689G George Herbert (1593-1633) with Christopher Harvey (1597-1633)

The Temple. Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations. By Mr. George Herbert, Late Oratour of the University of Cambridge. Together with his Life. with several Additions. Psal. 29. In his Temple doth every man speak of his honour. The Tenth Edition, with an Alphabetical Table for ready finding out the chief places. [bound with] The Synagogue: Or The Shadow Of The Temple. Sacred Poems, And Private Ejaculations. In Imitation of Mr. George Herbert. The Sixth Edition, Corrected and Enlarged.



London: Printed by W. Godbid, for R.S. and are to be Sold by John Williams Junior, in Cross-Key Court in Little-Britain, 1674. . price $ 4,500



Duodecimo , Signatures: π⁶ [*⁶](-[*1]) ,A- I¹² K⁶; ²A-C¹², A-B¹²,C⁶ {tricky but complete] Nineth edition of the first book, the second title is a Fifth edition. There were no editions published between 1709 -1799. This copy is bound in 20th century vellum over boards a nice copy.

From The Church Militant 

Religion stands on tiptoe in our land,
Ready to pass to the American strand.
When height of malice and prodigious lusts, Impudent sinning, witchcrafts, and distrusts
The marks of future bane—shall fill our cup
Unto the brim, and make our measure up ;
When Seine shall swallow Tiber, and the Thames, By letting in them both, pollutes her streams When Italy of us shall have her will,
And all her calendar of sins fulfil.
Whereby one may foretell what sins next year Shall both in France and England domineer Then shall Religion to America flee ;
They have their times of Gospel even as we. My God, Thou dost prepare for them a way, By carrying first their gold from them away ; For gold and grace did never yet agree ; Religion always sides with poverty.



The text of the Temple includes the pattern poems, “The Altar,” and “Easter Wings” Herbert’s reputation rests on this remarkable collection of poems which mark perfectly the metaphysical tone of his spiritual unrest, which is resolved in final peace, “the Herbert we know through ‘Aaron,’ ‘Discipline,’ ‘The Collar,’ ‘The Pulley,’ and many other poems in which he strives to subdue the willful or kindle the apathetic self His principal themes are those ‘two vast, spacious things Sinne and Love’ There is nothing soft in the poet who seeks to engrave divine love in steel; and a catalogue of gratuitous, untempered, and short-lived sweets leads up to the magnificent contrast of the disciplined soul that ‘never gives’


¶” As the Anglican merges with the greater poet, so the ‘quaint’ writer merges with the metaphysical Herbert had his share of the age’s passion for anagrams and the like, which Addison was to condemn as ‘false wit’ But the poet who could shape a poem in the physical likeness of ‘The Altar’ or ‘Easter Wings’ had, even more than most of his fellows, a functional sense of meter and rhythm. The technical experimentalist and master was, we remember, a skilled and devoted musician. The movement of his verse, taut or relaxed, can suggest all his fluctuating moods, from self-will or weakness to joyful surrender and assured strength. He moves from this world to the world of the spirit ‘As from one room t’another,’ or dwells simultaneously in both, and it is in keeping with that habit of mind, and with metaphysical origins in general, that many of his poems should be allegorical anecdotes, transfigured emblems. Apart from some of his fine dramatic openings, Herbert does not attempt the high pitch of Donne’s ‘Divine Poems’ . His great effects are all the greater for rising out of a homely, colloquial quietness of tone; and peace brings quiet endings- ‘So I did sit and eat;’ ‘And I reply’d, My Lord’ Though the friend and admirer of Donne (and of Bacon), Herbert did not cultivate scholastic or scientific imagery; mature and everyday life, the Bible and the liturgy were his chief sources The highest truth, as he said more than once, must be plainly dressed In spite of his classical learning and his Latin and Greek verse, he avoided the common surface classicism of the time Of the elements of a deeper classicism, if we care to use that name, he had muscular density, precision, deceptive simplicity, and a dynamic sense of form At times his structure may be a winding stair, but it is all built of seasoned timber” (D Bush, English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century, pages 137-138).

Wing (2nd ed.), H1521, &, Wing H-1049; Palmer IV, 12. https://datb.cerl.org/estc/R18431 and https://datb.cerl.org/estc/R4431

You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
Is England and nowhere. Never and always.

from T. S. Eliot’s Little Gidding 1942

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