Extract from a biography of Jeremy Taylor by Edmund Gosse, published by Macmillan & Co. Ltd, London, 1903: pp.113-116; transcribed from a copy in possession.
. . . The picturesque title of The Golden Grove and its fiery preface of revolt from under "the harrows and saws of impertinent and ignorant preachers," are likely to awaken anticipations in the literary reader which the body of the treatise can only disappoint. It is a manual of daily prayers and litanies, so phrased as to contain a brief summary of all that a Christian should believe, practise, or desire. It begins with a Short Catechism, which Taylor hoped would be accepted by moderate churchmen as a temporary substitute for that which had been suppressed with the Liturgy. This is followed by an exposition of the Creed, and that by "Agenda," or a list of acts of piety to be performed throughout the day. The next section, "Via Pacis," is largely a paraphrase from the Imitation of Christ, and is followed by "Postulanda," a dilution -- for we can call it nothing else -- of the Lord's Prayer. Then follow, concluding the treatise, a set of devotions for the week; many of these have the purity, and one or two something of the magnificence, of their author, but they are in his least personal vein. On the whole The Golden Grove offers very little worthy the notice of the literary student of Taylor's works.
But at the close of it, and appended to it as by an afterthought, is a slender collection of poems, Festival Hymns, which has the special interest attaching to the only work in verse which Jeremy Taylor published. He himself indulged in no illusions about the merit of these exercises. A year later he looked back upon their publication with a blush, and when Evelyn had the complaisance to praise them, their author replied, "I could not but smile at my own weaknesses, and very much love the great candour and sweetness of your nature, that you were pleased to endure my English poetry. But I could not be removed from my certain knowledge of my own greatest weaknesses in it." Taylor was also, about this time, translating part of the De Rerum Natura into English verse, but desisted when he was shown by Evelyn the version of Lucretius which that philosopher had made. All this is curious as showing that Jeremy Taylor, about 1655, having risen to the height of his mastery of prose, was attempting to extend his sovereignty into the province of verse. Had he attempted this twenty years earlier, is it probable that he might have trained himself to be an accomplished poet of the artificial order; but he made the experiment too late.
The greater part of the Festival Hymns is a sort of cantata on the mysteries of religion, arranged in connected sections. A quarter of a century had passed since certain eccentricities of the least happily inspired pieces in Herbert's Temple had opened the door to mere oddity in the form of religious poetry. The example of Cowley -- although his Pindarique Odes, those great dissolvers of the public taste, were as yet hardly known -- may have had some influence upon Taylor, But the one precedent author whom he had manifestly read, and whose fantastic innovations in metre he accepted with alacrity, was Henry Vaughan, the Silurist, the first part of whose Silex Scintillans had appeared in 1650 while the second was dated 1655. It is impossible to connect Vaughan with Taylor in any historic way. But it should be remembered that the lord of Golden Grove was a distant kinsman of the Silurist, that Llandilo and Llansaintffraid were within riding distance of one another, and that in Mrs Philips, "the Matchless Orinda," . . . Henry Vaughan and Jeremy Taylor had an enthusiastic common friend.
The versification in the Festival Hymns consists of short lines, arbitrarily broken up by rhymes, and arranged on no rhythmical principle. No system could be less tuneful, and in comparison with these hymns the worst odes of Cowley and even of Flatman are musical; what is curious in so learned a writer, Taylor's rhymes are often scarcely assonances. It was certainly in the Silex Scintillans that Taylor found his model for his eccentricity of metre; we may perhaps go further, and in Vaughan's irregular canticles called "The Jews" and "Jesus Weeping" detect the identical poems which Taylor read at the close of 1654 and straightway sat down to imitate. He was far too skilful a craftsman to fail to produce something ingenious, and the following passage may be quoted as presenting Jeremy Taylor at his best as a poet :--
- "What ravished heart, seraphic tongue or eyes,
- Clear as the morning's rise,
- Can speak, or think, or see
- That bright eternity ?
- There the King's great transparent throne
- Is of an éntire jasper stone :
- There the eye
- Of the chrysolite,
- And a sky
- Of diamonds, rubies, chrysoprase,
- And above all, Thy holy face,
- Makes an eternal clarity.
- When Thou Thy jewels up dost bind, that day
- Remember us, we pray."
It would be difficult to find a more instructive text on which to expatiate upon the essential difference between poetry and prose. For here are all the elements of imagination and of language which Taylor would have employed in building up one of his dazzling prose sentences, lifting it into our vision like some perfect marble campanile against the blue Italian sky. But this strophe is a mere mistake; it has neither the plastic harmony of prose, nor the severer and more mechanical beauty of verse. It misses either perfection, and is merely a brilliant instance of the failure of a great genius to express itself in an unfamiliar medium. . . .
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