No one could mistake the style of Watts in this sublime ode. He begins with his foot on Sinai, but flies to Calvary with the angel preacher whom St. John saw in his Patmos vision: Before Jehovah's awful throne Ye nations bow with sacred joy; Know that the Lord is God alone; He can create and He destroy. His sovereign power without our aid Made us of clay and formed us men, And when like wandering sheep we stray, He brought us to His fold again. * * * * * We'll crowd Thy gates with thankful songs, High as the heaven our voices raise, And earth with her ten thousand tongues Shall fill Thy courts with sounding praise. _TUNE--OLD HUNDRED._ Martin Madan's four-page anthem, "Denmark," has some grand strains in it, but it is a tune of florid and difficult vocalization, and is now heard only in Old Folks' Concerts. * * * * * The Rev. Isaac Watts, D.D., was born at Southampton, Eng., in 1674. His father was a deacon of the Independent Church there, and though not an uncultured man himself, he is said to have had little patience with the incurable penchant of his boy for making rhymes and verses. We hear nothing of the lad's mother, but we can fancy her hand and spirit in the indulgence of his poetic tastes as well as in his religious training. The tradition handed down from Dr. Price, a colleague of Watts, relates that at the age of eighteen Isaac became so irritated at the crabbed and untuneful hymns sung at the Nonconformist meetings that he complained bitterly of them to his father. The deacon may have felt something as Dr. Wayland did when a rather "fresh" student criticised the Proverbs, and hinted that making such things could not be "much of a job," and the Doctor remarked, "Suppose _you_ make a few." Possibly there was the same gentle sarcasm in the reply of Deacon Watts to his son, "Make some yourself, then." Isaac was in just the mood to take his father at his word, and he retired and wrote the hymn-- Behold the glories of the Lamb. There must have been a decent tune to carry it, for it pleased the worshippers greatly, when it was sung in meeting--and that was the beginning of Isaac Watts' career as a hymnist. So far as scholarship was an advantage, the young writer must have been well equipped already, for as early as the entering of his fifth year he was learning Latin, and at nine learning Greek; at eleven, French; and at thirteen, Hebrew. From the day of his first success he continued to indite hymns for the home church, until by the end of his twenty-second year he had written one hundred and ten, and in the two following years a hundred and forty-four more, besides preparing himself for the ministry. No. 7 in the edition of the first one hundred and ten, was that royal jewel of all his lyric work-- When I survey the wondrous cross.