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
With sentiments so faint,
Ill suit a subject, so sublime,

And seem to speak constraint.
3 Is this the offering, O my soul,
Which thou to God hast brought
For pardon'd sin, and sin so foul,
In word, in deed, in thought?

4 For hell escap'd and heaven acquir'd
By Christ's atoning blood,

How should a grateful heart be fir'd!-
But mine is drench'd in mud.

50 why is higher genius given

To war and lawless love,

Than to the praise of God and heaven,
Of God, all praise above?

6 Is this the numbness of old age,
Or piety declin'd?

That damps in me the poet's rage,
And thus unnerves my mind?

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,
You see too closely reap'd;
Alas how little could it yield,
When only these escap'd!

9 Or hath my God from me withdrawn
That gratitude and zeal,

Even those, which warm'd my early dawn!
Both, reader, I bewail.

10 O turn not thou a critic then,
Nor vilify these lays,

But, add thy spirit to my pen,
Thy GOD, and mine to praise.

11 I seek his glory, not my own,
Nor catch at thy applause;

For my own sins, and thine, I groan—
Groan thou too, there is cause.

12 Thus censur'd by yourself, you cry,
Pray, why then publish these?

The low I censure, not the high,

The brushwood, nor the trees.

13 But if a spreading oak shall crown
The shrubs that under grow,
Why then desire to cut it down,
When these begin to blow?

14 Our lowly efforts, when we sing
On such exalted themes,

May, moth-like, rise on feeble wing,
And higher soar in flames.

15 In human bodies, lesser parts
We see with greater join'd,

The fingers, toes, and sometimes warts,
With arms and legs combin'd.

16 Are you a Christian? you will here
Enough to censure find;

But censure rather with a tear,
Than a disdainful mind.

17 But if an irreligious heart

You bring to this review,

Your taste, your judgment, and your art
Have nothing here to do.

18 For God, and candour, far too vain,
Avaunt from things like these,
Go, kindle in a song profane;

At hymns you can but freeze.
19 The writer blushes at your praise,
For praise your satire takes,
This crowns him with poetic bays,
That swills him thro' a jakes.

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,
And for applause assume;

Nay, seize it as the truest praise,
And wear it as my plume.

A

HYMN FOR PENITENTS.

1 When backward on my actions past
I turn my mournful eyes,
The black review from first to last,
With guilt all crowded lies.

2 When on the time to come I pore,
The louring prospect shews
A dreadful sea without a shore,
A sea of fears and woes.

3 Behold, even now the storm begins,
The swelling billows rise,
And gathering fury from my sins,
And from the angry skies,

4 Thro' terrors not to be express'd,
My troubled soul they drive,
Of hope, of comfort, and of rest,
My anxious heart deprive.

5 Oppress'd by fear, by hope betray'd,
"Tis vain to stand or fly;

For life unfit, of death afraid,

I must, but dare not, die.