"He shall be damned that won't believe."

Why did not Mr. Beecher thus print it, instead of giving the alteration as found in the Methodist Hymn Book,

"And he condemned who won't believe?"

At the close of Hymn 1040, Dr. Watts says:

"The Lord makes bare his arm
Through all the earth abroad:"

and so the verse reads in all the collections we have examined. Mr. Beecher, who carefully restores original readings, alters it, perhaps, because he doubted the truth of the sentiment as given by Watts, and turns it into a prayer, thus:

"O God! make bare thine arm
Through all the earth abroad."

So, too, we can see no plausible pretext for altering the last line of this stanza in Hymn 45:

"One day amid the place

Where dear God, hath been,
my

Is sweeter than ten thousand days
Of pleasurable sin."

Thus Watts.

Beecher says:

"One day amid the place

Where God, my God hath been,

Is sweeter than ten thousand days
Within the tents of sin."

Mr. Beecher's Hymn, 480,

"Lord, I am vile, conceived in sin,"

has undergone a terrible mangling, and we incline to the opinion that it has been improved by the process.

In Hymn 132, Watts wrote:

"Nations, attend before his throne, With solemn fear, with sacred joy." John Wesley altered it to read:

"Before Jehovah's awful throne,
Ye nations bow with sacred joy,"

and Mr. Beecher, like a sensible man, perpetuates Wesley's alteration.

Then, again, out of mere waywardness, our compiler rejects emendations which commend themselves to the judgment of every sensible man. Thus he gives us,

"I'll praise my Maker with my breath," instead of,

"I'll praise my Maker while I've breath." And in the same hymn we have,

"The Lord hath eyes to give the blind,"

which is a very common-place statement of a fact that no reasonable man will question, preferred by Mr. Beecher to the truly poetic line,

"The Lord pours eyesight on the blind."

So in Watts's beautiful resurrection hymn the substitution of ever for often is a most manifest improvement:

"God, my Redeemer lives,

And often (ever) from the skies,
Looks down and watches all my dust,
Till he shall bid it rise."

But Mr. Beecher prefers often, implying that there may be occasions when the eye of the Lord is not in every place. Often it is, but not always.

Watts is so great a favorite with our compiler that he gives us one of his hymns in two places. Hymn 69 begins:

"The Lord Jehovah reigns;

His throne is built on high,
The garments he assumes
Are light and majesty.

His glories shine

With beams so bright,

Mo mortal eye

Can bear the sight."

Hymn 179 is the same thing done into long meter, thus:

"Jehovah reigns, His throne is high,
His robes are light and majesty;
His glory shines with beams so bright,
No mortal can sustain the sight."

Watts having been thus duplicated, it was no more than fair that Wesley should be honored in the same way, especially as the Plymouth collection sails under no sectarian flag, and in this way the number of hymns in the book would be increased. Accordingly, after giving us a part of that well-known hymn,

"Come on, my partners in distress,"

as No. 870, we pass on to No. 1182, and here we have the same hymn again. No. 870 ends with the stanza beginning,

"Who suffer with our Master here," and No. 1182 begins

"We suffer with our Master here," the rest of the stanza being precisely the same in both places. It is a little curious, and not creditable to the acuteness of the compiler, that the former is left without the name of the author. It stands there

as anonymous, one of those whose authorship could not be ascertained; but when it appears the second time it is credited properly to C. Wesley.

Mr. Beecher gives us from Watts, poetry that all other hymn compilers were willing to let pass into oblivion. A stanza like this, in Hymn 139, is unworthy of the most wretched verse - monger who was ever permitted to disfigure a Hymn Book.

"He speaks, and lo! all nature shakes;
Heaven's everlasting pillars bow;
He rends the clouds with hideous cracks,
And shoots his fiery arrows through."

What a figure! Shooting arrows through hideous cracks!

Here is a stanza, too, which might as well have been left in the mass of the Doctor's forgotten twaddle:

"Had I a glance at thee, my God,
Kingdoms and men would vanish soon;
Vanish, as though I saw them not,
As a dim candle dies at noon.'

That is, the songs steal honors, with which to build, not the poet's, but their own applause.

We do not know that there is in the volume anything decidedly heterodox, with proper explanations, but there are certainly a few stanzas hard to be understood. Take this from Hymn 66:

"Man drew from man his birth;

But God his noble frame
Built of the ruddy earth,

Fill'd with celestial flame."

In the first line, is the poet speaking of man in the abstract-of Adam? And if not, of whom is he speaking in the lines following? But we have a far more imposing "man" in Hymn 83:

"Mankind shall be one brotherhood,
One human soul shall fill the earth."

A large soul that, surely.

