“IS THIS THE KIND RETURN?”
Dr. Watts in this hymn gave experimental piety its hour and language of reflection and penitence:
Is this the kind return?
Are these the thanks we owe,
Thus to abuse Eternal Love
Whence all our blessings flow?
* * * * * *
Let past ingratitude
Provoke our weeping eyes.
United in loving wedlock with these words in former years was “Golden Hill,” a chime of sweet counterpoint too rare to bury its authorship under the vague phrase “A Western Melody.” It was caught evidently from a forest bird* that flutes its clear solo in the sunsets of May and June. There 139 / 109 can be no mistaking the imitation—the same compass, the same upward thrill, the same fall and warbled turn. Old-time folk used to call for it, “Sing, my Fairweather Bird.” It lingers in a few of the twenty- or thirty-years-ago collections, but stronger voices have drowned it out of the new.
* The wood thrush.
“Thacher,” (set to the same hymn,) faintly recalls its melody. Nevertheless “Thacher” is a good tune. Though commonly written in sharps, contrasting the B flat of its softer and more liquid rival of other days, it is one of Handel's strains, and lends the meaning and pathos of the lyric text to voice and instrument.