For He is nigh who trod
Amid the foaming spray,
Whose billows own'd th' Incarnate God,
And died away.
And naturally the memory of his almost shipwreck on the wild Atlantic colored more or less the visions of his muse, and influenced the metaphors of his verse for years.
The popularity of “Jesus, Lover of my Soul” not only procured it, at home, the name of “England's song of the sea,” but carried it with “the course of Empire” to the West, where it has reigned with “Rock of Ages,” for more than a hundred and fifty years, joint primate of inspired human songs.
Compiled incidents of its heavenly service would fill a chapter. A venerable minister tells of the supernal comfort that lightened his after years of sorrow from the dying bed of his wife who whispered with her last breath, “Hide me, O my Saviour, hide.”
A childless and widowed father in Washington remembers with a more than earthly peace, the wife and mother's last request for Wesley's hymn, and her departure to the sound of its music to join the spirit of her babe.
A summer visitor in Philadelphia, waiting on a hot street-corner for a car to Fairmount Park, overheard a quavering voice singing the same hymn and saw an emaciated hand caressing a little plant in an open window—and carried away the picture of a fading life, and the words—
Other refuge have I none,