We'll crowd thy gates with thankful songs, High as the heavens our voices raise; And earth, with her ten thousand tongues, Shall fill thy courts with sounding praise. And what pious tremors shook the air, when the country choirs in New England meeting-houses lifted up their voices to the old hymn, commencing:-- There is a land of pure delight! I don't know but these bits of moral music may have been hustled out from modern church primers for something more æsthetic; but I am sure that a good many white-haired people--of whom I hope to count some among my readers--are carried back pleasantly by the rhythmic jingle of the good Doctor to those child days when hopes were {15} fresh, and holidays a joy, and summers long; and when flowery paths stretched out before us, over which we have gone toiling since--to quite other music than that of Dr. Isaac Watts. And if his songs are gone out of our fine books, and have fallen below the mention of the dilettanti critics, I am the more glad to rescue his name, as that of an honest, devout, hard-working, cultivated man who has woven an immeasurable deal of moral fibre into the web and woof of many generations of men and women. By the generosity of a friend he was endowed with all the privileges of a beautiful baronial home (Abney Park) where he lived for thirty odd years--reaching almost four score--never forgetting his simplicities, his humilities, his faith, his sweet humanities, and never having done harm, or wished harm, to any of God's creatures; and this cannot be said of many who preach, and of many of whom we are to talk. [Sidenote: Edward Young.] There was another clerical poet of less private worth, who had a very great reputation early in the eighteenth century. Fragments of his sombre-colored and magniloquent _Night Thoughts_ {16} are still frequently encountered in Commonplace Books of Poetry; while some of his picturesque or full-freighted lines, or half lines, have passed into common speech; such as-- "The undevout astronomer is mad;" "Tired Nature's sweet restorer, balmy sleep;" "Procrastination is the thief of time." [Sidenote: Doctor Young.] You will recognize these as old acquaintances; and you are to credit them to Dr. Edward Young,[11] who was born about two hundred years ago down in Hampshire, son of a father who had been Chaplain to King William III. He was an Oxford man, lived a wild life there--attaching himself to a fast young Duke of Wharton, who led him into many awkward scrapes--and developing an early love, which clung by him through life, for attaching himself to great people. He wrote plays which were not good, and odes which were worse than the plays, but touched off with little jets of terrific adulation:-- "To poets, sacred is a Dorset's name, Their wonted passport thro' the gates of fame; {17} It bribes the partial reader into praise And throws a glory round the sheltered lays."