Elizabeth Gaskell

The celebrated English novelist Elizabeth Gaskell is not generally known as a hymnwriter, but there are a few to her credit.  She was born today in London in 1810. Her father had been a Unitarian minister, but resigned that occupation some years before Elizabeth's birth.

She married another Unitarian minister, William Gaskell, in 1832. She helped him in his work, teaching reading and writing as well as Scripture to Sunday School students at his church in Manchester. She also published a few short stories during the early years of her marriage. The Gaskells had four daughters. and it was following the death of an infant son in 1845 that William suggested that Elizabeth write a novel to distract from her grief. That novel, Mary Barton, was published anonymously in 1848.

Gaskell came to be primarily known for her novels, which often dealt with issues of social concern. Charles Dickens took an interest in her work, and published some of her later writing in his magazine Household Words. While supportive of her career, he was often frustrated by her refusal to agree to his editorial suggestions. Gaskell's reputation has survived to our own day, and you can probably find her books at your local bookstore. Some have also been adapted for film and television.

There are a number of ministers' wives who wrote hymns, such as Cecil Frances Alexander, Julia Anne Elliott, and Jane Lundie Bonar, so it is not surprising that Gaskell also tried her hand at it.  This wedding hymn was published in a number of nineteenth-century hymnals but is hardly known today. One unusual thing about it is that it makes no reference to gender, as most wedding hymns written before the last ten years or so usually do.

We join to pray, with wishes kind,
A blessing, God, from thee,
On those who now the bands have twined
Which ne'er may broken be.

We know that scenes not always bright
Must unto them be given;
But over all give thou the light
Of love, and truth, and heav'n.

Still hand in hand, their journey through,
Joint pilgrims may they go;
Mingling their joys as helpers true,
And sharing every woe.

May each in each still feed the flame
Of pure and holy love;
In faith and trust and heart the same,
The same their home above.

Elizabeth Gaskell, 19th cent.
Tune: HOWARD (C.M.)
Elizabeth Cuthbert, 1814


P.S. - In previous years, we have observed the Feast of Saint Michael and All Angels on this date.

Eight Years Ago: Around the throne of God a band

Seven Years Ago: Stars of the morning, so gloriously bright

Six Years Ago: They are evermore around us

Four Years Ago: O Captain of God's host

Two Years Ago: High on a hill of dazzling light

One Year Ago: Praise to God who reigns above

Francis Turner Palgrave

English educator, critic, and poet Francis Turner Palgrave was born today in 1824 in Great Yarmouth. He attended Balliol College at Oxford University, but temporarily interrupted his studies to serve as private secretary to William Gladstone, then a member of Parliament (and later Prime Minster). Later, upon finishing graduate studies in 1856, he served in a number of positions in the field of education before becoming a Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 1884.

As a critic, Palgrave wrote for various publications, and also published his own poetry.  He compiled and edited The Golden Treasury of English Songs and Lyrics (1861), considered to be one of the finest anthologies of English poetry. It is still published today under his name, though others have revised and updated it over the years.

He published a collection of his own sacred texts, titled simply Hymns (1867), which was updated twice with some additional material. According to Gwenllian Palgrave, who assembled Francis Turner Palgrave: His Journals and Memories of his Life (1899), her father considered hymnwriting "a most difficult task, even for the greatest poets." 

Today's hymn comes from that collection, originally beginning "O thou not made with hands," and it appears that way in several places. The Primitive Methodist Hymnal (1887) altered the line to "City not made with hands" (which I and several subsequent hymnal editors prefer), perhaps because hymns which begin "O thou..." are generally addressed directly to some aspect of the Divine, which this is not. In Palgrave's Hymns this is made clear by the descriptive title accompanying the hymn, "Kingdom of God within."

City not made with hands,
Not throned above the skies,
Nor walled with shining walls,
Nor framed with stones of price,
More bright than gold or gem,
God’s own Jerusalem.

Where’er the gentle heart
Finds courage from above;
Where’er the heart forsook
Warms with the breath of love;
Where faith bids fear depart,
City of God, thou art.

Where in life’s common ways
With cheerful feet we go,
In Jesus' steps we tread,
Who trod the way of woe;
Where Christ is in the heart,
City of God, thou art.

Not throned above the skies,
Nor golden-walled afar,
But where Christ’s two or three
In his name gathered are,
Be in the midst of them,
God’s own Jerusalem.

Francis Turner Palgrave, 1867; alt.
Tune: ST. VERONICA (6.6.6.6.6.6.)
Francis Henry Champneys, 1889

In 1862 Palgrave became embroiled in a scandal when he wrote the catalogue for the Great London Exhibition. In it, he praised the sculptor Thomas Woolner, to the detriment of some of Woolner's rivals. When it was revealed that Palgrave and Woolner lived together, he was forced to withdraw the catalogue.

