One thing our modern dialogue-consciousness has given us is what might be called an historical ‘sounding board’ harking back to the Hebraic tradition in which reverberate refrains of words like ‘When he calls, I shall answer, I am with you’ (Psalm 90). Set within the framework of our own age, which could be termed an age which speaks of God grown silent, these echoes can have a particular poignancy for us and we can at times find special relevance in the discovery of comparable tensions in the past. Such a tension is revealed in a study of the religious verse of two seventeenth-century English poets, John Donne and George Herbert.