style of this admirable lyric poet; and, of the myriad of His wakeful eyes employ his power There is an unhappy equivoke in the first line of the hymn numbered 810: Up to the hills where angels lie. It is at least doubtful whether angels "lie" on the hills up there, even in the sense in which the poet intended to be understood. Now we protest against the perpetuation of such blots as these: first, because the stanzas in which they are found do not deserve a place in any collection of sacred poetry. The "maimed" and the "halt" were not allowed in sacrifice even under the old dispensation. And secondly, we are jealous of the fame of "the good and great Dr. Watts," as John Wesley calls him. A very few such verses as these, paraded in a hymn book with the writer's name, are enough to ruin the reputation of any man; and that of Watts, who wrote so much that is as near perfection as we may hope for in the Church militant, ought not to be jeoparded by the unwise ambition of men whose aim is to make a big hymn book. There is one other piece of rhyme attributed to the doctor which we do not remember to have met with in any previous collection of hymns. By a perusal of one or two stanzas the reader will have no difficulty in assigning a reason for their omission by former hymn-book makers. We quote from hymn 629, verses 2, 3, 5: When my forgetful soul renews But ere one fleeting hour is past, Make haste, my days,* to reach the goal, And bring my heart to rest My God, my Saviour's breast! But it is time to turn our attention for a few moments to the novelties of this collection, "the contributions prepared expressly for it," by which, as we are assured, "it has been enriched." And first, by all means, let us pay our respects to the Rev. Horatius Bonar, of Scotland. He is the Magnus Apollo of the Sabbath Hymn Book in the way of novelty. He "prepared "—that is the word—he "prepared " many contributions expressly for it. In general terms let us say, then, that the Rev. Horatius is no poet; and yet some of his verses are very well expressed, and, in most of them, the jingle of the rhyme is well sustained; but in not a solitary stanza "prepared" by him is there a scintillation of genuine poetry. We may take at random a few specimens. Hymn 469 is one of Mr. Bonar's "preparations." It is entitled, "Praise to the Trinity," and thus plunges in medias res: Praises to him who built the hills; Praises to him who wakes the morn, And thus he dawdles on through seven stanzas, each beginning with "praises to him," the pronoun uniformly spelt with a small h, and each inducing the reader to wish from his heart that the whole of it had remained "in the blue afar," and had never reached this western world. Hymn 717 is also one of Mr. Bonar's. It is entitled, quaintly enough, "Mine-Thine," and is chiefly remarkable as an ingenious play upon those two pronouns. It indicates the wonderful facility with which hymns may be "prepared" in Scotland for the American market. We copy the second and third stanzas: Watts has it, "Make haste, my soul, to reach the goal." The emendation is by our compilers, one of those, we presume, that was deemed absolutely necessary. The evil of my former state The darkness of my former state, But Mr. Bonar does not confine himself to the pronouns. The interjections are made to do service, as in hymn 623: O these eyes, how dark and blind! O this foolish, earthly mind! O, these ever-roaming eyes, O this stubborn, prayerless knee, etc. The reader will understand that we are responsible for the italics in these quotations, but the punctuation, the marks of admiration, are Mr. Bonar's. Hymn 315 is, without exception, the most remarkable specimen of “preparation" that ever found, so far as we know, its way into a hymn book; it is entitled "The Name of Names," and we allow ourselves to disfigure these pages with but one, the first, stanza: In hymn 747 Mr. Bonar assumes a loftier tone, and gives us a specimen of what the critics call the figure of vision. Thus he commences: I see the crowd in Pilate's hall, And of that shouting multitude And in that din of voices rude There are men, we are told, to whom nothing is so agreeable as the sound of their own voices. Mr. Bonar does not tell us whether he felt glad to recognize his own voice when, in Scotia, he had that wonderful vision of what was done so many ages ago in Judea-" with blasphemy between." The presumption is that he rather enjoyed it upon the whole, and that he kept on shouting after he recognized his own voice. We formerly thought that Pat's description of a certain telescope that brought people a mile off so near that you might hear their conversation was a-bull. Mr. Bonar beats that entirely. He hears his own voice in the chorus of a rabble of Jews, not only thousands of miles distant, but hundreds of years ago. Occasionally Mr. Bonar prepares a hymn of very peculiar meter. His grateful patrons astonish cisatlantic worshipers by inserting in the Sabbath Hymn Book for the service of song in the house of the Lord stanzas like this, found in hymn 384: Hallelujah, hallelujah! Closed are the gates below, If there ever appeared in print a more wretched piece of doggerel than this we have not seen it. The lines ending with the words "below," "now," and "shout," are intended to be a triplet of rhyme. Mr. Bonar might have come nearer if he had taken words out of a dictionary blindfolded; he certainly could not have done much worse. We saw an intimation in a cotemporary Journal, that our compilers had probably been "taken in and done for" by Mr. Bonar. Having engaged him to make "preparations" for their hymn book, they felt bound to insert what he sent them, more especially as he made no charge for his "preparations." This is plausible, and evinces a tenderness of feeling on their part. Between the two horns of a dilemma, giving offense to the canny Scot and disfiguring a hymn-book by the insertion of forty or fifty such "preparations," we should for our parts have chosen differently. But there are other "novelties" in the Sabbath Hymn Book, some of them by authors whose names are modestly withheld, and for a knowledge of which the public will not, in all probability, evince any distressing anxiety. Hymn 63, entitled "Bless us to-night," is of this class. We quote stanza No. 2: Jesus, Immanuel, Come in thy love to dwell In hearts contrite: Pretty good that, isn't it? A parody, you perceive, on "God save the king." To be sure, there is no such word as con-trite'; but then, barring that, the rhyme is good, which is something. Of hymn 150, which is another anonymous novelty, we cannot say as much. It commences thus: Amid the splendors of thy state, O God! thy love appears, We will not allow ourselves to criticise that stanza. It is too ridiculously soft. But here is a hymn (222) in which, evidently for the sake of the rhyme, we have a totally false idea of a beautiful sentiment of the Saviour's: Behold the birds that wing the air, Indeed! Such is very far from the teaching of the Saviour. Our heavenly Father does not wait until they complain. The poet of course knew that well enough, but "Rhymes Are more imperative than kings sometimes." |