Emma Ashford

In recent years and months, composer Emma Ashford (who died today in 1930) has received some additional attention online from others who are interested in her background and career.

This article from the Vanderbilt University magazine, discusses several songs that have been written for the university.  The section on Ashford's musical contributions (as well as her association with Vanderbilt) is just a few paragraphs down, beginning with her 1900 composition of the music for a song commemorating the 25th anniversary of the university.

More recently, at the end of August this year, an extensive article on Emma Ashford's life and career was published on a blog devoted to reed organs, from where I obtained today's photograph (taken about 1901). This piece contains the most information I have seen on her in one place. Ashford did write several pieces for reed organ, one of which was featured here in 2012.

The video below is a performance of Ashford's anthem Lift up your heads, O ye gates, perhaps her most popular piece which is still sung today.  You can find several versions on YouTube but I chose this one by the Washington Performing Arts Society's Children of the Gospel Choir from 2009.  Some of the tempos might be peppier than those that Ashford heard in her day but performance practice does change over time and this rendition certainly makes a good case for Ashford's anthem.



As you can hear, the anthem ends with the hymn All hail the power of Jesus' name, to the tune CORONATION (1793), composed by Oliver Holden (whose birthday was just this past Sunday), incorporating the oldest American hymn tune in popular use today.


P.S. - I was pleased to include Ashford's tune EVELYN in the hymn festival I wrote and led last year, matched with a text by Phebe Hanaford on Miriam from the book of Exodus. EVELYN first appeared in the Methodist Hymnal of 1905, but not in any subsequent editions, so who knows when it was sung last?



Eight Years Ago: Emma Ashford

Six Years Ago: Emma Ashford

Four Years Ago: Emma Ashford

Saint Matthew

From earthly toils lift up thine eye;
Behold, thy Savior passeth by!
With pleasing voice he calleth thee,
"Leave cares behind, and follow me."

One heard him calling long ago,
And straightway left all things below,
Counting his earthly gain as loss
For Jesus and his blessèd cross.

That "follow me" his faithful ear
Seemed every day afresh to hear;
Its echoes stirred his spirit still,
And fired his hope, and nerved his will.

Praise, Lord, to thee, for Matthew's call,
At which he rose and left his all:
Thou gently call'st us every day:
Why should we then our bliss delay?

William Walsham How, 1871; alt.
Tune: ABENDS (L.M.)
Herbert S. Oakeley, 1874




Eight Years Ago: Come sing, ye choirs exultant

Seven Years Ago: He sat to watch o'er customs paid

Six Years Ago: Arise and follow me

One Year Ago: By all your saints still striving

Also, for the UN Int'l Day of Peace: Years are coming, speed them onward

Catherine Winkworth.

Catherine Winkworth, born today in 1829 in London, remains one of the most prolific and most well-known translators of German hymns into English. Though contemporary hymnal editors (Lutheran and others) are always looking for modern translations, Winkworth's are still prominently included.

We have covered much of her biographical information in previous years, and included many of her translations at other times of the year (click on the tag below), but a few items caught my attention this year in reading about her again.

Catherine and her sister Susanna were mostly educated at home, but they also studied with the Reverend William Gaskell, the Unitarian minister of the Cross Street Chapel in Manchester. Gaskell and his wife, Elizabeth, the popular novelist (whose books are still read and adapted for television today) were family friends of the Winkworths.  Catherine was also acquainted with other literary women of her day, including Charlotte Bronte and Harriet Martineau.

Catherine's first book of translated German hymn texts, the first volume of Lyra Germanica, was published in August of 1855. Within weeks of its appearance, Catherine began receiving requests from hymnbook editors for permission to include her translations in the collections they were preparing. The book had fortuitously arrived during a period of great change in congregational singing; the long resistance to hymns in the worship of the Church of England was coming to a close and there was great demand for new hymns. Six of Winkworth's translations appeared in the first edition of Hymns Ancient and Modern (1860), which probably spread them even faster and farther, and before long she was included in the hymnals of many denominations in the English-speaking world.  Closer to our own time, she is mostly known in Lutheran hymnals, though some of her hymns still cross denominational lines.

Today's hymn is from the second volume of Lyra Germanica (1858).

All depends on our possessing
God’s abundant grace and blessing,
Though all earthly wealth depart.
They who trust with faith unshaken
In their God are not forsaken
And will keep a dauntless heart.

God, who to this day has fed me
And to many joys has led me
Is and ever shall be mine.
God who did so gently school me,
God who still doth guide and rule me,
Will remain my Help divine.

When with sorrow I am stricken,
Hope anew my heart will quicken,
All my longing shall be stilled.
To God's lovingkindness tender
Soul and body I surrender;
For on God alone I build.

