The Worlds Best Poetry, Volume 10 | Page 5

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worthy of a
higher being."
In his Introduction to the "Plymouth Collection of Hymns and
Tunes"--the pioneer book of all such aids to church congregational
singing--Henry Ward Beecher gave a noble view of the power of a
hymn arising out of experience:

"No other composition is like an experimental hymn. It is not a mere
poetic impulse. It is not a thought, a fancy, a feeling threaded upon
words. It is the voice of experience speaking from the soul a few words
that condense and often represent a whole life....
"One great hope may come to fruit only at the end of many years, and
as the ripening of a hundred experiences. As there be flowers that drink
the dews of spring and summer, and feed upon all the rains, and only
just before the winter comes burst forth into bloom, so it is with some
of the noblest blossoms of the soul. The bolt that prostrated Saul gave
him the exceeding brightness of Christ; and so some hymns could
never have been written but for a heart-stroke that well-nigh crushed
out the life. It is cleft in two by bereavement, and out of the rift comes
forth, as by resurrection, the form and voice that shall never die out of
the world. Angels sat at the grave's mouth; and so hymns are the angels
that rise up out of our griefs and darkness and dismay.
"Thus born, a hymn is one of those silent ministers which God sends to
those who are to be heirs of salvation. It enters into the tender
imagination of childhood, and casts down upon the chambers of its
thought a holy radiance which shall never quite depart. It goes with the
Christian, singing to him all the way, as if it were the airy voice of
some guardian spirit. When darkness of trouble, settling fast, is shutting
out every star, a hymn bursts through and brings light like a torch. It
abides by our side in sickness. It goes forth with us in joy to syllable
that joy.
"And thus, after a time, we clothe a hymn with the memories and
associations of our own life. It is garlanded with flowers which grew in
our hearts. Born of the experience of one mind, it becomes the
unconscious record of many minds.... Thus sprung from a wondrous
life, hymns lead a life yet more wonderful. When they first come to us
they are like the single strokes of a bell ringing down to us from above;
but, at length, a single hymn becomes a whole chime of bells, mingling
and discoursing to us the harmonies of a life's Christian experience."
Passing from this very human and sympathetic view of the profoundest
use of poetry, note how the veteran Bryant confirms it. In treating of
the beautiful mythologies of Greece and Rome, so much of which
entered into the warp and woof of ancient poetry, he grants their
poetical quality, but doubts whether, on the whole, the art gained more

than it lost by them, because, having a god for every operation of nature,
they left nothing in obscurity; everything was accounted for;
mystery--a prime element of poetry--existed no longer. Moreover:
"That system gave us the story of a superior and celestial race of beings,
to whom human passions were attributed, and who were, like ourselves,
susceptible of suffering; but it elevated them so far above the creatures
of earth in power, in knowledge, and in security from the calamities of
our condition, that they could be the subjects of little sympathy.
Therefore it is that the mythological poetry of the ancients is as cold as
it is beautiful, as unaffecting as it is faultless....
"The admirers of poetry, then, may give up the ancient mythology
without a sigh. Its departure has left us what is better than all it has
taken away: it has left us men and women; it has left us the creatures
and things of God's universe, to the simple charm of which the cold
splendor of that system blinded men's eyes, and to the magnificence of
which the rapid progress of science is every day adding new wonders
and glories. It has left us, also, a more sublime and affecting religion,
whose truths are broader, higher, nobler than any outlook to which its
random conjectures ever attained."
Yet, after all, returning from this consideration of poetic themes to the
question of the poetic principle itself; we may find a sturdy assertion of
it in a few words by Edgar Allan Poe--perhaps the most acute of the
many debaters of this apparently simple yet evasive problem. After
discussing the elements of poetry in music, painting, and other art, Poe
writes:
"I would define, in brief, the Poetry of words as the Rhythmical
Creation of
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