It requires some little hermeneutical skill to make the following stanza exactly quadrate with Scripture and common sense. It is from Hymn 145:

"That every human word and deed,
Each flash of feeling, will, or creed,
Hath solemn meaning from above,
Begun and ended all in love."

Hymn 254 is an address to the Virgin Mary. Mr. Beecher commences by asking her several questions, thus:

Why is thy face so lit with smiles,
Mother of Jesus! why?

And wherefore is thy beaming look

So fixed upon the sky?"

Mary does not respond, but the poet goes on,
and we give the entire hymn as we find it:
"2. His rising form on Olivet
A summer's shadow cast!
The branches of the hoary trees
Droop'd as the shadow pass'd.

"3. And as he rose with all his train
Of righteous souls around,

His blessing fell into thine heart

Like dew into the ground.

"4. Down stoop'd a silver cloud from heaven,

The Eternal spirit's car,

And on the lessening vision went

Like some receding star.

5. The silver cloud hath sailed away,
The skies are blue and free;
The road that vision took is now
Sunshine and vacancy."

Was ever such trash put into the lips of a Protestant congregation?

There is another hymn (285) of very

an address to the Virgin Mary, but, if we understand it, a request of a husband to his wife, or vice versa. We copy the first stanza:

"O sing unto my soul, my love,
That all-entrancing lay,

Such as the seraphim above

Are singing far away."

O dear! Agnes, my love, give us a tune on the piano; an all-entrancing tune, my sweet!

Hymn 735 commences in, to say the least, a very strange style for the lips of a public congregation in the house of God on his holy day. Listen, and fancy Mr. Beecher inviting his people to sing :

"The turf shall be my fragrant shrine;
My temple, Lord, that arch of thine;
My censer's breath the mountain airs,
And silent thoughts my only prayers."

By "the turf" he does not mean, as our English brethren would understand him, the race course. Of course not. If he must have a censer, but we can see no indispensable necessity for it, if he must have it, we know no good reason why his wish should not be gratified, and mountain airs be supplied from the Catskill or the Alleghanies as breath for the aforesaid. "Silent thoughts" his only prayer? Nothing else at any time? We are more doubtful on this point than we are about the censer. Let the divines settle it. Nor are we quite confident that the orthodoxy of Hymn 595 will stand the test. The poetry, at any rate, is below par:

censer

"Dear Friend, whose presence in the house,
Whose gracious word benign
Could once at Cana's wedding feast

Change water into wine,
Come visit us! and when dull work

Grows weary, line on line,
Revive our souls, and let us see

Life's water turned to wine."

What, all of it? Perhaps, however, the poet is to be understood only in a Pickwickian sense; otherwise, at least during the dog days, we beg to be excused from uniting in the prayer.

There are in this collection not a few specimens of very flat rhyme, as, for example, Hymn 19:

"While now upon this Sabbath eve,
Thy house, Almighty God, we leave,
'Tis sweet, as sinks the setting sun,
To think on all our duties done."

We have seen, in our day, a great deal of ridiculous rhyme. In the box of rejected poems from moon-struck boys and little girls at boarding-schools, we never met with anything so utterly trashy as this stanza found in Hymn 155:

"And like a den most dark he made
His hid and secret place;
With waters black and airy clouds
Encompassed he was."

Mr. A. C. Coxe, one of our own countrymen, writes costively, but is always successful in making his lines rhyme, whether there is any reason in them or not. This is one of his stanzas from Hymn 230:

"How beauteous were the marks divine,
That in thy meekness used to shine;
That lit thy lovely pathway, trod
In wondrous love, O Son of God."

That participle trod is a great favorite with rhymesters. It comes in so pat to help them when in trouble. Mr. Coxe

continues his address to the Saviour:

"O who like thee-so calm, so bright, So pure, so made to live in light? O who like thee did ever go

So patient through a world of woe?"

O who like thee so humbly bore,
The scorn, the scoff of men, before?

Before? Truly, no one; nor behind either, for that matter. The epithets in the first line appear to have been plagiarized from Hymn 30, where they are applied to Sunday:

"Blest day of God! most calm, most bright."

But these epithets are great favorites. We have them again in Hymn 317 with the addition of another, which might not be sung with any approximation to the truth yesterday when the thermometer in the pulpit stood at ninety-eight and three

"But now I am a soldier,

My captain's gone before;
He's given me my orders,

And bid me not give o'er."

Interesting orders these, if we only knew what they were; or, are they all included in the command,

"Don't give o'er ?"

which would have been don't give over, but the rhyme was more imperative than the captain.

There are occasional specimens of what our Dagger correspondent calls the style highfalutin, as in Hymn 36:

"How sweet, how calm, this summer's morn!
How pure the air that breathes,
And soft the sound upon it borne,
And light its vapor wreaths."

