Why do we mourn departing friends?
Amidst trembling prayers, in the darkened room, in the presence of some sweet shrouded and coffined form, the memory of some soft sealed face and folded hands, and spirit for ever at rest, has rose the hymn into pensive rapture:
Are we not tending upward too,
As fast as time can move?
Nor would we wish the hours more slow
To keep us from our love.
Contrasting the evanescence of man, not merely with the eternity of God, but with the eternity of Christ, and the promised prevalence of His salvation everywhere, who has not seen large meetings leap into hearty fervour at the announcement of that noble prophecy:
Jesus shall reign where’er the sun
Does his successive journeys run.
Who has more triumphantly followed the spirit of the believer into its glorious home and rest? Watts had a singularly bold and majestic manner in striking in the very first words of a hymn the key-note of the whole piece; indeed there was usually a singular fitness and force in the first line.