The father said stop that, the small son complied but without stopping it!

In his Grace and Truth: Twenty Steps to Embracing Virtue and Saving Civilization, George W. Rutler tells of the child versifier who foreshadowed his future greatness.

Just as it is in our better nature to sing, so it is in our better nature to arrange words in poetry. In the late seventeenth century in Southampton, England, there was a boy who was addicted to verse. As a boy, Isaac Watts watched a mouse by the fireplace and said, “The little mouse, for want of stairs, went up a rope to say his prayers.”

His father told him to cut it out. The family had had enough of his constant scansion. He replied, “Father, father, pity take, and I will no more verses make.”

He didn’t keep his poetic promise. Instead, he became the father of English hymnody, writing hundreds upon hundreds of church songs. We still sing many of them: “Joy to the World,” “O God, Our Help in Ages Past,” “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross.”

A natural, to be sure.