"dipped in the brim of the Jordan," he gave forth, as his final hymn by the way, his parting song

In age and feebleness extreme,
Who shall a sinful worm redeem?
Jesus, my only hope Thou art,

Strength of my failing flesh and heart;
Oh, could I catch one smile from Thee,
And drop into eternity!

His prayer was answered. He caught that smile, and now it may be said of him, that the principles and feelings with which he began his course as a hymnist were his principles and feelings up to the end; they were holy and pure. "From the first day until the day of Christ" dawned on him, he had been “steadfast, unmovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord." This is more than can be recorded of some whose hymns still give pleasure to every Christian who knows and sings them. There is a touching and instructive tradition about one in particular, showing that hymns once given out from a simple loving Christian heart may serve to beguile the journey of many a pious wayfarer, while they now and then, in after days, spring up in the path of their authors to reprove them for denying and forsaking that Saviour of whom and to whom they once so sweetly sang. It used to be more easy to beguile the way with chat in the old coaching days than it is now amidst the hurry, rattle, and screech of our iron roads. It was more possible then to get an occasional bit of agreeable reading too, and, among inside passengers especially, there was, at times, a sort of Old English freedom in the mutual enjoyment of a book. It is said that one. day, on one of the well-known roads, a lady had been for some time engaged over one page of a little book,'

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which, in the course of the journey, she had occasionally consulted. Turning at length to her companion in travel, a gentleman from whose appearance she gathered that an appeal on such a question would not be disagreeable, she held the open page towards him, and said, "May I ask your attention to this hymn, and ask you to favour me with your opinion of it ? Do you know it?" It was

Her companion glanced down the page, and made an attempt to excuse himself from conversation on the

merits of the hymn; but the lady ventured on another appeal.

"That hymn has given me so much pleasure," she said; "its sentiments so touch me; indeed, I cannot tell you how much good it has done me. Don't you

think it very good?"

"Madam!" said the stranger, bursting into tears, "I am the poor unhappy man who wrote that hymn many years ago, and I would give a thousand worlds, if I had them, to enjoy the feelings I then had."

Poor Robinson! it was he, the victim of eccentricity, love of change, and self-conceit; it was he of whom Robert Hall said, "he had a musical voice, and was master of all its intonations; he had wonderful self-passion, and could say what he pleased, when he pleased, and how he pleased." Like many other men of popular and versatile talents, however, he ran a zigzag course. Now, one of Whitefield's converts, and a student at the Tabernacle' as a Calvinistic Methodist; now, an Independent minister; now, a Baptist, translating Saurin's sermons, dealing in coals and corn, writing a history of baptism, in which all the jumbled powers and oddities of his character seem to be reflected; and, at last, a Socinian, groping his way downward into the cheerless gloom, to realize the awful meaning of an inspired utterance, "He that despised Moses' law died without mercy under two or three witnesses: of how much sorer punishment, suppose ye, shall he be thought worthy who hath trodden under foot the Son of God, and hath counted the blood of the covenant, wherewith he was sanctified, an unholy thing, and hath done despite unto the Spirit of grace?"

Chapter XVI.

HYMNS ON THE WATERS.

"Hast thou heard of a shell on the margin of ocean,
Whose pearly recesses the echoes still keep,
Of the music it caught when, with tremulous motion,
It joined in the concert poured forth by the deep?

"And fables have told us when far inland carried,

To the waste sandy desert and dark ivied cave,
In its musical chambers some murmurs have tarried,
It learnt long before of the wind and the wave."

UST at the opening of the seventeenth century,
a clergyman in Hull was stepping into a boat

with a young couple, whom he was going to marry in Lincolnshire. The weather was calm, and there was the promise of a bright voyage to the scene of the wedding; but a mysterious sense of coming danger pressed upon the good parson's heart, and throwing his cane on shore as the boat went off, he cried, "Ho, for heaven!" The shout was prophetic; neither he, nor bridegroom, nor bride returned. They never reached the altar. They sank together. It was, indeed, "Ho, for heaven!" The son of that prophetic pastor lived to give us one of the best boat songs that ever floated over the waters, or charmed a

pilgrim on the ocean. This was Andrew Marvel, the
friend of Milton, and his associate as private secretary
to Cromwell. A man who was faithful to his prin-
ciples, and held his integrity though tempted in the
hour of need by offers of a royal bribe; one whose
ability and honourable bearing secured his election as
member of Parliament for his native city; and whose
genius, talent, humour, and wit were always engaged
for goodness and truth against corruption, falsehood,
and wrong.
Did you ever read his whimsical re-
flections on Holland?

They prove that Dutchmen were not his favourites. Their politics were not his. And his lines serve, too, to show the power which he could wield as a satirist :

Holland, that scarce deserves the name of land,
As but th' offscouring of the British sand;
And so much earth as was contributed
By English pilots when they heave the lead,
Or what by th' ocean's slow alluvion fell
Of shipwreck'd cockle and the mussel shell-
This undigested vomit of the sea

Fell to the Dutch by just propriety.

This is enough as evidence that his memory justly inherits the distinction of great humour and satirical genius. But he was a good man. Nor was he, as a poet, less capable of tenderness and reverent beauty, when they were called for, than for logical and acute philippic. Of course, he would deeply sympathize with the emigrants who in his day fled their country to avoid the oppression to which they were subject for their religious and ecclesiastical principles; and for those of them who found their way to the Bermudas he wrote a hymn which lives to give pleasure to the deyout taste of every following generation: