Being a dissenter, he was debarred the advantages of a university education, but he taught dissenters how to put grace into their hymns and sermons; and without being a strong logician, he put such clearness into his Treatise upon Logic as to carry it for a time into the curriculum of Oxford. Our American poet, Bryant, had great admiration for the familiar Watts's version of the 100th Psalm: We'll crowd thy gates with thankful songs, High as the heavens our voices raise; And earth, with her ten thousand tongues, Shall fill thy courts with sounding praise. And what pious tremors shook the air, when the country choirs in New England meetinghouses lifted up their voices to the old hymn, commencing: There is a land of pure delight! I don't know but these bits of moral music may have been hustled out from modern. church primers for something more æsthetic; but I am sure that a good many white-haired people-of whom I hope to count some among my readers-are carried back pleasantly by the rhythmic jingle of the good Doctor to those child days when hopes were fresh, and holidays a joy, and summers long; and when flowery paths stretched out before us, over which we have gone toiling since-to quite other music than that of Dr. Isaac Watts. And if his songs are gone out of our fine books, and have fallen below the mention of the dilettante critics, I am the more glad to rescue his name, as that of an honest, devout, hard-working, cultivated man who has woven an immeasurable deal of moral fibre into the web and woof of many generations of men and women. By the generosity of a friend he was endowed with all the privileges of a beautiful baronial home (Abney Park) where he lived for thirty odd years-reaching almost four score-never forgetting his simplicities, his humilities, his faith, his sweet humanities, and never having done harm, or wished harm, to any of God's creatures; and this cannot be said of many who preach, and of many of whom we are to talk. There was another clerical poet of less private worth, who had a very great reputation early in the eighteenth century. Fragments of his sombre-colored and magniloquent Night Thoughts are still frequently encountered in Commonplace Books of Poetry; while some of his picturesque or full-freighted lines, or half lines, have passed into common speech; such as- "The undevout astronomer is mad;" "Tired Nature's sweet restorer, balmy sleep;" "Procrastination is the thief of time." You will recognize these as old acquaintances; and you are to credit them to Dr. Edward Young,1 who was born about two hundred years ago down in Hampshire, son of a father who had been Chaplain to King William III. He was an Oxford man, lived a wild life there-attaching himself to a fast young Duke of Wharton, who led him into many awkward scrapes-and developing an early love, which clung by him through life, for attaching himself to great people. He wrote plays which were not good, and odes which were worse than the plays, but touched off with little jets of terrific adulation: "To poets, sacred is a Dorset's name, Their wonted passport thro' the gates of fame; It bribes the partial reader into praise And throws a glory round the sheltered lays." And so on to a Compton, a Lady Germaine, 1B. 1681; d. 1765. ford. 2 vols., 12 mo. Works, with memoir, by J. Mit- a Duke, in nauseous succession. In fact, he seemed incapable of using any colors but gaudy or resplendent ones, and is nothing if not exaggerated, and using heaps of words. Would you hear how he puts Jonah into the whale's mouth? "As yawns an earthquake, when imprisoned air This is from his poem of the Last Day, which had some of his best work in it. He wrote flattering words of Addison, which Addison could not return in the same measure. He had acquaintance with Pope, with Swift, with Lady Mary Montagu, and others whom he counted worth knowing. He made a vain run for Parliament, and ended by taking church orders somewhat late in life-staying one of his plays,1 which was just then in rehearsal, as inconsistent with his new duties. 'Only staying; since the play (of The Brothers) was brought out in 1753, some twenty years after his establishment in the rectory of Welwyn. He married the elegant widowed daughter of an earl, who died not many years thereafter; and from this affliction, and his brooding over it, came his best-known poem of Night Thoughts. It had great currency in England, and was admired, and translated, and read largely upon the Continent. For many a year, a copy of Young's mournful, magniloquent poem, bound in morocco and gilt-edged was reckoned one of the most acceptable and worthy gifts to a person in affliction. But of a surety it has not the same hold upon people in this century that it had in the last. There are eloquent passages in it-passages almost rising to sublimity. His love of superlatives and of wordy exaggerations served him in good stead when he came to talk of the shortness of time, and the length of eternity, and the depth of the grave, and the shadows of death. Amidst these topics he moved on the great sable pinions of his muse with a sweep of wing, and a steadiness of poise, that drew a great many sorrowing and pious souls after him. This is his Apostrophe to Night: "O majestic Night! Nature's great ancestor! Day's elder born! |