Sunday, February 4, 2024

"lost | In wonder, love, and praise"

      Joseph Addison, "When all thy mercies, O my God," stanza 1, the poem with which he concludes an essay on gratitude; The spectator 6, no. 453 (Saturday, August 9, 1712):  223.  See the Canterbury Dictionary of Hymnology under "When all thy mercies, O my God" ("The hymn [by Addison] was very popular in the 18th century, and has remained so. John Wesley* used it in his first hymnbook, the Collection of Psalms and Hymns published at Charlestown in 1737, though unhappily altering the two lines printed above to 'Why my cold heart, art thou not lost / In wonder, love and praise?'") and Charles Wesley's "Love divine, all loves excelling".  Later Gerard Manley Hopkins used the phrase "lost in wonder" at the end of the first stanza of his translation of Aquinas' "Adoro te devote."