Theron Brown

“ He makes the grass the mountains crown,
And corn in valleys grow. THE TUNE,
One of the chorals—if not the best—to claim partnership with this sacred classic, is John Cole's “Geneva,” distinguished among the few fugue tunes which the singing world refuses to dismiss. There is a growing grandeur in the opening solo and its following duet as they climb the first tetra-chord, when the full harmony suddenly reveals the majesty of the music. The little parenthetic duo at the eighth bar breaks the roll of the song for one breath, and the concord of voices closes in again like a diapason. ”

“ Safe in the life-boat, sailor, cling to self no more;
Leave the poor old stranded wreck and pull for the shore!
The hymn-tune is a buoyant allegro—solo and chorus—full of hope and courage, and both imagery and harmony appeal to the hearts of seamen. It is popular, and has long been one of the song numbers in demand at religious services both on sea and land. ”

“ Poetic tradition has dramatized the story of the birth of the “Te Deum,” dating it on an Easter Sunday, and dividing the honor of its composition between Ambrose and his most eminent convert. It was the day when the bishop baptized Augustine, in the presence of a vast throng that crowded the Basilica of Milan. As if foreseeing with a prophet's eye that his brilliant candidate would become one of the ruling stars of Christendom, Ambrose lifted his hands to heaven and chanted in a holy rapture,—
We praise Thee, O God! ”

“ Few men have ever lived whose case more needed a “Hymn of Trust”—and fewer still could have written it themselves. Through all those trial years he was pouring forth his soul in devout verses, making in all no less than a hundred and twenty-five hymns—every one of them a comfort to others as well as to himself.
He became a favorite, and for a time the favorite, hymn-writer of all the German-speaking people. ”

“ National feeling has taken maturer speech and finer melody, but it was these ruder voices that set the pitch. They were sung with native pride and affection at fireside vespers and rural feasts with the adopted songs of Burns and Moore and Mrs. Hemans, and, like the lays of Scotland and Provence, they breathed the flavor of the country air and soil, and taught the generation of home-born minstrelsy that gave us the Hutchinson family, Ossian E. Dodge, Covert with his “Sword of Bunker Hill,” and Philip Phillips, the “Singing Pilgrim.” ”

“ The music of faith, hope and charity will be somewhere in its strain.
Philosophy composes poems, but not hymns. “It is no love-symphony we hear when the lion thinkers roar,” some blunt writer has said. “The moles of Science have never found the heavenly dove's nest, and the Sea of Reason touches no shore where balm for sorrow grows.”
On the contrary there are thousands of true hymns that have no standing at the court of the muses. Even Cowper's Olney hymns, as Goldwin Smith has said, “have not any serious value as poetry. Hymns rarely have,” he continues. ”

“ There would not be room in a dozen pages to record all the similar saving incidents connected with the singing of “Where Is My Wandering Boy?” The rhetoric of love is strong in every note and syllable of the solo, and the tender chorus of voices swells the song to heaven like an antiphonal prayer. ”

“ To present each hymn with its tune appeared the natural and most satisfactory way, as in most cases it is impossible to dissociate the two. The melody is the psychological coëfficient of the metrical text. Without it the verse of a seraph would be smothered praise. Like a flower and its fragrance, hymn and tune are one creature, and stand for a whole value and a full effect. ”

“ A stronger illustration of tranquil thought in terrible tumult was never drawn.
“O Galilee, Sweet Galilee,” whose history has been given at the end of chapter six, was not only often sung in Sunday-schools, but chimed (in the cities) on steeple-bells—nor is it by any means forgotten today—on the Sabbath and in social singing assemblies. Like “Precious Jewels,” it has been, in many places, taken up by street boys with a relish, and often displaced the play-house ditties in the lips of little newsboys and bootblacks during a leisure hour or a happy mood. ”

“ Echoes that remain to us of those fervid and affectionate, as well as resolute and vehement, expressions of religious life as sung in the early revivals of New England, in parts of the South, and especially in the Middle West, are suggestive of spontaneous melody forest-born, and as unconscious of scale, clef or tempo as the song of a bird. ”

“ The Methodist Reformation, while it had found no practical sympathy within the established church, left a deep sense of its reason and purpose in the minds of the more devout Episcopalians, and this feeling, instead of taking form in popular revival methods, prompted them to deeper sincerity and more spiritual fervor in their traditional rites of worship. Many of the next generation inherited this pious ecclesiasticism, and carried their loyalty to the old Christian culture to the extreme of devotion till they saw in the sacraments the highest good of the soul. ”

