86 OUR HYMNS :
poet reminded her of the verse, " Commit thy way unto the Lord," Psalm xxxvii. 5 ; and, retiring to an arbour, wrote this hymn upon those words. The same night two gentlemen arrived who had come by order of Duke Christian, of Merseburg, to invite the poet to Merseburg, and to inform him that the Duke had settled a considerable pension on him as a compensation for the injustice of which he was a victim. Gerhard then gave his wife the hymn he had written in trouble but in faith, and said, " See how God provides ! Did I not bid you to trust in God, and all would be well."
��JOHN MILTON. 16081674.
OF the life of the celebrated author of the " Paradise Lost," Montgomery truly says, " His youth and his old age he devoted to himself and his fame, his middle life to his country. That Milton thus appropriated the different parts of his life will appear as we briefly recount his history.
His father, of the same name, was a man of good family, who had enjoyed educational advantages, and was especially skilled in music a talent inherited by his greater son. The poet waa born on the 9th of December, 1608, at a house in Bread Street, London, where his father carried on the profession of scrivener, or preparer of legal contracts. There was also a younger brother, who became a judge, Sir Christopher Milton ; and a sister, whose children the poet afterwards educated. The young poet was educated at St. Paul s School, and afterwards at Cambridge, where he distinguished himself for the excellence of his Latin verses. There also he graduated M.A. in his twenty- fourth year. His father had intended to make him a minister of the State Church; but this was impossible with the views he already held, and especially at a time when Archbishop Laud was the ruling spirit of that Church. "If Milton had become a
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