Sweet fields beyond the swelling flood, But timorous mortals start and shrink Oh! could we make our doubts remove, Could we but climb where Moses stood, And view the landscape o'er, Nor Jordan's stream, nor death's cold flood, Should fright us from the shore. Or turn to the Hymn upon the Resurrection, which commences with a sublime stanza : He dies! the friend of sinners dies! Lo! Salem's daughters weep around! A solemn darkness veils the skies, A sudden trembling shakes the ground: and then immediately sinks into the combined errors of feebleness and bad taste. the streets of heaven. In a similar vein he talks of His Lyric Poems, containing the more ambitious efforts of his muse, are less interesting than the gentler effusions of a religious heart,—but his Ode upon the Day of Judgment, attempted in the Sapphic measure, displays considerable power, and even grandeur of thought. No English writer, with the exception of Collins, has completely succeeded in recommending poetry to the ear without the accompaniment of rhyme, or the graver and mellower music of blank verse. The Laureate's charming romance of Thalaba was a bold, but scarcely a successful enterprise. Several metrical experiments were attempted in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Spenser's hexameters have not come down to us; and Sidney's elegiac imitations of Ovid have no elegance to recommend them. The happiest copy of the Ovidian metre is contained in the following couplet of Coleridge: In the hexameter rises the fountain's silvery column; Campion, who was himself an experimentalist in poetry, wrote a treatise to show the inutility of rhyme *. THE DAY OF JUDGMENT, AN ODE†. ATTEMPTED IN THE ENGLISH SAPPHIC. When the fierce North-Wind with his airy forces And the red lightning, with a storm of hail, comes * Mr. Guest quotes the following song as appearing to him extremely beautiful: In a letter from Beattie respecting this ode, in Pinkerton's Literary Correspondence, vol. i., p. 11. How the poor sailors stand amazed and tremble, Quick to devour them. Such shall the noise be, and the wild disorder, Tears the strong pillars of the vault of heaven, Hark, the shrill outcries of the guilty wretches! Stare through their eyelids, while the living worm lies, Thoughts, like old vultures, prey upon their heart-strings, Stop here, my fancy; (all away, ye horrid How he sits, Godlike! and the saints around him O may I sit there, when he comes triumphant, But whatever estimate may be formed of the literary merits of Watts' poetry, all readers will unite in extolling the ardour of its devotion, and the purity of its spirit. These, we may believe, have gained for him a more unfading garland than fame could ever have bestowed. Of his Songs for Children only one opinion prevails; wherever they are known, they are admired. They present the happiest specimen, in any language, of religion and morality recommended to the infant mind through the medium of verse. The diction is familiar and elegant, without being either too common or refined; and the imagery is wisely chosen from objects and scenes continually before the eye. In this manner has the writer obtained for himself a place in our hearts among the most cherished remembrances of childhood. The bee, that hums by us on the summer grass, recalls him to the memory; and we cannot think upon our mothers, without recollecting Watts *. "You remember, I doubt not, the last sentence in Gibbon's Autobiography; I have engaged my young friend to write under it, Dr. Watts' beautiful Hymn, ending with the line,- Foretells a bright rising again.' This is one of the Hymns for Children, but surely it is for the children of God; for the heirs of glory; and when you compare it, either in point of good sense, or imagination, or sterling value, or sustaining hope, with the considerations and objects which feed the fancy, or exercise the understanding or affections of the most celebrated men who have engaged the attention, or called forth the eulogiums of the literati of the last century, you are irresistibly forced to exclaim, in the spirit of my grand favourite, O happy hymnist, O unhappy bard!" Mr. Wilberforce, writing to his Son, in 1830; Memoirs, vol. v. p. 289. EDWARD YOUNG. NEAR the skirts of the forest, between Bishop's Waltham and Winchester, lies the little village of Upham; here, in June, 1681, was born the future author of the Night Thoughts. His father was rector of the parish. The poet's life commenced under flattering auguries. Jacob says, writing in 1720, that the "queen stood godmother to him;" a mark of peculiar respect to the parent, and an earnest of patronage to the child. He was placed upon the foundation of Winchester School, but no vacancy occurring at New College before he was superannuated by the statutes, he entered, October, 1703, an independent member of that society, residing in the house of the Warden, upon whose death he removed, in the rank of a Gentleman Commoner, to Corpus, and, in 1708, was elected to a law-fellowship at All Souls, by Archbishop Tenison, as we are informed in the Biographia, from a feeling of regard for his father. He received the degree of Bachelor of Civil Law, April, 1714, and of Doctor, June, 1719. It has been asserted that his subsequent conduct in the university was not altogether free from reproach. The charge has never been supported by evidence. That he had already begun to meditate seriously upon the great doctrines of our faith, we gather from an observation of Tindal, the deist, who was a fellow of the same college. "The other boys I can always answer, because I always know where they have their arguments, which I have |