. And he lighted upon a certain place, and tarried there all night, because the sun was set; 'and he took of the stones of that place and put them for his pillows, and lay down in that place to sleep. And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven; and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it. . . . And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said, Surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not. And he was afraid and said, How dreadful is this place! this is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven. And Jacob rose up early in the morning and took the stone that he had put for his pillows, and set it up for a pillar and poured oil upon the top of of it. And he called the name of that place Beth-el.

This passage furnishes a splendid theme for hymnody, and a number of good hymns are based upon

it, such, for example, as that of Madame Guyon, translated from the French by William Cowper. It begins:

My Lord, how full of sweet content,
I pass my years of banishment!
Where'er I dwell, I dwell with thee,
In Heaven, in earth, or on the sea.

To me remains nor place nor time;
My country is in every clime:
I can be calm and free from care
On any shore, since God is there.

But notice with what vividness of detail "Nearer, My God, to Thee" gives the picture as Madame Guyon's hymn does not. Still Mrs. Adams maintains a true lyric economy of words. Much might have been said about Jacob's homesickness, his guilty conscience, his fear of night and enemies, his hunger and cold, and so on through the story, the ladder, the angels, and all. But notice the swiftness and directness of the hymn narrative, and the sweep of its style:

Nearer, my God, to thee!
Nearer to thee,

E'en though it be a cross

That raiseth me;

Still all my song shall be,
Nearer, my God, to thee,
Nearer to thee!

These lines might, by the way, be held up as a touchstone of hymnody. When one begins to measure other poems by the qualities of this one-its brev

ity, its simplicity, its vivid imagery, its strong feeling under perfect control, its general artistic integrity-one finds what a rare and fine thing a perfect hymn is.

The essential directness of style is evident in the hymnal attitude toward external nature. The hymn poet may pass through gardens and pleasant fields, but he must not loiter there. In the more open fields of poesy he may wander as he likes, but in the aisle of the hymn he must go straightly. The journeying soul may see

Sweet prospects, sweet birds, and sweet flowers,

but the end of the journey, not they, is the poiht. Like Bunyan's Pilgrim, he may delight in scenes of natural beauty, but at the same time he must be on his way. The twenty-third Psalm deals with nature ideally from the hymnal point of view. The poem, as it is rendered in the King James version, is essentially, in manner, idea, and spirit, a model hymn, except for the fact that it has not rime and meter for the hymn music; translation as it is, unmetrical as it is, it is yet perhaps the single most popular English poem. It pictures vivid and unforgetable scenes of nature; but these scenes are not there merely because they are beautiful. The idea of the lyric does not wander after them; they accompany and serve the idea. The point of the poem is not green pastures, still water, and shadowed valley, but the care of the good Shepherd.

The frequent glimpses of natural scenery in the

hymn are often no less vivid and appealing because they are brief. Descriptions of one or two lines stamp themselves strangely on the memory. The curious critical notion that the hymn must be duncolored and tame of spirit can be traced back to Dr. Johnson's famous and false pronouncement about devotional poetry. "The paucity of its topics," he said, "enforces perpetual repetition, and the sanctity of its matter rejects the ornaments of figurative diction." The English hymn was not then so strong to refute this as it is now, but the Hebrew was, and the Latin. Still this charge was met by Watts, in the preface to his "Hymns and Spiritual Songs, 1707, long before Johnson made it. "Have they forgot, or were they never told that many parts of the Old Testament were verse? and the figures are stronger and the metaphors bolder and the images more surprising and strange than ever I read in any profane writer?"

Indeed the best hymns are boldest in figure. So far from being undesirable, poetic vigor and color are necessary to great hymns; only this liveliness must not be what Herrick called "unbaptized." The hymn that figured night as

That Ethiop queen with jewels in her hair

did not long survive. A hymn might conceivably point a moral by a Cleopatra or more easily by a Queen of Sheba, but it may not ask the saints to celebrate her charms, or to give her more than passing note. The hymn-book is not unreasonable in