pour'd on earth below
Wake blessing's brightest radiancy.
'Tis power, love, wisdom, first exalted
And waken'd from oblivion's birth;
Yon starry arch--yon palace, vaulted--
Yon heaven of heavens, to smile on earth.
From his resplendent majesty
We shade us 'neath our sheltering wings,
While awe-inspired, and tremblingly
We praise the glorious King of Kings,
With sight and sense confused and dim;
O name--describe the Lord of Lords,
The seraph's praise shall hallow Him;--
Or is the theme too vast for words?"

RESPONSE.

"'Tis God! who pours the living glow
Of light, creation's fountain-head:
Forgive the praise--too mean and low--
Or from the living or the dead.
No tongue thy peerless name hath spoken,
No space can hold that awful name;
The aspiring spirit's wing is broken;--
Thou wilt be, wert, and art the same!
Language is dumb. Imagination,
Knowledge, and science, helpless fall;
They are irreverent profanation,
And thou, O God! art all in all.
How vain on such a thought to dwell!
Who knows Thee--Thee the All-unknown?
Can angels be thy oracle,
Who art--who art Thyself alone?
None, none can trace Thy course sublime,
For none can catch a ray from Thee,
The splendour and the source of time--
The Eternal of eternity.
Thy light of light outpour'd conveys
Salvation in its flight elysian,
Brighter than e'en Thy mercy's rays;
But vainly would our feeble vision
Aspire to Thee. From day to day
Age steals on us, but meets thee never;
Thy power is life's support and stay--
We praise thee, sing thee, Lord! for ever."

CHORUS.

"Holy, holy, holy! Praise--
Praise be His in every land;
Safety in His presence stays;
Sacred is His high command!"

Dr. Bowring's version,--though a good one, if the difficulty be
considered of giving back a piece of poetry, whose every word is a poem
in itself, and by whose rhyme and accentuation a feeling of
indescribable awe is instilled into the most fastidious reader's
mind,--Dr. Bowring's version is but a feeble reverberation of the holy
fire pervading our Dutch poet's anthem. But still there rests enough in
his copy to give one a high idea of the ori