A thousand ages in Thy sight
Are like an evening gone;
Short as the watch that ends the night
Before the rising sun.

These lines come from Isaac Watts’s hymn paraphrase of Psalm 90, a biblical meditation traditionally attributed to Moses that contrasts God’s eternity with human brevity. Watts (1674–1748), a leading English Nonconformist hymn-writer, published many such “psalm imitations” to render the Psalms in contemporary Christian language suitable for congregational singing. The stanza reflects early 18th‑century Protestant devotional culture, in which hymnody served as both worship and moral reflection. Here Watts adapts Psalm 90:4 (“a thousand years… are but as yesterday… and as a watch in the night”) into memorable English verse emphasizing the vast disproportion between divine time and human experience.

The speaker addresses God directly, stressing that what seems unimaginably long to humans (“a thousand ages”) is, to the eternal divine perspective, as fleeting as an evening or a single night watch. The imagery compresses time: an “evening gone” and a “watch” ending before sunrise evoke how quickly life passes and how limited human control over time is. The stanza’s force lies in its moral and spiritual implication: if human life is so short, wisdom consists in humility, repentance, and ordering one’s days toward what endures. It also offers consolation—history’s long burdens are not long to God—while underscoring the Psalm’s theme of mortality.