to Miss Elizabeth Singer, a much-admired young lady, talented, beautiful, and good. She rejected him-kindly but finally. The disappointment was bitter, and in the first shadow of it he wrote, How vain are all things here below, Miss Singer became the celebrated Mrs. Elizabeth Rowe, the spiritual and poetic beauty of whose Meditations once made a devotional textbook for pious souls. Of Dr. Watts and his offer of his hand and heart, she always said, "I loved the jewel, but I did not admire the casket." The poet suitor was undersized, in habitually delicate health-and not handsome. But the good minister and scholar found noble employment to keep his mind from preying upon itself and shortening his days. During his long though afflicted leisure he versified the Psalms, wrote a treatise on Logic, an Introduction to the Study of Astronomy and Geography, and a work On the Improvement of the Mind; and died in 1748, at the age of seventy-four. "O FOR A THOUSAND TONGUES TO SING." Charles Wesley, the author of this hymn, took up the harp of Watts when the older poet laid it down. He was born at Epworth, Eng., in 1708, the third son of Rev. Samuel Wesley, and died in London, March 29, 1788. The hymn is believed to have been written May 17, 1739, for the anniversary of his own conversion: O for a thousand tongues to sing The remark of a fervent Christian friend, Peter Bohler, "Had I a thousand tongues I would praise Christ Jesus with them all," struck an answering chord in Wesley's heart, and he embalmed the wish in his fluent verse. The third stanza (printed as second in some hymnals), has made language for pardoned souls for at least four generations: Jesus! the name that calms our fears And bids our sorrows cease; 'Tis music in the sinner's ears, 'Tis life and health and peace. Charles Wesley was the poet of the soul, and knew every mood. In the words of Isaac Taylor, "There is no main article of belief....no moral sentiment peculiarly characteristic of the gospel that does not find itself....pointedly and clearly conveyed in some stanza of Charles Wesley's poetry." And it does not dim the lustre of Watts, considering the marvellous brightness, versatility and felicity of his greatest successor, to say of the latter, with the London Quarterly, that he "was, perhaps, the most gifted minstrel of the modern Church." Most of the hymns of this good man were hymns of experience and this is why they are so dear to the Christian heart. The music of eternal life is in them. The happy glow of a single line in one of them Love Divine, all loves excelling, -thrills through them all. He led a spotless life from youth to old age, and grew unceasingly in spiritual knowledge and sweetness. His piety and purity were the weapons that alike humbled his scoffing fellow scholars at Oxford, and conquered the wild colliers of Kingwood. With his brother John, through persecution and ridicule, he preached and sang that Divine Love to his countrymen and in the wilds of America, and on their return to England his quenchless melodies multiplied till they made an Evangelical literature around his name. His hymns--he wrote no less than six thousand-are a liturgy not only for the Methodist Church but for English-speaking Christendom. The voices of Wesley and Watts cannot be hidden, whatever province of Christian life and service is traversed in themes of song, and in these chapters they will be heard again and again. A Watts-and-Wesley Scholarship would grace any Theological Seminary, to encourage the study and discussion of the best lyrics of the two great Gospel bards. THE TUNES. The musical mouth-piece of "O for a thousand tongues," nearest to its own date, is old "Azmon" |