Isaac Watts; his life and writings, his homes and friends

by Edwin Paxton Hood

The fish with glittering tails.

And his receipt for the orderly conduct of Divine worship, for sustaining a mental effort in prayer, is useful, beautiful, and perfect:

Call upon God, adore, confess,

Petition, plead, and then declare

You are the Lord’s, give thanks and bless,

And let Amen confirm the prayer.

The devout purpose which ruled and governed the whole life of Watts is of course manifest in his poems. Such as he is, he is always a sacred poet; he never forgets that his life has been consecrated and set apart to religious teaching and to the promulgation of useful knowledge; his moralities are recreation, never mere dreams; and if he never attempts the great flights of poetry in epic or dramatic writing, we may remember that in this, as in his yet more sacred pieces, he was a lyrist, and reserved all his greater efforts for his work in the ministry, seeking thus to make more sweet and serviceable the whole service of the House of God.

Throughout these remarks we have left it to be inferred that the verse-making, great as was the fame it procured the author, was regarded by him merely as the accident of his work; at the same time his nature seems to have been truly in sympathy with all those impulses derived from external scenery, calculated to stir a poetic sensibility. We fancy his modest nature would almost have assented, without a rejoinder, even to some of the very severe criticisms which modern fastidiousness has pronounced upon him; but Dr. Gibbons assures us how swiftly and instantly his spirit caught every impression of natural scenery and life; how he delighted in the rural verdure, or the waving harvest-field, or the resounding grove; how his nature was awed almost equally by the wonderful and subtle labours of the industrious bee, or the sun walking through the heavens in the greatness of his strength. In his lyrics, classical forms, perhaps, rather hampered than aided him; he was fascinated by the majestic roll of the Pindaric Greek; but from this fault the best of his hymns are entirely free.

We have dwelt thus at length upon some of the characteristics of Watts’ verse, feeling that criticism upon it is far from exhausted; and that, amidst its various representatives in our language, in spite of that modern contempt which is creeping even into the circles of those who profess to hold his faith and follow in his footsteps, he still deserves to retain a place in the history of English poetry. We have referred rather to those more striking and obvious marks of his genius; but we must still prefer him in his more quiet and subdued strains of devotion, those peaceful, pensive lines with which his works abound. It is equally certain that he wrote a number of verses and lines perfectly indefensible on the score of good taste: this is the more remarkable, because his taste does seem to have been cultivated to the highest pitch of excellence; and his mind was remarkable, not merely for the plenitude of its ideas, but for the easy elegance with which he ordinarily gave expression to them. However this may be, their bad taste and strange conceits have not greatly repressed the reverence with which we regard the works of George Herbert or of Henry Vaughan; nor does the frequent turgidity of Milton much interfere with the admiration and awe with which we read most of his poems.