‘The promise of my Father’s love
Shall stand for ever good,’
He said; and gave His soul to death,
And sealed the grace with blood.
Watts wrote no great festival hymns to be compared with ‘Hark! how all the welkin rings,’ or ‘Hail the day that sees Him rise.’ His best work is found in his hymns and spiritual songs, some of which are among the most spiritual and most scriptural ever written. The tone of triumph is comparatively rare, though now and again, as in ‘Join all the glorious names,’ he rises as high as ever Charles Wesley rose in his hymns for ‘Believers rejoicing.’ Such are, ‘My God, the spring of all my joys’; ‘Come, we that love the Lord’; ‘Jesus shall reign where’er the sun’; ‘Come, let us join our cheerful songs.’
To Dr. Watts, with his delicate health and protracted sicknesses, songs in a minor key were peculiarly suitable, and some of his most precious hymns are those which speak of the life to come. He seldom writes of death as Wesley does, and such a line as
Ah, lovely appearance of death
would have been impossible to him; but no Christian poet has touched the sorrows of our hearts more tenderly or comforted the bereaved more wisely than he has done in such a hymn as
Give me the wings of faith to rise;
while