Compare this with a version of the same portion by Dr. Henry King, Bishop of Chichester, who, no great poet, has written some good verse. He was about the same age as Phineas Fletcher.
Except the Lord the house sustain, The builder's labour is in vain; Except the city he defend, And to the dwellers safety send, In vain are sentinels prepared, Or arméd watchmen for the guard.
You vainly with the early light Arise, or sit up late at night To find support, and daily eat Your bread with sorrow earned and sweat; When God, who his beloved keeps, This plenty gives with quiet sleeps.
What difference do we find? That the former has the more poetic touch, the latter the greater truth. The former has just lost the one precious thing in the psalm; the latter has kept it: that care is as useless as painful, for God gives us while we sleep, and not while we labour.
George Wither, born in 1588, therefore about the same age as Giles Fletcher, was a very different sort of writer indeed. There could hardly be a greater contrast. Fancy, and all her motley train, were scarcely known to Wither, save by the hearing of the ears.
He became an eager Puritan towards the close of his life, but his poetry chiefly belongs to the earlier part of it. Throughout it is distinguished by a certain straightforward simplicity of good English thought and English word. His hymns remind me, in the form of their speech, of Gascoigne. I shall quote but little; for, although there is a sweet calm and a great justice of reflection and feeling, there is hardly anything of that warming glow, that rousing force, that impressive weight in his verse, which is the chief virtue of the lofty rhyme.
The best in a volume of ninety _Hymns and Songs of the Church_, is, I think, _The Author's Hymn_ at the close, of which I give three stanzas. They manifest the simplicity and truth of the man, reflecting in their very tone his faithful, contented, trustful nature.
By thy grace, those passions, troubles, And those wants that me opprest, Have appeared as water-bubbles, Or as dreams, and things in jest: For, thy leisure still attending, I with pleasure saw their ending.
Those afflictions and those terrors, Which to others grim appear, Did but show me where my errors And my imperfections were; But distrustful could not make me Of thy love, nor fright nor shake me.