With years oppressed, with sorrows worn

Representative Text

1 With years opprest, with sorrow worn,
Dejected, harassed, sick, forlorn,
To Thee, O God, I pray:
To Thee my withered hands arise,
To Thee I left these failing eyes;
O cast me not away!

2 Thy mercy heard my infant prayer:
Thy Love, with all a mother's care,
Sustained my childish days:
Thy goodness watched my ripening youth,
And formed my heart to love Thy truth,
And filled my lips with praise.

3 O Saviour, has Thy grace declined?
Can years affect the eternal Mind,
Or time its Love decay?
A thousand ages in Thy sight,
And all their long and weary flight,
Are gone like yesterday.

4 Then, even in age and grief, Thy Name
Shall still my languid heart inflame,
And bow my faltering knee:
O yet this bosom feels the fire;
This trembling hand and drooping lyre
Have yet a strain for Thee!

5 Yes, broken, tuneless, still, O Lord,
This voice, transported, shall record
Thy goodness, tried so long;
Till, sinking slow with calm decay,
Its feeble murmurs melt away
Into a seraph's song.

Source: Church Book: for the use of Evangelical Lutheran congregations #537

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Author: Robert Grant

Robert Grant (b. Bengal, India, 1779; d. Dalpoorie, India, 1838) was influenced in writing this text by William Kethe’s paraphrase of Psalm 104 in the Anglo-Genevan Psalter (1561). Grant’s text was first published in Edward Bickersteth’s Christian Psalmody (1833) with several unauthorized alterations. In 1835 his original six-stanza text was published in Henry Elliott’s Psalm and Hymns (The original stanza 3 was omitted in Lift Up Your Hearts). Of Scottish ancestry, Grant was born in India, where his father was a director of the East India Company. He attended Magdalen College, Cambridge, and was called to the bar in 1807. He had a distinguished public career a Governor of Bombay and as a member of the British Parliament, where… Go to person page >

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Text Information

Text Information

First Line:	With years oppressed, with sorrows worn
Author:	Robert Grant
Language:	English
Copyright:	Public Domain

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With years oppressed, with sorrow worn. Sir R. Grant. [Psalms lxxi.] Published in his posthumous Sacred Poems, 1839, p. 31, in 5 stanzas of 6 lines. It is in common use in its full or abbreviated form, and also as "Thy mercy heard my infant prayer" (stanza ii).

--John Julian, Dictionary of Hymnology (1907)

Notes

With years oppressed, with sorrow worn. Sir R. Grant. [Psalms lxxi.] Published in his posthumous Sacred Poems, 1839, p. 31, in 5 stanzas of 6 lines. It is in common use in its full or abbreviated form, and also as "Thy mercy heard my infant prayer" (stanza ii).

--John Julian, Dictionary of Hymnology (1907)

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