God answers sharp and sudden on some prayers,
And thrusts the thing we have prayed for in our face,
A gauntlet with a gift in ’t.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1857)

Did not God
Sometimes withhold in mercy what we ask,
We should be ruin’d at our own request.
—Hannah More, “Moses in the Bulrushes,”
Sacred Dramas (1782)

Not, Lord, because I have done well or ill;
Not that my mind looks up to thee clear-eyed;
Not that it struggles in fast cerements tied;
Not that I need thee daily sorer still;
Nor now for any cause to thee I cry,
But this, that thou art thou, and here am I.
—George MacDonald, The Diary of an Old Soul (1880)