* * * * *

  Ye chief, for whom the whole creation smiles,
  At once the head, the heart, and tongue of all,
  Crown the great hymn! in swarming cities vast,
  Assembled men, to the deep organ join
  The long-resounding voice, oft breaking clear,
  At solemn pauses, through the swelling base;
  And, as each mingling flame increases each,
  In one united ardour rise to heaven.

* * * * *

  Should fate command me to the farthest verge
  Of the green earth, to distant barbarous climes,
  Rivers unknown to song, where first the sun
  Gilds Indian mountains, or his setting beam
  Flames on the Atlantic isles, ’tis nought to me,
  Since God is ever present, ever felt,
  In the void waste as in the city full;
  And where he vital breathes there must be joy.

* * * * *

The worship of intellectual power in laws and inventions is the main delight of the song; not the living presence of creative love, which never sings its own praises, but spends itself in giving.  Still, although there has passed away a glory from the world of song, although the fervour of childlike worship has vanished for a season, there are signs in these verses of a new dawn of devotion.  Even the exclusive and therefore blind worship of science will, when it has turned the coil of the ascending spiral, result in a new song to “him that made heaven and earth and the sea and the fountains of waters.”  But first, for a long time, the worship of power will go on.  There is one sonnet by Kirke White, eighty-five years younger than Thomson, which is quite pagan in its mode of glorifying the power of the Deity.

But about the same time when Thomson’s Seasons was published, which was in 1730, the third year of George II., that life which had burned on in the hidden corners of the church in spite of the worldliness and sensuality of its rulers, began to show a flame destined to enlarge and spread until it should have lighted up the mass with an outburst of Christian faith and hope.  I refer to the movement called Methodism, in the midst of which, at an early stage of its history, arose the directing energies of John Wesley, a man sent of God to deepen at once and purify its motive influences.  What he and his friends taught, would, I presume, in its essence, amount mainly to this:  that acquiescence in the doctrines of the church is no fulfilment of duty—­or anything, indeed, short of an obedient recognition of personal relation to God, who has sent every man the message of present salvation in his Son.  A new life began to bud and blossom from the dry stem of the church.  The spirit moved upon the waters of feeling, and the new undulation broke on the shores of thought in an outburst of new song.  For while John Wesley roused the hearts of the people to sing, his brother Charles put songs in their mouths.