Well God knows what best to grant me;
All the longing hopes that haunt me,
Joy and sorrow have their day.
I shall doubt God's wisdom never—
As God wills, so be it ever—
Freely I commit my way.

As on earth my days are lengthened,
God my weary soul has strengthened;
All my trust in God I place.
Earthly wealth is not abiding,
Like a stream away is gliding;
Safe I anchor in God's grace.

Anonymous, from Nurnburg Gesang-Buch, 1676;

tr. Catherine Winkworth, 1858; alt.
Tune: ALLES IST AN GOTTES SEGEN (8.8.7.8.8.7.)
Johann Löhner, 1691; adapt. Johann B. König, 1737

Catherine died of heart trouble in France in 1878. She had traveled to Europe to help care for her invalid nephew Frank Shaen.  After her death, her sister Susanna (who was a noted translator of German prose) began to write a memorial volume drawn from family correspondence, but she died in 1884 before completing the work. Years later, their niece Margaret Shaen took up the project and finished it, and it was finally published in 1908, Memorials of Two Sisters: Susanna and Catherine Winkworth.



Eight Years Ago: Catherine Winkworth

Seven Years Ago: Catherine Winkworth

One Year Ago: Catherine Winkworth

One Encircling Providence

In many churches, today marks a re-gathering of the community, returning from summer to a new program year for the church, even perhaps a rededication to the mission.  Seems like a good occasion for a "re-run," a hymn about our communities of faith and what we find in them.

O Light, from age to age the same,
Forever living Word,
Here have we felt thy kindling flame,
Thy voice within have heard.
Here holy thought and hymn and prayer
Have winged the Spirit’s powers,
And made these walls divinely fair,
Thy temple, God, and ours.

What visions rise above the years,
What tender memories throng
To fill the eye with happy tears,
The heart with grateful song!
Then vanish mists of time and sense,
They come, the loved of yore,
And one encircling Providence
Holds all forevermore.

O not in vain their toil who wrought
To build faith’s freer shrine;
Nor theirs whose steadfast love and thought
Have watched the fire divine.
Burn, holy Fire, and shine more wide!
While systems rise and fall,
Faith, hope, and charity abide,
The heart and soul of all.

Frederick Lucian Hosmer, 1890; alt.
Tune: ST. MATTHEW (C.M.D.)
William Croft, 1708

You can read more about this hymn and its author from October 16, 2008. 

Today is also the fifteenth anniversary of the largest terrorist attack on the United States, known simply by the date: September 11.  Many hymn texts have been written in response, and several have been gathered by the Hymn Society in the United States and Canada, which you can request through the Hymns in Time of Crisis page of their website (scroll down to Violence: Acts of Terrorism, Overcoming Despair).  More readily available online are three hymn texts on the topic (linked here) written by Presbyterian pastor Carolyn Winfrey Gillette, whose ministry in providing comforting hymns for difficult times we have covered before.

Seven Years Ago: Harry Thacker Burleigh

Hymns in the News

Last week an article appeared in Salt Lake City's Deseret News about the opening of the 1000 Songs of Zion Museum in Enoch, Utah, dedicated to Mormon Elder Joel Hills Johnson (1802-1882). As indicated in the museum's name, Johnson wrote more than a thousand poems, many of which have been sung as hymns in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in the last 150 years.  He was also the founder of the city of Enoch. 

His best-loved hymn is still sung in LDS circles, though, like many of their hymns, is not known in other denomination. Some of its theology would seem out-of-place in other settings.  The mountain imagery is taken from passages in the Book of Isaiah, and also would have referred to the mountains of Utah where many of the followers of Joseph Smith ended up (more on that below).

High on the mountain top
A banner is unfurled.
Ye nations, now look up;
It waves to all the world.
In Deseret's sweet, peaceful land,
On Zion's mount behold it stand!

For God remembers still
His promise made of old
That he on Zion's hill
Truth's standard would unfold!
Her light should there attract the gaze
Of all the world in latter days.

His house shall there be reared,
His glory to display,
And people shall be heard
In distant lands to say:
We'll now go up and serve the Lord,
Obey his truth, and learn his word.

For there we shall be taught
The law that will go forth,
With truth and wisdom fraught,
To govern all the earth.
Forever there his ways we'll tread,
And save ourselves with all our dead.

Joel H. Johnson, c.1853
Tune: DESERET (6.6.6.6.8.8.)
Ebenezer Beesley, 19th cent.

You can read more about Johnson and this particular hymn at the blog of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and also view the Choir singing it. Unfortunately, the largest online hymn sites do not have much to say about Johnson: Hymnary.org has no biographical information and only lists four of his hymns, and he does not appear at all on the Cyber Hymnal site. For those interested in further exploring LDS hymnody, the denomination has put their latest hymnal online, Hymns of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (1985).

