St. Ephrem the Syrian

Let us see those things that He does for us every day!
How many tastes for the mouth! How many beauties for the eye!
How many melodies for the ear! How many scents of the nostrils!
Who is sufficient in comparison to the goodness of these little things?
Who is able to make thousands of remunerations in a day?
Even if there dwell in him a great spring of words,
He will be unable by words and melodies to make
The great remuneration of every hour,
O Gracious Cheated One, Who, although cheated daily,
Does not cease to do good (Hymns on Nativity, 31).

Today we commemorate (in the West anyway) St. Ephrem the Syrian, one of the most prolific hymn writers the Church has ever possessed. His were among the first Patristic works I aquired, in the form of Sebastian Brock's translation of Hymns on Paradise. His though is sometimes rather different from that of other Fathers, as St. Ephrem lived in the medium of a culture rather different from that of the Greek or Latin Fathers: but subsisting in an orthodox faith flowing from the Scriptures.

(The above lines are taken from this article, which I found a while back on Break Point.)