Roundell Palmer

“ If Newton carried to some excess the sound principle laid down by him, that “perspicuity, simplicity and ease should be chiefly attended to, and the imagery and colouring of poetry, if admitted at all, should be indulged very sparingly and with great judgment,” if he is often dry and colloquial, he rises at other times into “soul-animating strains,” such as “Glorious things of thee are spoken, Zion, city of our God”; and sometimes (as in “Approach, my soul, the mercy seat”) rivals Cowper himself in depth of feeling. Cowper’s hymns in this book are, almost without exception, worthy of his name. ”

“ Will not persons be encouraged by such legislation to disobey the law, and get up societies in order to induce the Legislature to sanction further disobedience? Are we to say that a certain amount of perseverance in systematic disobedience to the law will not merely induce Parliament to alter a law, which might in some instances be right, but to pass an Act, not of indemnity, but of ex post facto justification, in favour of the whole body of law-breakers for many years past? ”

“ But not a few very excellent hymns may be gathered from them. Simple and natural, without the vivacity and terseness of Watts or the severity of Newton, Kelly has some points in common with both those writers, and he is less subjective than most of the “Methodist” school. His hymns beginning “Lo! He comes, let all adore Him,” and “Through the day Thy love hath spared us,” have a rich, melodious movement; and another, “We sing the praise of Him who died,” is distinguished by a calm, subdued power, rising gradually from a rather low to a very high key. ”

“ Every married man whose wife has sisters has an interest in that condition of society which is produced by the state of law which makes his wife's sister his "sister-in-law." Our popular expression exactly hits the principle. The law makes the wife's sister his sister, and if you alter the law the wife's sister for domestic purpose will be his sister no longer. Do you want prohibitory laws against marriage without any degrees of relationship, or do you not? ”

“ With those whose taste is for hymns in which warm religious feelings are warmly and demonstratively expressed, “Jesus, lover of my soul,” is as popular as any of these.
Of the other Wesleyan hymn-writers, Olivers, originally a Welsh shoemaker and afterwards a preacher, is the most remarkable. He is the author of only two works, both odes, in a stately metre, and from their length unfit for congregational singing, but one of them,Olivers. “The God of Abraham praise,” an ode of singular power and beauty. ”

“ But everybody else who, having repented of breaking the law, and having treated the marriage as void, has separated front the person who never was his wife, shall be married compulsorily by the Bill to that person. Is that the sort of legislation of which your Lordships will approve? You not only give to the law-breakers themselves everything they ask, but you say that persons who have regretted their disobedience of the law shall be forced back into their original illegal relations. ”

“ Of the rest, one is well known and highly appreciated in English through Wesley’s translation, “Commit thou all thy ways”; and the evening and spring-tide hymns (“Now all the woods are sleeping” and “Go forth, my heart, and seek delight”) show an exquisite feeling for nature; while nothing can be more tender and pathetic than “Du bist zwar mein und bleibest mein” (“Thou’rt Franck. mine, yes, still thou art mine own”) , on the death of his son. ”

“ If the principle be a right one, of course it extends to all the immediate members of one's own family. We know that the brutal passions of some of the lowest order of mankind are capable of overleaping even the natural barriers which exist between parent and child, between brother and sister. ”

“ The grains of poetry scattered through this large mass of Calvinistic divinity are very few; yet in one short passage of seven stanzas (“O send me down a draught of love”) , the fire burns with a brightness so remarkable as to justify a strong feeling of regret that the gift which this writer evidently had in him was not more often cultivated. ”

“ To pass such an Act, repealing the law retrospectively in favour of all law-breakers, is really to tell the people "you are under no obligation to obey the laws." But the matter does not stop there. Every clause of the Bill is more and more monstrous as we go forward. ”

“ The hymnody of North Germany has for artistic treatment a strong advantage which is unpossessed by that of England, in that for the most part the same verses are associated with the same tunes, so that, whenever the text or the music is heard, either prompts recollection of the other, whereas in England tunes were always and are now often composed to metres and not to poems; any tune in a given metre is available for every poem in the same, and hence there are various tunes to one poem, and various poems to one tune. ”

“ If we were to bring together all the aberrations of our law in matters relating to the connection of the sexes we should no doubt have a very alarming and very lamentable catalogue of evils. But does any one suppose that by adapting our law to such a state of things we should not produce a greater amount of mischief? For these reasons, my Lords, I earnestly entreat you not to agree to the second reading of this Bill. ”

“ With a correct style and good versification, his tone is subjective, and the burden of his hymns is not praise, but prayer. Among his works (which enter largely into most German hymn-books) , two of the best are the “Song of Tears” and the “Song of Comfort,” translated by Miss Winkworth in her Christian Singers of Germany. Rist published about 600 hymns, “pressed out of him,” as he said, “by the cross.” He was a pastor, and son of a pastor, in Holstein, and lived after the peace to enjoy many years of prosperity, being appointed poet-laureate to the emperor and finally ennobled. ”

“ I think I have said enough to show that if your Lordships should at any time be persuaded, contrary to my own conviction, that the main principle of the Bill is right, you must set to work to give effect to your wish in a totally different manner. You must not by retrospective legislation try to render legal that which was not lawful and cannot properly be made so. You must consider how far your principle ought to go, and I am sure you can never stop short of the abolition of all marriages of affinity. ”

