and the joyful traverse of its notes along the staff in four-four time, with the momentum of a good choir, is exhilarating in the extreme.

Corelli, the composer, was a master violinist, the greatest of his day, and wrote a great deal of violin music; and the thought of his glad instrument may have influenced his work when harmonizing the four voices of "Ain."

Arcangelo Corelli was born at Fusignano, in 1653. He was a sensitive artist, and although faultless in Italian music, he was not sure of himself in playing French scores, and once while performing with Handel (who resented the slightest error), and once again with Scarlatti, leading an orchestra in Naples when the king was present, he made a mortifying mistake. He took the humiliation so much to heart that he brooded over it till he died, in Rome, Jan. 18, 1717.

For revival meetings the modern tune set to "Come we that love the Lord," by Robert Lowry, should be mentioned. A shouting chorus is appended to it, but it has melody and plenty of stimulating motion.

The Rev. Robert Lowry was born in Philadelphia, March 12, 1826, and educated at Lewisburg, Pa. From his 28th year till his death, 1899, he was a faithful and successful minister of Christ, but is more widely known as a composer of sacred music.

"BE THOU EXALTED, O MY GOD."

In this hymn the thought of Watts touches the eternal summits. Taken from the 57th and 108th Psalms

Be Thou exalted, O my God,

Above the heavens where angels dwell;
Thy power on earth be known abroad
And land to land Thy wonders tell.

Haydn furnished it out of his chorus of morning stars, and it was christened "Creation," after the name of his great oratorio. It is a march of trumpets.

"BEFORE JEHOVAH'S AWFUL THRONE."

No one could mistake the style of Watts in this sublime ode. He begins with his foot on Sinai, but flies to Calvary with the angel preacher whom St. John saw in his Patmos vision:

Before Jehovah's awful throne

Ye nations bow with sacred joy;
Know that the Lord is God alone;
He can create and He destroy.

His sovereign power without our aid
Made us of clay and formed us men,
And when like wandering sheep we stray,
He brought us to His fold again.

We'll crowd Thy gates with thankful songs,
High as the heaven our voices raise,
And earth with her ten thousand tongues
Shall fill Thy courts with sounding praise.

TUNE-OLD HUNDRED.

Martin Madan's four-page anthem, "Denmark,” has some grand strains in it, but it is a tune of florid and difficult vocalization, and is now heard only in Old Folks' Concerts.

The Rev. Isaac Watts, D.D., was born at Southampton, Eng., in 1674. His father was a deacon of the Independent Church there, and though not an uncultured man himself, he is said to have had little patience with the incurable penchant of his boy for making rhymes and verses. We hear nothing of the lad's mother, but we can fancy her hand and spirit in the indulgence of his poetic tastes as well as in his religious training. The tradition handed down from Dr. Price, a colleague of Watts, relates that at the age of eighteen Isaac became so irritated at the crabbed and untuneful hymns sung at the Nonconformist meetings that he complained bitterly of them to his father. The deacon may have felt something

-enforced his text, "All things are yours." The hymn,

Not all the blood of beasts

On Jewish altars slain,

-was, as some say, suggested to the writer by a visit to the abbatoir in Smithfield Market. The same hymn years afterwards, discovered, we are told, in a printed paper wrapped around a shop bundle, converted a Jewess, and influenced her to a life of Christian faith and sacrifice.

A young man, hardened by austere and minatory sermons, was melted, says Dr. Belcher, by simply reading,

Show pity Lord, O Lord, forgive,

Let a repenting sinner live.

-and became partaker of a rich religious experience. The summer scenery of Southampton, with its distant view of the Isle of Wight, was believed to have inspired the hymnist sitting at a parlor window and gazing across the river Itchen, to write the stanza

Sweet fields beyond the swelling flood

Stand drest in living green;

So to the Jews old Canaan stood

While Jordan rolled between.

The hymn, "Unveil thy bosom, faithful tomb," was personal, addressed by Watts "to Lucius on the death of Seneca."

A severe heart-trial was the occasion of another hymn. When a young man he proposed marriage

to Miss Elizabeth Singer, a much-admired young lady, talented, beautiful, and good. She rejected him-kindly but finally. The disappointment was bitter, and in the first shadow of it he wrote,

How vain are all things here below,
How false and yet how fair.

Miss Singer became the celebrated Mrs. Elizabeth Rowe, the spiritual and poetic beauty of whose Meditations once made a devotional textbook for pious souls. Of Dr. Watts and his offer of his hand and heart, she always said, "I loved the jewel, but I did not admire the casket." The poet suitor was undersized, in habitually delicate health-and not handsome.

But the good minister and scholar found noble employment to keep his mind from preying upon itself and shortening his days. During his long though afflicted leisure he versified the Psalms, wrote a treatise on Logic, an Introduction to the Study of Astronomy and Geography, and a work On the Improvement of the Mind; and died in 1748, at the age of seventy-four.

"O FOR A THOUSAND TONGUES TO SING.”

Charles Wesley, the author of this hymn, took up the harp of Watts when the older poet laid it down. He was born at Epworth, Eng., in 1708, the third son of Rev. Samuel Wesley, and died in London, March 29, 1788. The hymn is believed to have