Two additional stanzas of Johnson's text do not appear in that book, or on the choir's video, but were included in earlier Mormon hymnals:

Then hail to Deseret!
A refuge for the good,
And safety for the great, If they but understood
That God with plagues will shake the world
Till all its thrones shall down be hurled.

In Deseret doth truth
Rear up its royal head;
Though nations may oppose,
Still wider doth it spread;
Yes, truth and justice, love and grace,
In Deseret find ample place.

In this hymn, those of us not familiar with LDS doctrine might assume that "Deseret" is used in the sense that other hymnwriters might use "Jerusalem" or "Zion," but its meaning is far more concrete. The State of Deseret was established by Mormon settlers in 1849 (Johnson was an elected member of its legislature) and proposed to the United States as an official territory, but the federal government named it Utah instead, based on a Native American name. Further efforts to establish a territory named "Deseret" continued until 1872.  Johnson was writing of the hoped-for Deseret, an actual place on this continent where his people would be safe and prosperous. The name persists to our day as an old name for Utah, such as in the Deseret News, which brings us back to where we began. 



Eight Years Ago: Amy Beach

Seven Years Ago: Amy Beach

Four Years Ago: Hymns in the News (coincidentally, about another LDS hymn!)

Tell Forth the Wondrous Story

With happy voices ringing, thy people, God, appear;
Their joyous praises bringing in anthems sweet and clear.
For skies of golden splendor, for azure rolling sea,
For blossoms sweet and tender, O God, we worship thee.

What though no eye beholds thee, no hand thy hand may feel,
Thy universe unfolds thee, thy starry heav’ns reveal;
The earth and all its glory, our homes and all we love,
Tell forth the wondrous story of One who reigns above.

And shall we not adore thee, with more than joyous song,
And live in truth before thee, all beautiful and strong?
God, bless our souls’ endeavor thy people true to be,
And through all life, forever, to live our praise to thee.

William G. Tarrant, 1888; alt.
Tune: WOLVERCOTE (7.6.7.6.D.)
William H. Ferguson, c.1910

Lydia Sigourney

One of the most widely-read poets in her time, Lydia Howard Huntley Sigourney (September 1, 1791 - June 10, 1865) published fifty-nine books of poetry and prose. She was born in Norwich, Connecticut. the daughter of a gardener, and one of his wealthy employers paid for her education at a private school.  She opened a school for girls in Norwich (sources date its founding to either 1809 or 1811) and she taught there and in Hartford until her marriage in 1819 to Charles Sigourney. She had already published her first book, Moral Pieces in Prose and Verse (1815), but her husband requested that she now publish anonymously.

Lydia agreed to this stipulation and continued to submit to magazines and publish books of her prose and poetry. She initally donated the proceeds from her writing to organizations advancing such social causes as temperance, peace, and abolition, but by the 1830s her husband was no longer entirely able to support their family and she became the primary breadwinner. At that time, she also began to publish under her own name. Her writing was so well known that the publisher of the popular magazine Godey's Lady's Book paid her an honorarium for the use of her name in the masthead beside its other editors (including Sarah Josepha Hale), though Sigourney had no editorial duties. The social concerns that she supported continued to appear in her writing, and she was an early advocate for Native American causes.

A number of hymns later identified as hers first appeared in Village Hymns (1824), a Congregationalist collection assembled by Asahel Nettleton for the General Association of Connecticut, and over the years Sigourney's hymns appeared in several other hymnbooks, including Maria Weston Chapman's abolitionist collection, Songs of the Free (1836).

I found today's hymn in a collection titled Lyra Sacra Americana: or, Gems from American Sacred Poetry (1868), and though it probably appeared earlier I do not know whether Sigourney considered it a poem or a hymn.  As you know, hymnal editors have often believed such authors' intentions to be relatively unimportant.

Prayer is the dew of faith,
Its raindrop, night and day,
That guards its vital power from death
When cherished hopes decay.
And keeps it 'mid this changeful scene
A bright, perennial evergreen.

Our works, of faith the fruit,
May ripen year by year,
Of health and soundness at the root
An evidence sincere;
Dear Savior! grant your blessing free,
And make our faith no barren tree.

Lydia H. Sigourney, 19th cent.; alt.
Tune: BATH (6.6.8.6.8.8.)
William Henry Cooke, 19th. cent.

(Apparently this meter is rather unusual, as I could only find one tune with a sound file available online. BATH by William Cooke is somewhat acceptable, but probably not the best match.)

Sigourney's autobiography, Letters of Life (1866) was published after her death. Fortunately, she did live to see the end of slavery and the Civil War. Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier wrote a memorial poem, including these lines:

She sang alone, ere womanhood had known
The gift of song which fills the air to-day:
Tender and sweet, a music all her own
May fitly linger where she knelt to pray.