“ The so-called Orphic hymns, in hexameter verse, styled τελεταί, or hymns of initiation into the “mysteries” of the Hellenic religion, are productions of the Alexandrian school,—as to which learned men are not agreed whether they are earlier or later than the Christian era.
The Romans did not adopt the word “hymn”; nor have we many Latin poems of the classical age to which it can properly be applied. ”

“ It is not improbable that some rudiments of the peculiar system of hymnody which now prevails throughout the Greek communion, and whose affinities are rather to the Hebrew and Syriac than to the classical forms, may have existed in the church of Constantinople, even Greek system of hymnody. at that time. Anatolius, patriarch of Constantinople in the middle of the 5th century, was the precursor of that system; but the reputation of being its proper founder belongs to Romanos, of whom little more is known than that he wrote hymns still extant, and lived towards the end of that century. ”

“ The truth is, that the husband and the wife are so united that you cannot make their intercourse with their own brothers and sisters really sisterly and brotherly—you cannot make it unrestrained—unless you apply the same rule to both of them. ”

“ The Greek “Morning Hymn” (which, as divided into verses by Archbishop Ussher in his treatise De Symbolis, has a majestic rhythm, resembling a choric or dithyrambic strophe) is the original form of “Gloria in Excelsis,” still said or sung, with some variations, in all branches of the church which have not relinquished the use of liturgies. The Latin form of this hymn (of which that in the English communion office is an exact translation) is said, by Bede and other ancient writers, to have been brought into use at Rome by Pope Telesphorus, as early as the time of the emperor Hadrian. ”

“ That is the principle on which the law has proceeded, and I say it is a most wise and salutary law that you should carry the fence as far in favour of the relatives of the wife as of the relatives of the husband, so that the two may be thoroughly identified, and the intercourse which is perfectly unrestrained as to the one should be equally unrestrained as to the other. ”

“ Luther’s own hymns, thirty-seven in number (of which about twelve are translations or adaptations from Latin originals) , are for the principal Christian seasons; on the sacraments, the church, grace, death, &c.; and paraphrases of seven psalms, of a passage in Isaiah, and of the Lord’s Prayer, Ten Commandments, Creed, Litany and “Te Deum.” There is also a very touching and stirring song on the martyrdom of two youths by fire at Brussels, in 1523–1524. Homely and sometimes rugged in form, and for the most part objective in tone, they are full of fire, manly simplicity and strong faith. ”

“ The moment you go a little further in the circle of relationship the power of the prohibitory law becomes stronger, because, the more remote the connection, the more important it is to fence it. Take the case of uncle and niece. We know that in some countries dispensations are granted for such marriages; and there the principle of such unions being admitted men are not restrained by natural repugnance from forming them. ”

“ Eleven hymns of Gregory, and twelve or thirteen (mostly taken from longer poems) by Fortunatus, came into general use in the Italian, Gallican and British churches. Those of Gregory are in a style hardly distinguishable from the Ambrosian; those of Fortunatus are graceful, and sometimes vigorous. He does not, however, deserve the praise given to him by Dr Neale, of having struck out a new path in Latin hymnody. On the contrary, he may more justly be described as a disciple of the school of Prudentius, and as having affected the classical style, at least as much as any of his predecessors. ”

“ Works, critical and historical, upon the subject of hymns, have also multiplied; and collections for church use have become innumerable—several of the various religious denominations, and many of the leading ecclesiastical and religious societies, having issued hymn-books of their own, in addition to those compiled for particular dioceses, churches and chapels, and to books (like Hymns Ancient and Modern, published 1861, supplemented 1889, revised edition, 1905) which have become popular without any sanction from authority. ”

“ Klopstock, the author of the Messiah, cannot be considered great as a hymn-writer, though his “Sabbath Hymn” (of which there is a version in Hymns from the Land of Luther) is simple and good. Generally his hymns (ten of which are translated in Klopstock.Sheppard’s Foreign Sacred Lyre) are artificial and much too elaborate.
Of the “romantic” school, which came in with the French Revolution, the two leading writers are Friedrich Leopold von Hardenberg, called “Novalis,” and Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, the celebrated author of Undine and Sintram—both romance-writers, as well as poets. ”

“ It is necessary and important so to fence round the sanctity of the domestic hearth upon the subject of marriage as to make safe and secure, as far as law can do so, the unrestrained and peculiarly affectionate intercourse which ought to exist for the happiness of families between the closest and nearest relations. ”

“ In their versions, as might be expected, there are occasional gleams of power and beauty, exceeding anything to be found in Sternhold and Hopkins, or Tate and Brady; but even in the best these are rare, and chiefly occur where the strict idea of translation has been most widely departed from. In all of them, as a rule, the life and spirit, which in prose versions of the psalms are so wonderfully preserved, have disappeared. The conclusion practically suggested by so many failures is that the difficulties of metrical translation, always great, are in this case insuperable ”

“ His compositions, which may be compared, in many respects, to those of the Christian Year, are lyric poems, of considerable length, rather than hymns, though many hymns have been taken from them. They are, with few exceptions, subjective, and speak the language of individual experience. They occupy a middle ground between the masculine simplicity of the old Lutheran style and the highly wrought religious emotion of the later pietists, towards whom they on the whole incline. Being nearly all excellent, it is not easy to distinguish among the 123 those which are entitled to the highest praise. ”