The churchyard lines I just now quoted
afford an instance of it: but the whole branch of our literature,--
and a very popular branch it is, our hymnology,--to which those lines
are to be referred, is one continued instance of it. Our German
kinsmen and we are the great people for hymns. The Germans are very
proud of their hymns, and we are very proud of ours; but it is hard
to say which of the two, the German hymn-book or ours, has least
poetical worth in itself, or does least to prove genuine poetical
power in the people producing it. I have not a word to say against
Sir Roundell Palmer's choice and arrangement of materials for his
Book of Praise; I am content to put them on a level (and that is
giving them the highest possible rank) with Mr. Palgrave's choice and
arrangement of materials for his Golden Treasury; but yet no sound
critic can doubt that, so far as poetry is concerned, while the
Golden Treasury is a monument of a nation's strength, the Book of
Praise is a monument of a nation's weakness. Only the German race,
with its want of quick instinctive tact, of delicate, sure
perception, could have invented the hymn as the Germans and we have
it; and our non-German turn for style,--style, of which the very
essence is a certain happy fineness and truth of poetical
perception,--could not but desert us when our German nature carried
us into a kind of composition which can please only when the
perception is somewhat blunt.
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