Awake, awake,[70] ye heavenly choir, May your devotion me inspire, That I, like you, my age may spend, Like you, may on my God attend. May I, like you, in God delight, Have all day long my God in sight, Perform, like you, my Maker’s will; O may I never more do ill! Had I your wings, to heaven I’d fly, But God shall that defect supply, And my soul winged with warm desire, Shall all day long to heaven aspire. I would not wake, nor rise again, Even heaven itself I would disdain; Wert not Thou there to be enjoyed, And I in hymns to be employed. Heaven is, dear Lord, where’er Thou art, O never then from me depart; For to my soul ’tis hell to be But for one moment without[71] Thee. The special charm of Ken’s hymns lies in their simplicity and suitability. In the plainest words he asks for just what every Christian feels that he needs, morning and evening, his whole life through. They are the first great English hymns, and are worthy to lead the devotions of the Church. Ken’s influence upon later poets has been great. Charles Wesley, Keble, and Christopher Wordsworth were, to some extent, inspired by his hymns on the Festivals, whilst Newman desired to add Ken to the Calendar of English saints, and actually prepared a service for use on ‘Ken’s day.’[72] Archbishop Alexander, himself a poet, preaching in Wells Cathedral at the festival commemorative of the bicentenary of Ken’s consecration, said— Outside the Psalter, no lines have ever been so familiar to English Christians as Ken’s Morning and Evening Hymn. Other hymns have been more mystical, more impassioned, more imaginative—have perhaps contained profounder thoughts in their depth, have certainly exhibited richer colouring upon their surface. But none are so suitable to the homely pathos and majesty of the English Liturgy; none are so adapted to the character which the English Church has aimed at forming, the sweet reserve, the quiet thoroughness, the penitence which is continuous without being unhopeful. They are lines which the child may repeat without the painful sense that they are beyond him, and the man without the contemptuous sense that they are below him. They appeal to the man in the child, and the child in the man. They are at once a form of devotion, a rule of life, a breath of prayer, a sigh of aspiration. They are the utterances of a heart which had no contempt for earth, but which is at home among the angels. When we listen to them, or repeat them with congenial spirit, in whatever climate we may be, the roses of the English dawn and the gold of the English sunset are in our sky.[73]