“ Henry John Gauntlett, have tried their skill in fitting music to this hymn, but only Gottschalk and Kozeluck approach the mood into which its quiet words charm a pious and reflective mind. Possibly its frequent association with “Holley,” composed by George Hews, may influence a hearer's judgement of other melodies but there is something in that tune that makes it cling to the hymn as if by instinctive kinship.
Others may have as much or more artistic music but “Holley” in its soft modulations seems to breathe the spirit of every word. ”

“ The ethnic anthologies growing out of love of country are a mingled literature of filial and religious piety, ranging from war-like pæans to lyric prayers. They become the cherished inheritance of a nation, and, once fixed in the common memory and common heart, the people rarely let them die. ”

“ THE TUNE, Composed by James McGranahan, delivers the whole stanza in soprano or tenor solo, when the alto, joining the treble, leads off the refrain in duet, the male voices striking alternate notes until the full harmony in the last three bars. The style and movement of the chorus are somewhat suggestive of a popular glee, but the music of the duet is flexible and sweet, and the bass and tenor progress with it not in the ride-and-tie-fashion but marking time with the title-syllable. ”

“ Genius in a colossal frame cannot otherwise than walk in strides. What is technically a hymn he never wrote, but it is significant that as he neared the Shoreless Sea, and looked into the Infinite, his sense of the Divine presence instilled something of the hymn spirit into his last verses.
Between Alfred Tennyson singing trustfully of his Pilot and Fanny Crosby singing “Safe in the Arms of Jesus,” is only the width of the choir. The organ tone and the flute-note breathe the same song. ”

“ An eminent Episcopal divine, (says the Christian Register,) one Trinity Sunday, at the close of his sermon, read three hymns by Unitarian authors: one to God the Father, by Samuel Longfellow, one to Jesus, by Theodore Parker, and one to the Holy Spirit, by N.L. Frothingham. “There,” he said, “you have the Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.”
It is natural to speak of hymns as “poems,” indiscriminately, for they have the same structure. But a hymn is not necessarily a poem, while a poem that can be sung as a hymn is something more than a poem. Imagination makes poems; devotion makes hymns. ”

“ In this hymn we see, sitting humbly at the feet of the great author of our religion, a man who impressed himself perhaps more than any other save Napoleon Bonaparte upon his own generation, and who was the wonder of Europe for his immense attainments and the versatility of his powers. Statesman, philanthropist, biographer, publicist, linguist, historian, financier, naturalist, poet, political economist—there is hardly a branch of knowledge or a field of research from which he did not enrich himself and others, or a human condition that he did not study and influence. ”

“ Music was only an avocation with him, but he was an artist in his way, and among his compositions are found in some ancient Tune books his “Morning Glory,” “Canaan,” “Falmouth,” “Restoration,” “Massachusetts,” “Raynham,” “Crucifixion,” “Harmony,” “Devotion,” “Zion,” and “Hosanna.”
“All Saints New” was his masterpiece.
“WHEN I CAN READ MY TITLE CLEAR.”
No sacred song has been more profanely parodied by the thoughtless, or more travestied, (if we may use so strong a word) , in popular religious airs, than this golden hymn which has made Isaac Watts a benefactor to every prisoner of hope. ”

“ At one of Evan Roberts' meetings in Laughor, Wales, one speaker related the story of a “vision,” when in his room alone, and a Voice that bade him pray, and when he knelt but could not pray, commanded him to “Throw out the Life-line.” He had scarcely uttered these words in his story when the whole great congregation sprang to its feet and shouted the hymn together like the sound of many waters.
“There is more electricity in that song than in any other I ever heard,” Dr. Cuyler said to Mr. Sankey when he heard him sing it. Its electricity has carried it nearly round the world. ”

“ Their intent was the same as that of “revival meetings,” since so called, though the method—and the music—were different. The results in winning sinners, so far as they owed anything to the hymns and hymn-tunes, were apt to be a new generation of Christian recruits as sombre as the singing. “Lebanon” set forth the appalling shortness of human life; “Windham” gave its depressing story of the great majority of mankind on the “broad road,” and other minor tunes proclaimed God's sovereignty and eternal decrees; or if a psalm had His love in it, it was likely to be sung in a similar melancholy key. ”

