truth; the lowest are poverty-stricken indeed.

In 1615 was born Richard Baxter, one of the purest and wisest and
devoutest of men--and no mean poet either. If ever a man sought between
contending parties to do his duty, siding with each as each appeared
right, opposing each as each appeared wrong, surely that man was Baxter.
Hence he fared as all men too wise to be partisans must fare--he pleased
neither Royalists nor Puritans. Dull of heart and sadly unlike a mother
was the Church when, by the Act of Uniformity of Charles II., she drove
from her bosom such a son, with his two thousand brethren of the clergy!

He has left us a good deal of verse--too much, perhaps, if we consider
the length of the poems and the value of condensation. There is in many
of them a delightful fervour of the simplest love to God, uttered with a
plain half poetic, half logical strength, from which sometimes the poetry
breaks out clear and fine. Much that he writes is of death, from the
dread of which he evidently suffered--a good thing when it drives a man
to renew his confidence in his Saviour's presence. It has with him a very
different origin from the vulgar fancy that to talk about death is
religious. It was refuge from the fear of death he sought, and that is
the part of every man who would not be a slave. The _door of death_ of
which he so often speaks is to him a door out of the fear of death.

The poem from which the following excerpt is made was evidently written
in view of some imminent suffering for conscience-sake, probably when the
Act of Uniformity was passed: twenty years after, he was imprisoned at
the age of sixty-seven, and lay nearly a year and a half.--I omit many
verses.