Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/187

Rh or in the Church Floor, with its characteristically quaint and imaginative symbolism—

"Mark you the floor? that square and speckled stone                                        Is Patience :          And the other black and grave wherewith each one                              Is cheker'd all along                                         Humilitie :          The gentle rising which on either hand                             Leads to the Quire above                                         Is Confidence:         But the sweet cement which in one sure band                     Ties the whole frame is Love                                         and Charitie.         Hither sometimes sinne steals and stains          The marble's neat and curious veins:      But all is cleansed when the marble weeps.         Sometimes Death puffing at the door         Blows all the dust about the floor:     But while he thinks to spoil the room he sweeps.         Blest be the Architect whose art Could build so strong in a weak heart."

Herbert's love of symbolism extends to the form of his verses. He has poems in the shape of wings and crosses, and, more happily, writes of The Trinity in a verse of three lines, of Sunday in one of seven, and describes Aaron's dress in stanzas that swell out and die away like bells.

The influence of Herbert's fine spirit and prevailing though quaint rhetoric is witnessed for by Baxter, and is clear from the work of his two chief followers, greater poets at their best than himself, but less careful workmen—Henry Vaughan (1621-2-1695) and Richard Crashaw (1613-1649). Vaughan was a Welshman of whose life we