parts, or as far, as that duration without end will outlast a moment, or seventy years if you please. The mathematician who hath not weights, measures, and arithmetic for these truths, should never have presumed to palm his tables of purchase on a world, less awake than himself; nor ought his followers, in favour of their master, to have so strenuously contended with the followers of another mathematician for the honour of executing a scheme of fluxions, that is, for the honour of doing what neither of them ever did. HYMNS. INTRODUCTION, BEWAILING THE DEFECTS OF THESE HYMNS. They shall bring forth fruit in old age.-PSAL. xcii. 14. How feebly burns my fire! 1 How weak and low are these my strains! How little of myself remains! My heart! what, nothing higher! 2 An hobbling verse, and a forc'd rhyme And seem to speak constraint. 4 For hell escap'd and heaven acquir'd How should a grateful heart be fir'd!- 50 why is higher genius given To war and lawless love, Than to the praise of God and heaven, 6 Is this the numbness of old age, That damps in me the poet's rage, 7 In soil exhausted as I sow, And late, what can accrue, But grain unripe, reap'd under snow, Like that of eighty-two?* The harvest in 1782, was the latest ever known in Great Britain and 8 The gleanings of my meagre field, 9 Or hath my God from me withdrawn Even those, which warm'd my early dawn! 10 O turn not thou a critic then, But, add thy spirit to my pen, 11 I seek his glory, not my own, For my own sins, and thine, I groan— 12 Thus censur'd by yourself, you cry, The low I censure, not the high, The brushwood, nor the trees. 13 But if a spreading oak shall crown 14 Our lowly efforts, when we sing May, moth-like, rise on feeble wing, 15 In human bodies, lesser parts The fingers, toes, and sometimes warts, 16 Are you a Christian? you will here But censure rather with a tear, 17 But if an irreligious heart You bring to this review, Your taste, your judgment, and your art 18 For God, and candour, far too vain, At hymns you can but freeze. 20 All praise from him who merits none, Is shameless want of sense ; Or, if by views of service won, Is obloquy propense. 21 This sort of praise unbought I seize, Nay, seize it as the truest praise, A HYMN FOR PENITENTS. 1 When backward on my actions past 2 When on the time to come I pore, 3 Behold, even now the storm begins, 4 Thro' terrors not to be express'd, 5 Oppress'd by fear, by hope betray'd, For life unfit, of death afraid, I must, but dare not, die. |