it has passed
among his forgotten or mostly forgotten productions but is notable for
the frequent use of its 3rd stanza by his brother John. John Wesley, in
his old age, did not so much shrink from death as from the thought of
its too slow approach. His almost constant prayer was, "Lord, let me not
live to be useless." "At every place," says Belcher, "after giving to
his societies what he desired them to consider his last advice, he
invariably concluded with the stanza beginning--

"'Oh that, without a lingering groan,
I may the welcome word receive.
My body with my charge lay down,
And cease at once to work and live.'"

The anticipation of death itself by both the great evangelists ended
like the ending of the hymn--

No anxious doubt, no guilty gloom
Shall daunt whom Jesus' presence cheers;
My Light, my Life, my God is come,
And glory in His face appears.

"FOREVER WITH THE LORD."

Montgomery had the Ambrosian gift of spiritual song-writing. Whatever
may be thought of his more ambitious descriptive or heroic pages of
verse, and his long narrative poems, his lyrics and cabinet pieces are
gems. The poetry in some exquisite stanzas of his "Grave" is a dream of
peace:

There is a calm for those who weep,
A rest for weary mortals found;
They softly lie and sweetly sleep
Low in the ground.

The storms that wreck the winter's sky
No more disturb their deep repose
Than summer evening's latest sigh
That shuts the rose.

But in the poem, "At Home in Heaven," which we are considering--with its
divine text in I Thess. 4:17--the Sheffield bard rises to the heights of
vision. He wrote it when he was an old man. The contemplation so
absorbed him that he could not quit his theme till he had composed
twenty-two quatrains. Only four or five--or at most only seven of
them--are now in general use. Like his "Prayer is the Soul's Sincere
Desire," they have the pith of devotional thought in them, but are less
subjective and analytical.

Forever with the Lord!
Amen, so let it be,
Life from the dead is in that word;
'Tis immortality.

Here in the body pent,
Absent from Him I roam,
Yet nightly pitch my moving tent
A day's march nearer home.

My Father's house on high!
Home of my soul, how near
At times to faith's foreseeing eye
Thy golden gates appear.

I hear at morn and