He was invited to write other hymns for use in the same church, and soon produced a sufficient number to make a book. The book met a demand of the times,

and was immediately popular.

Among his early hymns was one composed under very interesting circumstances. Dr. Watts was enamored of Miss Elizabeth Singer, afterwards the celebrated Mrs. Rowe, who was greatly admired for her personal beauty, intellectual graces, and moral excellences. Some of the most accomplished men of the time were among her friends, and several offered her their hands.

Dr. Watts proposed marriage to Miss Singer, and was rejected. He was small in stature and lacking in personal beauty. Miss Singer, in alluding to his intellectual worth, said that she "loved the jewel, but could not admire the casket that contained it." His disappointment was very great, and in the first shadow of it he thus exhibits the feelings of his heart:

How vain are all things here below,

How false, and yet how fair!
Each pleasure hath its poison too,
And every sweet a snare.

The brightest things below the sky
Give but a flattering light;

We should suspect some danger nigh
Where we possess delight.

Our dearest joys and nearest friends,
The partners of our blood,

How they divide our wavering minds,
And leave but half for God.

The fondness of a creature's love,
How strong it strikes the sense;
Thither the warm affections move,
Nor can we call them thence.

My Saviour, let thy beauties be
My soul's eternal food;

And grace command my heart away

From all created good.

The hymn, beginning,

"There is a land of pure delight,"

associates itself with the natural scenery of Southampton, his native town. It was written while he was sitting at the window of a parlor, overlooking the river Itchen, and in full view of the Isle of Wight. The landscape there is very beautiful, and forms a model for a poet to employ in describing allegorically the passage of the soul from earth to the paradise above.

His

Watts lived a tranquil, uneventful lire, passing thirtyfour years in the seclusion of Alney Park, a nobleman's seat, where he had been invited to make a home. health was always delicate. He both preached and wrote, but his best efforts were given to his pen.

A critical writer in the "Oxford Essays" fixes upon the hymn beginning,

"When I survey the wondrous cross,'

as Dr. Watts' best original effort; and pronounces the rendering of the ninetieth Psalm, beginning,

"Our God, our help in ages past,"

as his finest paraphrase. The latter indeed not only preserves the sublime and lofty spirit, but the grand and

shadowy imagery of the Hebrew lawgiver's poetical con

templation:

"A thousand ages in thy sight,

66

Are like an evening gone;

Short as the watch that ends the night,

Before the rising sun.

Time, like an ever-rolling stream,

Bears all its sons away;

They fly, forgotten, as a dream

Dies at the opening day.

"The busy tribes of flesh and blood,
With all their cares and fears,
Are carried downward by the flood,
And lost in following years."

Probably none of Dr. Watts' hymns has been so widely used, and has held so steadily its character as the interpreter of a common religious experience, as that beginning,

"When I can read my title clear,

To mansions in the skies."

The last stanza of this hymn, beginning,

"There I shall bathe my weary soul

In seas of heavenly rest,"

is supposed to have borrowed its pleasing imagery from the scenery of the calm harbor of Southampton, in view of which it was written. Cowper seems to have taken his picture of the pious peasant woman's contentment and hope, in the famous allusion to Voltaire in the poem Hope," from one of these stanzas. He speaks of the

humble cottager as one who