"He rode on hye, and did soe flye Upon the cherubins He came in sight and made his flight Upon the winges of windes." They sung instead,-- "And th' earth did shake and quake and styrred bee grounds of the mount: & shook for wroth was hee Smoke mounted, in his wrath, fyre did eat out of his mouth: from it burned-with heat." Alas, poor Priscilla! how could she sing with ease or reverence such confused verses? The tune, too, set in the psalm-book seems absolutely unfitted to the metre. I fear when she sang from the pages "the old Puritan anthem" that she was forced to turn it into a chant, else the irregular lines could never have been brought within the compass of the melody; and yet, the metre is certainly better than the sense. It may be thought that these selections of the Psalms have been chosen for their crudeness and grotesqueness. I have tried in vain to find othersome that would show more elegant finish or more of the spirit of poetry; the most poetical lines I can discover are these, which are beautiful for the reason that the noble thoughts of the Psalmist cannot be hidden, even by the wording of the learned Puritan minister:-- 1. Jehovah feedeth me: I shall not lack 2. In grassy fields, he downe dooth make me lye: he gently-leads mee, quiet-Waters by. 3. He dooth return my soul: for his name-sake in paths of justice leads-me-quietly. 4. Yea, though I walk in dale of deadly-shade ile fear none yll, for with me thou wilt be thy rod, thy staff eke, they shall comfort mee. But few of these psalm-books of Ainsworth are now in existence; but few indeed came to New England. Elder Brewster owned one, as is shown by the inventory of the books in his library. Not every member of the congregation, not every family possessed one; many were too poor, many "lacked skill to read," and in some communities only one psalm-book was owned in the entire church. Hence arose the odious custom of "deaconing" or "lining" the psalm, by which each line was read separately by the deacon or elder and then sung by the congregation. There is no doubt, however, that this Ainsworth's Version was used in many of the early New England meetings. Reverend Thomas Symmes, in his "Joco-Serious Dialogue," printed in 1723, wrote: "Furthermore the Church of Plymouth made use of Ainsworths Version of the Psalms until the year 1692. For altho' our New England version of the Psalms was compiled by sundry hands and completed by President Dunster about the year 1640; yet that church did not use it, it seems, 'till two and fifty years after but stuck to Ainsworth; and until about 1682 their excellent custom was to sing without reading the lines."