“ There is a prayer in the swell of every semitone and the touch of every accidental, and the sweet concord of the 416 / 364 duet—soprano with tenor or bass—pleads on to the end of the fourth line, where the full harmony reinforces it like an organ with every stop in play. The tune is a rill of melody ending in a river of song.*
* Holbrook has also an arrangement of Franz Abt's, “When the Swallows Homeward Fly” written to “Jesus, Lover of my Soul,” but with Wesley's words it is far less effective than his original work. “Refuge” is not a manufacture but an inspiration. ”

“ But of so fine a composition there is no call for finical criticism. The “Recessional” is a product of the poet's holiest mood. “The Spirit of the Lord came upon him”—as the old Hebrew phrase is, and for the time he was a rapt prophet, with a backward and a forward vision. Providence saved the hymn, and it touched and sank into the better mind of the nation. It is already learned by heart—and sung—wherever English is the common speech, and will be heard in numerous translations, with the wish that there were more patriotic hymns of the same Christian temper and strength. ”

“ We set today a votive stone;
That memory may their deed redeem,
When, like our sires, our sons are gone.
Spirit, that made those heroes dare
To die, and leave their children free,
Bid Time and Nature gently spare
The shaft we raise to them and Thee.
This does not appear in the hymnals and owns no special tune. Its niche of honor is in the temple of anthology, but it will always be called the “Concord Hymn”—and the fourth line of its first stanza is a perennial quotation.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, LL.D., the renowned American essayist and poet, was born in Boston, 1803. ”

“ E.S. Ufford, well-known as a Baptist preacher, lecturer, and evangelist, was witnessing a drill at the life-saving station on Point Allerton, Nantasket Beach, when the order to “throw out the life-line” and the sight of the apparatus in action, combined with the story of a shipwreck on the spot, left an echo in his mind till it took the form of a song-sermon. Returning home, he pencilled the words of this rousing hymn, and, being himself a singer and player, sat down to his instrument to match the lines with a suitable air. ”

“ The admirable hymn of Dr. Doddridge may be noted in this division with its equally admirable 560 / 496 tune of “Melancthon,” one of the old Lutheran chorals of Germany.
Great God, we sing that mighty hand
By which supported still we stand.
The opening year Thy mercy shows;
Thy mercy crown it till its close!
By day, by night, at home, abroad,
Still we are guarded by our God.
As this last couplet stood—and ought now to stand—pious parents teaching the hymn to their children heard them repeat—
By day, by night, at home, abroad,
We are surrounded still with God. ”

“ Speak, O speak, thou gentle Jesus, —recalls the well-known verse of Newton, “How sweet the name of Jesus sounds.” Like many of Williams' hymns, it was prompted by occasion. Some converts suffered for lack of a “clear experience” and complained to him. They were like the disciples in the ship, “It was dark, and Jesus had not yet come unto them.” The poet-preacher immediately made this hymn-prayer for all souls similarly tried. ”

“ It was the singing by Philip Phillips that first impressed Ira D. Sankey with the amazing power of evangelical solo song, and helped him years later to resign his lucrative business as a revenue officer and consecrate his own rare vocal gift to the Christian ministry of sacred music. Heaven alone can show the birth-records of souls won to God all along the journeys of the “Singing Pilgrims,” and the rich succession of Mr. Sankey's melodies, that can be traced back by a chain of causes to the poem that “wrote itself” and became a hymn. And the chain may not yet be complete. ”

“ For what we know of the first formulated human prayer and praise we are mostly indebted to the Hebrew race. They seem to have been at least the only ancient nation that had a complete psalter—and their collection is the mother hymn-book of the world.
Probably the first form of hymn-worship was the plain-song—a declamatory unison of assembled singers, every voice on the same pitch, and within the compass of five notes—and so continued, from whatever may have stood for plain-song in Tabernacle and Temple days down to the earliest centuries of the Christian church. ”

“ THE TUNE.
The plain-music of William Boyd's “Pentecost,” (with modulations in the tenor) , creates a new accent for the familiar lines. Preferable in every sense are Bradbury's tender “Zephyr” or “Rest.”
No coming generation will ever feel the pious gladness of Amariah Hall's “All Saints New” in E flat major as it stirred the Christian choirs of seventy five years ago. Fitted to this heart-felt lyric of Watts, it opened with the words—
O if my Lord would come and meet, in full harmony and four-four time, continuing to the end of the stanza. ”