sailors had come singing hymns; and Anglo-Saxon Puritan settlers sent back a hymn-book, the first literary offering of the New World to the Old. It is worth noting that the offering was well received. It afterward went through many English editions. Of course the hymns sung on Columbus's ships were in Latin, and the songs of the New England book were rough-hewn translations of the Psalms into English verse, but they were all, in the broader sense of the word, true hymns. The great Northwest was opened to civilization and claimed for France with the singing of hymns. And La Salle, discovering the mouth of the Mississippi River, stood on the bank and claimed all the vast region for France in a ceremony marked by the singing of three hymns. By the New Englanders' firesides, at their social gatherings, and on their austere Sabbaths, the hymns, or metrical psalms, held a large place; and the emotions and ideals which these lyrics bore could not but enter into the fiber of the people's lives. Along the Atlantic coast the Indians could hear from the clearings of the white men, mingled with sounds of cattle and barn-yard fowl and busy ax, here and there from women at their work, from families in their cabins at night, from gatherings in groves and log meeting-houses, the sound of hymns. And there were Indians who learned to sing them. A letter, for example, to Sir William Ashurst from New England describes the Indians' "excellent singing the Psalms with most ravishing melody." It did not take the Southern slaves long to learn their masters' hymns and to make sweet and plaintive ones of their own. No one can guess how much the American negro's hymns have meant to him in making for consolation and piety and virtue. They have played, and still play, a large part in his life. Scattered details here and there in the records of past American life indicate even to the casual reader how intimately religious lyrical verse entered into that life. "The Bay Psalm Book" was printed in the modest dwelling of the first president of Harvard. President Dwight of Yale, chaplaingeneral of the Revolutionary Army, edited and partly wrote what was for years the leading hymnand psalm-book in the country. President Davies of Princeton was in his day a leading American hymn-writer. In 1737, at Charlestown, South Carolina, a young Oxford graduate, John Wesley, Anglican priest, chaplain to Oglethorpe, and missionary to the Indians, published the first real hymn-book-as distinguished from the metrical psalm-book-of the Church of England. Thus in America began the sequence of great English hymn-books. Among the earliest extant writing in the hand of George Washington is the transcription of a hymn.1 Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were warmly interested in hymns. In their correspond 1 Jared Sparks, “Life and Writings of Washington," Vol. XII, p. 299. Little, Brown, and Company, Boston, 1855. ence, after they had retired from Washington, the two old chieftains carried on a discussion of hymnody. They seemed to agree upon the Psalms as the greatest of all lyrical poetry. In a letter of advice to young Isaac Englebrecht, Jefferson transcribed Tate and Brady's version of the fifteenth Psalm, "knowing," he says, "nothing more moral, more sublime, more worthy of your preservation." Benjamin Franklin was particularly fond of the lyrics of Isaac Watts. The first book issued from Franklin's press in Philadelphia was an edition of Watts's "Psalms and Hymns." To a friend, Mrs. Newsom, when she visited him during his last hours, he quoted several of the lyrics of Watts, "discoursing at length upon their sublimity." Joel Barlow, poet of the Revolution, and later minister to France, was a writer of hymns and editor of a notable American hymn-book. John Quincy Adams translated the whole Book of Psalms into English verse, besides writing the large number of hymns in his "Poems of Religion and Society." The hymn is so much interwoven in the fabric of our past and present that it seems gratuitous to mention instances of the use of hymnody in familiar life. One must leave to the imagination, and to intimate recollections, evaluation of the worth of the hymn as a force in strengthening ties of fellowship and of sanctity, in giving voice to the otherwise unuttered grief or desire, and in bearing to those in need of it consolation and hope and courage. One might go on with innumerable details indi cating the influence of these lyrics in American life. For example, Julia Ward Howe's "Battle Hymn of the Republic," written in a dark hour of the Civil War, and spreading through the camps and marches like fire, was worth to the Northern cause possibly more than train-loads of corn and ammunition could have been in its place. Lincoln was so moved by it that he broke into tears at the public singing of it. Lee, on the other side, was finding in the old hymn, "How Firm a Foundation," something of strength and comfort to help him. When Abraham Lincoln died, the people throughout the North sang the hymns that he had found helpful in his life. Nor is it without significance that many thousands of persons sang together all over the land as memorials to Garfield and McKinley, and later to Roosevelt, and to Harding, the hymns that these men had loved. Such glimpses as the foregoing indicate that the small type of lyrical poetry called the hymn has had a good deal to do, first and last, with the ideas and emotions of the people of the continent. The same may be said of the hymns in English life. The first literature written on English soil is, so far as we know, a religious lyric, Cædmon's Hymn. The missionaries who went to England with St. Augustine marched in a procession, singing hymns, up the strand to where King Ethelbert sat waiting to receive them. The king gave them a home in Canterbury, which town they entered, according to Bede, singing a litany. St. Patrick and his followers approached the old druids and hostile chiefs singing hymns. Among the works of Bede was "A Book of Hymns in Divers Sorts of Meter and Rhythm." There are throngs of incidents in early English lore indicating the part of hymnody in the life of the people. Bede tells, for example, of the famous "Halleluiah victory" of Germanicus over the Saxons and Picts wherein by a "universal 'shouting of Halleluiah" they put the enemy to rout. King Alfred was so attached to his hymn-book that he would go nowhere, not even hunting, without it. Henry VIII, Elizabeth, Mary Stuart, and James I were authors of hymns. So we may glance down over the hymns of the Wesleys and the hymns of the Oxford Movement and on down to the singing of "O God Our Help in Ages Past" by the English at the burial of their Unknown Soldier at the close of the World War. An indication of the influence of the hymn in Scottish life may be found in Burns's portrayal in "The Cotter's Saturday Night"; and Robert Burns knew the heart of Scotland. They chant their artless notes in simple guise; Hymnody constitutes a part, not only of English literature, but of all literature. Rich as the English |