The waves roll gentler, and the tempest dies,
Now vast eternity fills all her sight,
She floats on the broad deep with infinite delight,
The seas for ever calm, the skies for ever bright.
The weight and grandeur of his thoughts, the radiance of his perception, the far-reaching, remote grandeur of the objects of his verse, must always be taken into account, pondered, and allowed an adequate influence over the reader’s mind, whenever attempts are made to estimate what he was as a sacred poet. Not the less was his mind in ready accord with objects of Nature. He had seen, probably, little of Nature in her more grand and exciting moods. Men like him, horn to London life, and only occasionally escaping thence to some near and quiet watering-place, saw little of those ample pages which, in our own or other lands, are now unrolled to almost every designing eye. But his verses abundantly show with what perfect sympathy every object touched him, how all the smaller or greater things of Nature impressed the subtle sense within him, and awoke the mystery and the awe. The following lines, not composed as a hymn, but included in his “Miscellaneous Thoughts,” have always seemed to us very cogently to illustrate this:
My God, I love, and I adore;
But souls that love would know Thee more.
Wilt Thou for ever hide, and stand
Behind the labours of Thy hand?