Thy courts, Immanuel!
* See [page 316].
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“IF YOU CANNOT ON THE OCEAN.”
This popular Christian ballad, entitled “Your Mission,” was written one stormy day in the winter of 1861–2 by Miss Ellen M. Huntington (Mrs. Isaac Gates), and made her reputation as one of the few didactic poets whose exquisite art wins a hearing for them everywhere. In a moment of revery, while looking through the window at the falling snow, the words came to her:
If you cannot on the ocean
Sail among the swiftest fleet.
She turned away and wrote the lines on her slate, following with verse after verse till she finished the whole poem. “It wrote itself,” she says in her own account of it.