Thy mercies never shall remove, The Sun of Righteousness on me Hath rose, with healing in His wings; Contented now upon my thigh I halt, till life's short journey end; All helplessness, all weakness, I On Thee alone for strength depend; Nor have I power from Thee to move; Thy Nature, and Thy Name, is Love. Lame as I am, I take the prey, Hell, earth, and sin, with ease o'ercome; I leap for joy, pursue my way, And as a bounding hårt fly home! Through all eternity to prove, Thy Nature and Thy Name is Love! CATHOLIC LOVE. Weary of all this wordy strife, These notions, forms, and modes, and names, To Thee, the Way, the Truth, the Life, Whose love my simple heart inflames, Divinely taught, at last I fly, With Thee, and Thine to live, and die. Forth from the midst of Babel brought, Redeem'd by Thine almighty grace, I taste my glorious liberty, But cleave to those who cleave to Thee; But only in Thy saints delight, Who walk with God in purest white. One with the little flock I rest, The members sound who hold the Head; The chosen few, with pardon blest, And by the anointing Spirit led My brethren, friends, and kinsmen these, And all Thy counsels to fulfil, Athirst to be whate'er Thou art, And love their God with all their heart. For these, howe'er in flesh disjoin'd, And constant as the life of God; Joined to the hidden church unknown And glory in the uniting grace, A point of life, a moment's space O God, mine inmost soul convert, Give me to feel their solemn weight, Before me place in dread array To judge the nations at Thy bar: 1 Said to have been suggested by a rocky isthmus at the Land's End in Cornwall, Be this my one great business here, Then, Saviour, then my soul receive, Transported from the vale, to live And reign with Thee above, Where faith is sweetly lost in sight, And hope in full supreme delight, And everlasting love. WILLIAM SHENSTONE. [SHENSTONE was born at the Leasowes, near Hales Owen in 1714: he died at the same place in 1763. In 1737, while still at Pembroke College, Oxford, he published some miscellaneous poems anonymously. The Judgment of Hercules appeared in 1741, The Schoolmistress next year. His works, prose and verse, were published in 1764, the year after his death.] Shenstone is our principal master of what may perhaps be called the artificial-natural style in poetry; and the somewhat lasting hold which some at least of his poems have taken on the popular ear is the best testimony that can be produced to his merit. It is very hard to shape any critical canons likely to pass muster nowadays, and yet capable of saving the bulk of his verse. But the first and second of his Pastoral Ballads always fix themselves in the memory of those who, possessing that faculty, are set in childhood to the not very grateful task of learning them; and on re-reading them years after, they do not wholly lose their charm, though the reader may be tempted rather to smile than to sympathise. The Schoolmistress, especially the charming passage here, as usually, given, has something of the same grace, so has the Dying Kid; while the poem on St. Valentine's Day would perhaps be the best of Shenstone's works but for some inexcusable negligences of expression which ten minutes study would have corrected. It is difficult to believe that Shenstone ever gave much study to his work, or that he possessed any critical faculty. His elegies, though not always devoid of music, are but dreary stuff, and his more ambitious poems still drearier. His attempts at the style of Prior and Gay are for the most part valueless. Yet when all this is discarded, 'My banks they are furnished with bees,' and a few other such things, obstinately recur to the memory and assert that their author after all was a poet. In the mixture of grace and pathos with a certain triviality, with much that is artificial, and with not a little that is downright foolish, Shenstone comes nearer to Goldsmith than to any other English author. His tenderness, |