Come, O come! in pious lays Sound we God Almighty’s praise; Hither bring in one consent, Heart, and voice, and instrument. Music add of every kind; Sound the trump, the cornet wind; Strike the viol, touch the lute; Let no tongue nor string be mute; Nor a creature dumb be found, That hath either voice or sound. Come, ye sons of human race, In this chorus take a place; And amid the mortal throng, Be you masters of the song. Angels, and supernal powers, Be the noblest tenor yours; Let in praise of God the sound Run a never-ending round; That our song of praise may be Everlasting as is He. From earth’s vast and hollow womb, Music’s deepest bass may come; Seas and floods, from shore to shore, Shall their countertenors roar, To this concert, when we sing, Whistling winds your descants bring; That our song may over-climb All the bounds of place and time, And ascend from sphere to sphere, To the great Almighty’s ear. So, from heaven, on earth He shall Let His gracious blessings fall: And this huge wide orb we see, Shall one choir, one temple be; Where, in such a praise-full tone We will sing what He hath done, That the cursèd fiends below Shall thereat impatient grow. Then, O come! in pious lays Sound we God Almighty’s praise. Wither has been slow in winning his place among our sacred poets. He was a man of war from his youth, had a perilous gift of sarcasm, and lacked the caution and good sense which were so much needed in his troublous times. He was boycotted by the booksellers, satirized by Butler in _Hudibras_, by Pope, Dryden, and Swift, and seemed likely to be forgotten, save as the butt of a former age. But Southey, Charles Lamb, Montgomery, Edward Farr, George Macdonald, F. T. Palgrave, Dr. Grosart, among others have recognized his merits. He was a devout man and courageous, for he not only fought on both sides in the Civil War, but with rarer bravery chose to remain in London during the Great Plague, and to render what little help he could to the sufferers in that awful visitation. The king is said to have spared his life at Sir John Denham’s good-naturedly contemptuous entreaty that he (Denham) might not be ‘the worst poet in England’; his contemporaries thought the prison cell a fit cage for the poet, but somehow he joined the lark, and sang at heaven’s gate.[85] Samuel Crossman, who died in 1683, within a few weeks of his appointment to the Deanery of Bristol, makes up in quality what he lacks in quantity. Of his nine hymns—published in 1660—two or three have won an assured place in the hymn-book of the Church. My life’s a shade, my days Apace to death decline. and Sweet place, sweet place alone The home of God most high. They are in a minor key, but they speak to the heart of the Christian pilgrim who seeks another country—his true fatherland. His other hymns are seldom met with. I quote one, omitting a verse.