The fondness of a creature's love,
How strong it strikes the sense;
Thither the warm affections move,
Nor can we call them thence.

My Saviour, let thy beauties be
My soul's eternal food;

And grace command my heart away

From all created good.

The hymn, beginning,

“There is a land of pure delight,"

associates itself with the natural scenery of Southampton, his native town. It was written while he was sitting at the window of a parlor, overlooking the river Itchen, and in full view of the Isle of Wight. The landscape there is very beautiful, and forms a model for a poet to employ in describing allegorically the passage of the soul from earth to the paradise above.

Watts lived a tranquil, uneventful lire, passing thirtyfour years in the seclusion of Alney Park, a nobleman's seat, where he had been invited to make a home. His health was always delicate. He both preached and wrote, but his best efforts were given to his pen.

A critical writer in the "Oxford Essays" fixes upon the hymn beginning,

"When I survey the wondrous cross,'

as Dr. Watts' best original effort; and pronounces the rendering of the ninetieth Psalm, beginning,

"Our God, our help in ages past,"

as his finest paraphrase. The latter indeed not only preserves the sublime and lofty spirit, but the grand and

shadowy imagery of the Hebrew lawgiver's poetical con

templation:

"A thousand ages in thy sight,

Are like an evening gone;

Short as the watch that ends the night,

Before the rising sun.

"Time, like an ever-rolling stream,
Bears all its sons away;

They fly, forgotten, as a dream
Dies at the opening day.

"The busy tribes of flesh and blood,
With all their cares and fears,
Are carried downward by the flood,
And lost in following years."

Probably none of Dr. Watts' hymns has been so widely used, and has held so steadily its character as the interpreter of a common religious experience, as that beginning,

"When I can read my title clear,

To mansions in the skies."

The last stanza of this hymn, beginning,

“There I shall bathe my weary soul

In seas of heavenly rest,"

is supposed to have borrowed its pleasing imagery from the scenery of the calm harbor of Southampton, in view of which it was written. Cowper seems to have taken his picture of the pious peasant woman's contentment and hope, in the famous allusion to Voltaire in the poem "Hope," from one of these stanzas. He speaks of the humble cottager as one who