Word
Gems
What is a
man but the sum of his thoughts?
Poetry:
- Sarah Flower
Adams'
- Nearer My God
to Thee
- NEARER, my God, to Thee,
- Nearer to Thee!
- E'en though it be a cross
- That raiseth me;
- Still all my song shall be,
- Nearer, my God, to Thee,
- Nearer to Thee!
-
- Though like the wanderer,
- The sun gone down,
- Darkness be over me,
- My rest a stone;
- Yet in my dreams I'd be
- Nearer, my God, to Thee,
- Nearer to Thee!
-
- There let the way appear
- Steps unto Heaven,
- All that Thou send'st me
- In mercy given;
- Angels to beckon me
- Nearer, my God, to Thee,
- Nearer to Thee!
-
- Than, with my waking thoughts
- Bright with Thy praise,
- Out of my stony griefs,
- Bethel I'll raise;
- So by my woes to be
- Nearer, my God, to Thee,
- Nearer to Thee!
- A close friend of poet Percy Bysshe
Shelley (1792-1822), Adams (1805-1848) continued to follow the ideals of Romanticism in
direct contrast to the new sociological aesthetic espoused by writers such as Thomas Carlyle and Charles Dickens.
She is linked with the influential but eccentric and eventually discredited school of
poets satirized by William Aytoun as the 'Spasmodics'. She is chiefly remembered for Vivia Perpetua
(1841), a dramatic poem about the life and death of an early Christian martyr. An early
champion of women's rights, she insisted on a 'no housekeeping' pact with her husband and,
at the age of eighteen, broke the record for the ascent of Ben Lomond by a woman.
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