beautiful in the sight of Him who made them, than all Herrick's
Dianemes, Waller's Saccharissas, flames, darts, posies, love-knots,
anagrams, and the rest of the insincere cant of the court? What if
Zeal-for-Truth had never strung two rhymes together in his life? Did
not his heart go for inspiration to a loftier Helicon when it
whispered to itself, 'My love, my dove, my undefiled, is but one,'
than if he had filled pages with sonnets about Venuses and Cupids,
lovesick shepherds and cruel nymphs?

And was there no poetry, true idyllic poetry, as of Longfellow's
'Evangeline' itself in that trip round the old farm next morning;
when Zeal-for-Truth, after looking over every heifer, and peeping
into every sty, would needs canter down by his father's side to the
horse-fen, with his arm in a sling; while the partridges whirred up
before them, and the lurchers flashed like gray snakes after the
hare, and the colts came whinnying round, with staring eyes and
streaming manes; and the two chatted on in the same sober
businesslike English tone, alternately of 'The Lord's great dealings'
by General Cromwell, the pride of all honest fen-men, and the price
of troop-horses at the next Horncastle fair?

Poetry in those old Puritans? Why not? They were men of like
passions with ourselves. They loved, they married, they brought up
children; they feared, they sinned, they sorrowed, they fought--they
conquered. There was poetry enough in them, be sure, though they
acted it like men, instead of singing it like birds.