Henry Septimus Sutton

Sutton, Henry Septimus, born at Nottingham, 1825, the son of a bookseller and newspaper proprietor. He was articled to a surgeon, but abandoned medicine for literature. Mr. Sutton's connection with newspaper work has been life-long, and for upwards of thirty years he has been editor of the Alliance News. His first volume of Poems was issued from the Review office, Nottingham, 1848. This included Clifton Grove Garland, a long descriptive and narrative poem. In 1854 appeared Quinquinergia, a prose work of mystical religion, the author being a member of the New Church. To this was appended a series of poems, entitled Rose's Diary, written in memory of an early friend of the author's, who died in 1850. In successive cantos the changing moods and aspirations of personal religion are depicted, with occasionally a touch of quaintness in the language and imagery which reminds one of the best of the devout poets of the seventeenth century. An enlarged and revised edition of the Poems was published by David M. Main, Glasgow, 1886. In Martineau's Hymns, 1873, appear the following five pieces, selected from Rose's Diary:—
1. I have a little trembling light, which still. The inward light. Canto I. and the last two stanzas of Canto III.
2. 0 Father! I have sinned: I have done. Under the sense of sin. Canto XI.
3. Put not on me, 0 Lord, this work divine. Self distrust and self-surrender. Canto VIII.
4. The day with light its genial self engirds. The outer and inner sunshine. Canto VI.
5. What mean these slow returns of love; these days. The sleep that longs for waking. Canto X. [Rev. Valentine D. Davis, B.A.]

-- John Julian, Dictionary of Hymnology (1907)