276 OUE HYMNS :
" Look, ye saints, the sight is glorious,"
is a fine rendering of the passage, "We see Jesus crowned with glory." Heb. ii. 9.
JAMES MONTGOMERY.
1771-1854.
MONTGOMERY, whom we may describe as the Cowper of the 19th century, was born at Irvine, in Ayrshire, where his father was a Moravian minister. In his fifth year he accompanied his parents to Grace Hill, a settlement of the Moravians, near Ballymena, in Ireland. Two years after he was sent to the Moravian seminary at Fulneck, in Yorkshire. In the year 1783, and while he was still at Fulneck, his parents were sent as missionaries to the West Indies, where they both died.
Fulneck was the chief settlement of the Moravians in England. It was built in 1760, the year of Count Zinzendorf s death. There the young poet had offered to him the advantages of a liberal and religious education, and came under the beneficial influence of men of ardent piety. Montgomery was designed for a preacher, but his early devotion to the muses, which began in his tenth year, diverted his attention from severe study and altered the course of the current of his life. It was a happy element in his history that he early recognized his own bent, and saw that he was to serve the cause of Christ better as a poet than he could as a preacher.
Leaving Fulneck in 1787, he entered a retail shop at Mil-field, near Wakefield. There he continued to write poetry and cultivate music. But after remaining there a year and a half, being afflicted with that pensive melancholy which often returned upon him, he set out with a few shillings in his pocket to try his fortune in the world. But he soon repented of his rash under taking, and gladly accepted a situation similar to that he had left, at the village of Wath, near Rotherham. After remaining there
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