This hymn was written early in the 18th century, by the Rev. Robert Seagrave, born at Twyford, Leicestershire, Eng., Nov. 22, 1693. Educated at Cambridge, he took holy orders in the Established Church, but espoused the cause of the great evangelistic movement, and became a hearty co-worker with the Wesleys. Judging by the lyric fire he could evidently put into his verses, one involuntarily asks if he would not have written more, and been in fact the song-leader of the spiritual reformation if there had been no Charles Wesley. There is not a hymn of Wesley's in use on the same subject equal to the one immortal hymn of Seagrave, and the only other near its time that approaches it in vigor and appealing power is Doddridge's “Awake my soul, stretch every nerve.”
But Providence gave Wesley the harp and appointed to the elder poet a branch of possibly equal usefulness, where he was kept too busy to enter the singers' ranks.
For eleven years he was the Sunday-evening lecturer at Lorimer's Hall, London, and often preached in Whitefield's Tabernacle. His hymn is one of the most soul-stirring in the English language:
Rise, my soul, and stretch thy wings;
Thy better portion trace;
Rise from transitory things
Toward Heaven, thy native place;
Sun and moon and stars decay,
Time shall soon this earth remove;
Rise, my soul and haste away