“Your most agreeable and divine conversation, two days ago, so sweetly overpowered my spirits, and the most affectionate expressions which you so plentifully bestowed on me awakened in me so many pleasing sensations, that I seemed a borderer on the heavenly world when I saw you on the confines of heaven and conversed with you there. Yet I can hardly forbear to ask for your stay on earth, and wish your service in the sanctuary, after you have been so much within view of the glorious invisibilities which the Gospel reveals to us. But if that hope fail, yet our better expectations can never fail us. Our anchor enters within the veil, where Jesus, our forerunner, is gone to take our places (Heb. vi. ult.). May your pains decrease, or your divine joys overpower them! May you never lose sight of the blessed world, and of Jesus, the Lord of it, till the storm is passed and you are safely arrived. And may the same grace prepare me for the same mansions, and give you the pleasure of welcoming to those bright regions
“Your affectionate and unworthy friend and brother,
“Isaac Watts.
“Lime Street, 7th April, 1722.
“Just going to Theobalds.
“P.S.—Our family salute you; they are much affected, pleased, and edified with their late visit. Grace be with you and all your dear relations. Amen.”
And among his friends, as we have already seen, he kept up a considerable intimacy with his own fellow-townsman and fellow-student, Samuel Say, son of Giles Say, who was ejected from the parish church of St. Michael’s in Southampton, and one of the first ministers of the Nonconformist church of that town, and with which Watts’ family was connected. He was a kind of smaller Watts, a man of large and varied knowledge in the classics, mathematics, astronomy, and natural philosophy. For forty-eight years he kept a journal of the alterations of the weather and of his observations of remarkable occurrences in nature. Possessed of an extraordinary genius, it was veiled and shrouded by a modesty as extraordinary; but about two years before his death some of his papers were committed to the press, consisting of poems and essays on the “Harmony, Variety and Power of Numbers, whether in Prose or Verse.” He had a great admiration for Milton, and translated apparently with great elegance the introduction of “Paradise Lost” into Latin verse; and in the “Gentleman’s Magazine,” vol. xxxv., is an interesting paper by him, entitled, “The Resurrection Illustrated by the Changes of the Silkworm.” Watts thought highly of his judgment, as the following, among other letters, indicates:
“April 11th, 1728.
“Dear Sir,
“Your letter, dated from Feb. 10th to March 5th, afforded me agreeable entertainment, and particularly your notes on the 2nd Psalm, in which I think I concur in sentiment with you in every line, and thank you. The epiphonema to the 16th Psalm is also very acceptable, and, in my opinion, the Psalms ought to be translated in such a manner for Christian worship, in order to show the hidden glories of that divine posey. I beg leave only to query about the Sheol in Psalm 16, whether that phrase of ‘not seeing corruption’ ought to be applied to David at all, since Peter (Acts ii. 31) and Paul (Acts xiii. 36) seem to exclude him. And though I will not say that your sense of the soul, i.e., the life, may answer the Hebrew manner of the reduplication of the same thing in other words, yet, as David sometimes speaks of the soul as a thing distinct from the body, and may not the soul be taken in this place and Sheol signify Hades, the state of the dead?