And beauteous Mary bless’d him when she died.”
The poetry of the Epworth rector has unquestionably been “slighted and derided,” and it must be honestly confessed that some of his verses are exceedingly careless and inharmonious; but this was not so much the fault of the man’s poetic genius, as of his too great haste in writing them. His poems were written amid the pressure of parochial duties; and, we incline to think, sometimes when he was hard pushed for want of food and clothes for himself and family. Even his most hasty and unfinished pieces flash with the purest poetic fire, and are not without signs that the man who wrote them was a bard of the highest order. It was from him that his three sons, Samuel, John, and Charles, and his two daughters, Emilia and Mehetabel, inherited that remarkable poetic passion, which gave birth to some of the finest verse in the English language. Copious extracts from his poetry have been already given; but as yet no mention has been made of his “Eupolis’s Hymn to the Creator.”[[348]] Dr Adam Clarke pronounces this poem to be “the finest on the subject in the English language. It possesses what Racine calls the genie createur, the genuine spirit of poetry. It is not saying too much to assert, the man who was the author of what is called ‘Eupolis’s Hymn to the Creator,’ had he taken time, care, and pains, and had not been continually harassed with the res augusta domi, would have adorned the highest walks of poetry.”[[349]]
This remarkable poem was first published by John Wesley, in the Arminian Magazine for 1778, and the following are extracts from it:—
“Author of Being! Source of Light!
With unfading beauties bright,
Fulness, goodness, rolling round,
Thy own fair orb, without a bound;
Whether Thee, thy suppliants call,
Truth, or Good, or One, or All,
Ei, or Jao; Thee we hail,