It is the first stanza of a poem to _Death_.

He is glorying over Death as personified in a skeleton.
Death, thou wast once an uncouth, hideous thing-- Nothing but bones, The sad effect of sadder groans: Thy mouth was open, but thou couldst not sing.
No writer before him has shown such a love to God, such a childlike confidence in him.

The love is like the love of those whose verses came first in my volume.

But the nation had learned to think more, and new difficulties had consequently arisen.

These, again, had to be undermined by deeper thought, and the discovery of yet deeper truth had been the reward.