Hymns of Longing for Rest

“L’h that I had wings like a dove, for then would I fly away, and be at rest!” The reference in this beautiful verse is to the turtle-dove of Palestine, a bird of such free spirit that if confined in a cage, it soon droops and dies. How often the child of God breathes this yearning aspiration for a higher and a holier atmosphere! How often, in seasons of grief and disappointment and utter disgust .with the inconstancy of our fellow-creatures, the homesick heart pines for escape into the very bosom of Jesus! For there only is rest, full, sweet, and all-satisfying.

This aspiration is not only breathed in prayer. It is uttered in song. Many of our richest hymns are prayers in metre. And few yearnings break forth oftener in the psalmodies of God’s people than the yearning for soulrest. Of the hymns that are pitched to this key we might mention many. Of the hymnists who have composed them, none is more celebrated than James Montgomery.

He is the Cowper of the nineteenth century, -■ — not in the poetry of nature, but in sacred song. Scotland gave him birth, as she did to Henry Lyte and Horatius Bonar. He was born in Ayrshire, the land of Kobert Burns, in 1771. His father was a Moravian missionary, who labored and died in the West Indies. James united with the Moravian Church at the age of forty-three, and his memory is held in high veneration among that small but true-hearted band of Christians. The Moravian body is like a tube-rose, small in bulk, but sends its sweet odors afar off. With this communion Montgomery worshipped until in his later years, and then he attended an evangelical EpiscopaV church (St. George’s) in Sheffield, England.

During my student days I spent some time at Sheffield, and often, met the venerable poet.

He was small of stature, with hair as white as snow. Although he had long been an editor, — and once been imprisoned for his bold utterances in his newspaper, the Iris, — he would be easily mistaken for a clergyman. He wore an exceedingly conspicuous white cravat, which reached close to his chin, and gave you the impression that he was suffering from a chronic sore throat. When I first called on him at his residence, “The Mount,” several of his most familiar lines began to repeat themselves to me, such as, —

“Friend after friend departs.
Who hath not lost a friend?”

And that other exquisite verse, which often weaves itself into our secret devotions: —

” Here in the body pent,

Absent from Him I roam;
Tet nightly pitch my moving tent.
One day’’s march nearer home.’’’’

There are few finer verses in the whole range of devotional poetry. It is a pilgrim’s wayfaring song, as he pulls up the tent-pins every morning, and moves onward toviards his everlasting rest.

Montgomery never visited this country, but he was full of warm enthusiasm towards America, in whose churches his hymns are sung every Sabbath. He was also full of honest indignation that so many people would persist in confounding him with the spasmodic Robert Montgomery, whose poem on “Satan” has been impaled, like a buzzing beetle on a pin, by the sharp pen of Macaulay. “Only think,” said the dear old poet to me, “that T should have just got a letter telling me that my poem on Satan is the best I ever wrote.” I do not wonder that his wrath waxed warm under such an imputation. The last time I ever saw the veteran, he was sitting in his pew at St. George’s, the “good, gray head” bending reverently over his prayer-book, as he joined in the responses. He “flew away, and was at rest,” in 1854, at the ripe old age of eighty-three.

Montgomery’s most popular hymn is that one which breathes out the longing of a weary heart: — “Oh! where shall rest be found, — Rest for the weary soul? ‘Twere vain the ocean depths to sound. Or pierce to either pole.”

Ten thousand times have God’s best beloved children, when made sick at the worthlessness and emptiness of worldly treasures, broke out in the fervid protestation: —

“This world can never give

The bliss for which we sigh;
‘Tis not the whole of life to live,
Nor all of death to die.”

Of Montgomery’s other favorite hymns, “Prayer is the soul’s sincere desire,” and “What are these in bright array,” I wish I had space to speak. But we must confine ourselves in this brief article to those songs of Zion which are full of longings for the better life and the better land.

Of this class of hymns there is one which everybody knows and everybody sings, and yet almost nobody knows its authorship. For Robert Seagrave is one of God’s “hidden ones” from all celebrity in the world of letters.

He was a minister of the English Established Church, but being a caged dove there, he broke loose into Dissent. This unfettered spirit of his gave birth to that vigorous hymn whose uplift has carried us often into the higher climes —

“Kiso, my soul, and stretch thy wings, Thy better portion trace; BJse from transitory things,

Towards heaven, thy native place.”

Seagrave sang this one bird-song about the year 1748, but I never heard that he sang again. But his inspiring lyric is ringing yet, like the notes of a lark at the gates of heaven. Probably all the sermons preached that year throughout Christendom have not lifted so many souls towards the gates of pearl as that single melody of Robert Seagrave. We must all seek to become acquainted with him in our Father’s house.

Yes, and we shall all love to know Horatius Bonar there, and thank him for his many hymns, so full of heavenward aspiration. Another singer, from our own land too, who has lately flown above the clouds, sweet, sorrowful Phebe Gary. For she taught us all to sing, amid our care-burdens and our crosses, —

“One sweetly solemn thought
Comes to me o’er and o’er:
I am nearer home to-day

Than I ever have been before.”