Shall their counter-tenors roar,” etc.
Clever in a way, but hardly devotional!
Withers’ “Musicians’ Hymn” has a very practical hint to the “singers’ gallery,” as well as to the congregation:
“He sings and plays
The songs which best Thou lovest,
Who does and says
The things which Thou approvest.”
What Withers’ influence on subsequent English hymnody might have been we can only conjecture: the Company of Stationers boycotted his book because he had secured the king’s order to bind it up with the Psalter and shut it out from the regular channels of trade. His second collection, “Hallelujah,” was even more practicable and candidly didactic in style. But Withers had but a slight, if any, influence, for Sternhold and Hopkins still ruled the worship of the churches.
His immediate successors in hymn writing, Herbert, Donne, Crashaw, and Vaughan, were not influenced by his practical spirit and sang to please themselves, not to lead the congregation.
George Herbert (1593-1633) was a devout soul, full of a usually charming fantasy and fertile in imagery; but antithesis was still an allurement to poets in his generation. His “Antiphon” makes an effective hymn, but the inevitable contrast is still there: