Where, in such a praise-full tone
We will sing what He hath done,
That the cursèd fiends below
Shall thereat impatient grow.
Then, O come! in pious lays
Sound we God Almighty’s praise.
Wither has been slow in winning his place among our sacred poets. He was a man of war from his youth, had a perilous gift of sarcasm, and lacked the caution and good sense which were so much needed in his troublous times. He was boycotted by the booksellers, satirized by Butler in Hudibras, by Pope, Dryden, and Swift, and seemed likely to be forgotten, save as the butt of a former age. But Southey, Charles Lamb, Montgomery, Edward Farr, George Macdonald, F. T. Palgrave, Dr. Grosart, among others have recognized his merits. He was a devout man and courageous, for he not only fought on both sides in the Civil War, but with rarer bravery chose to remain in London during the Great Plague, and to render what little help he could to the sufferers in that awful visitation. The king is said to have spared his life at Sir John Denham’s good-naturedly contemptuous entreaty that he (Denham) might not be ‘the worst poet in England’; his contemporaries thought the prison cell a fit cage for the poet, but somehow he joined the lark, and sang at heaven’s gate.[85]
Samuel Crossman, who died in 1683, within a few weeks of his appointment to the Deanery of Bristol, makes up in quality what he lacks in quantity. Of his nine hymns—published in 1660—two or three have won an assured place in the hymn-book of the Church.
My life’s a shade, my days
Apace to death decline.