His attention was very early awakened to the importance and necessity for some improvement in this department of Divine service. Our readers will remember that after he had closed his academical studies at Stoke Newington, before he entered on the ministry, he returned home and lived during the years 1695 and 1696 in the old house with his father; he devoted those years, the twenty-first and twenty-second of his life, to systematic reading, meditation, and prayer; and during those years he appears to have composed the greater number of his hymns. Thus, if they are among the first effusions of his poet’s pen, they are among the best, and in this circumstance they resemble the first and chief volume of one of his successors in the art of sacred poetry in our own day, John Keble, whose “Christian Year” was the production of his earliest manhood, and all whose subsequent efforts in verse seem to be a vain striving to overtake the beauty and harmony of his first performances. Many of Watts’ later hymns are very noble and beautiful, but the greater number appear to have been composed in those early Southampton days. Dr. Gibbons says, “Mr. John Morgan, a minister of very respectable character now living at Romsey, Hants, has sent me the following information: ‘The occasion of the Doctor’s hymns was this, as I had the account from his worthy fellow-labourer and colleague, the Rev. Mr. Price, in whose family I dwelt above fifty years ago. The hymns which were sung at the Dissenting meeting at Southampton were so little to the gust of Mr. Watts, that he could not forbear complaining of them to his father. The father bid him try what he could do to mend the matter. He did, and had such success in his first essay that a second hymn was earnestly desired of him, and then a third, and fourth, etc., till in process of time there was such a number of them as to make up a volume.’”