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Norris, John, born at Collingbourne, Kingston, Wilts, 1657, his father being clergyman of the parish. He was educated at Winchester, and Exeter College, Oxford, subsequently becoming a Fellow of All Souls. From Oxford he passed, in 1689, to the Rectory of Newton St. Loe, Somersetshire, and thence, in 1691, to Bemerton, near Salisbury (and once the home of George Herbert), where he died and was buried, in 1711. He was noted as a theologian, and as a metaphysical writer, his works on those subjects being many. In 1687 he published A Collection of Miscellanies, in prose and verse, in which four versions of individual psalms were given. A specimen from these is found in Holland's British Psalmists, and the whole were reprinted in 1871 with Norris's other poems in Dr Grosart's Fuller Worthies' Miscellanies. From his Collection of Miscellanies, 1687, two hymns have passed into Martineau's Hymns, &c, 1873:—
1. In vain, great God, in vain I try. God Omniscient.
2. Long have I viewed, long have I thought. Resignation. [William T. Brooke]

--John Julian, Dictionary of Hymnology (1907)