If the rhyme would have allowed, we should have had, perhaps,

"How pure the air we breathe!"

Its light vapor wreaths are soft, pure, and sweet. Mawkish, too, are they not?

But the author of Hymn 83 is still more sentimental, lackadaisical, in fact:

"The stormy winds are hushed to rest, And hang self-poised upon their wings; And nursed on mother nature's breast,

Sweet flowers lie like sleeping things."

Self-poised, hey? And sleeping things; Creeping things" we read of in the Bible; but sleeping things, what are they? Sweet flowers lie, like them.

Hymn 1136 appears to be intended for singing at the death of a little child. The rhymes are well enough, but what strange fatuity gave it a place in a collection of hymns to be sung in Christian congregations? We copy the whole of it:

"1. What though the stream be dead,
Its banks all still and dry!

It murmureth o'er a lovelier bed
In air-groves of the sky.

"2. What though our bird of light
Lie mute with plumage dim;
In heaven I see her glancing bright,
I hear her angel hymn.

"3. True that our beauteous doe
Hath left her still retreat,
But purer now, in heavenly snow,
She lies at Jesus' feet."

Lying in snow, is she? Poor thing, cold. But we may not stop to moralize. Here is the last stanza:

"4. O star, untimely set!

Why should we weep for thee? Thy bright and dewy coronet

Is rising o'er the sea.'

A dewy coronet rising over the sea! But why over the sea? Perhaps she was a sailor's daughter, and the image is nautical.

But now you shall have a touch of the exquisite. Listen; we read from Hymn

801:

"Bright were the mornings first impearl'd
On earth, and sea, and air;
The birth-days of a rising world,

For Power divine was there!"

Where? The mornings which were first impearled were bright. Those which have been impearled since, of course are not so bright. Why not? Why, because those mornings were the first days of the world. They, that is, the world's birthdays, came all at once; and not as yours does, annually.

But we must not stop to point out specific beauties. Most of our readers have sufficient acuteness of intellectual vision to find them for themselves, at least where they are so thickly scattered as in the verses last quoted.

Pass we then to Hymn 98, which, if we mistake not, will require some patient study from those who wish to understand it. Thus it begins:

"I sing of God, the mighty source
Of all things, the stupendous force

On which all things depend;
From whose right arm, beneath whose eyes
All period, power, and enterprise

Commence, and reign, and end."

Isn't that grand? We might give you more of it, but it is unnecessary, nor would it be kind in us to leave you in the stanza where the poet invites us to

"The multitudinous abyss,
Where nature joys in secret bliss,

And wisdom hides her skill."

Multitudinous is a great word; so is abyss. The union of the two conveys a very multitudinarian idea. But that multitudinous abyss is a secret place where "nature joys.' "It reminds one of Tillietudleum, where young men and lasses "joy" themselves, not in secret, indeed, but in couples.

But here we have something still more magnificent. It is the closing stanza of Hymn 86, and is an address to the Supreme Being:

"I find thee in the noon of night,

And read thy name in every star That drinks in splendor from the light That flows from mercy's beaming car; Thy footstool, Lord, each starry gem Composes-not Thy diadem."

"The noon

You must read that again if you desire to extract all its sweetness. of night," of course, means midnight, and the " wee short hours ayont the twal," as Burns has it. But only think of every star with the same letters on it, and each at the same time drinking from a beaming The last two lines are equally inimitable and unintelligible. So is the commencement of Hymn 488, at least to us. Can any body find meaning in the lines: "God named Love, whose fount thou art,

car.

Thy crownless Church before thee stands, With too much hating in her heart,

And too much striving in her hands."

It may be our own fault, certainly it is our misfortune, that we are unable, and we have tried faithfully, to fathom the meaning of this, the introductory stanza of Hymn 910:

"Alas! the utter emptiness!

What life has it to give?
O shall it God's own fire affect?
Soul, wilt thou slightly live ?"

To what does it in the second and third lines refer? Perhaps the reader thinks if he had the next stanza it might help him to understand the first. Here it is:

"Thyself amid the silence clear,
The world far off and dim,
Thy vision free, the Bright one near,
Thyself alone with him."

Now please to read these verses again. Do it carefully. Does any semblance of sense begin to appear? The rest of the hymn is in the same foggy strain.

Parodies on well-known hymns are always offensive to good taste, almost sacrilegious is one on Heber's Missionary hymn, commencing,

On Thibet's snow-capped mountains,
On Afric's burning sand,
Where roll the fiery fountains
Along Hawai's strand.

But our space is exhausted, and we must take our leave of the Plymouth collection. If we have not gained from its pages much information, we must admit that it has afforded us what is scarcely less desirable in this warm weather-a good deal of amusement.