The Lord God prepared a gourd, and made it to come up over Jonah, that it might be a shadow over his head, to deliver him from his grief. So Jonah was exceeding glad of the gourd. But God prepared a worm when the morning rose the next day, and it smote the gourd that it withered.
Jonah 4:6–7
Words: Charles Wesley, Short Hymns on Select Passages of the Holy Scriptures, Volume 2 (Bristol, England: E. Farley, 1762), numbers 1361 & 1362.
Music: Aubrey Charles J. Vincent, Jr. (1852–1934) (🔊 pdf nwc).
If you have access to a better photo of Vincent, would you ?
Our joy in a created good,
How soon it fades away,
Fades, at the morning hour bestowed,
Before the noon of day.
Joy, by its violent excess,
To certain ruin tends,
And all our rapturous happiness
In hasty sorrow ends.
In vain doth earthly bliss afford
A momentary shade;
It rises like the prophet’s gourd,
And withers o’er my head.
But of my Savior’s love possessed,
No more for earth I pine;
Secure of everlasting rest
Beneath the heav’nly vine.