Literary Pleasure.
A great delight awaits the minister of cultivated taste and sensibility, for there are not only ten really good hymns, as a famous literary doctor[1] once insisted, but hundreds of them, whose distinction and beauty of phraseology, whose fresh and orderly development of ideas, and whose elevation and glory of thought give unfailing literary pleasure. How can one read Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Still, still with Thee,” that best of American morning hymns, without exquisite delight?
“Still, still with Thee, when purple morning breaketh,
When the bird waketh, and the shadows flee:
Fairer than morning, lovelier than daylight,
Dawns the sweet consciousness, I am with Thee.”
Prominent among these literary hymns will be that hymn of majestic praise by Sir Robert Grant:
“Oh, worship the King, all-glorious above,
Oh, gratefully sing his power and his love;
Our Shield and Defender, the Ancient of days,