The Story of the Hymns and Tunes | Page 2

made to them or their authors.
Among those who have helped me in my work special
acknowledgements are due to Mr. Hubert P. Main of Newark, N.J.;
Messrs. Hughes & Son of Wrexham, Wales; the American Tract
Society, New York; Mr. William T. Meek, Mrs. A.J. Gordon, Mr. Paul
Foster, Mr. George Douglas, and Revs. John R. Hague and Edmund F.
Merriam of Boston; Professor William L. Phelps of New Haven, Conn.;
Mrs. Ellen M.H. Gates of New York; Rev. Franklin G. McKeever of
New London, Conn.; and Rev. Arthur S. Phelps of Greeley, Colorado.
Further obligations are gratefully remembered to Oliver Ditson & Co.
for answers to queries and access to publications, to the
Historic-and-Geneological Society and the custodians and attendants of
the Boston Public Library (notably in the Music Department) for their
uniform courtesy and pains in placing every resource within my reach.
THERON BROWN.
Boston, May 15th, 1906.

INTRODUCTION.
Augustine defines a hymn as "praise to God with song," and another
writer calls hymn-singing "a devotional approach to God in our
emotions,"--which of course applies to both the words and the music.
This religious emotion, reverently acknowledging the Divine Being in
song, is a constant element, and wherever felt it makes the song a
worship, irrespective of sect or creed. 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. There can be poetry
without emotion, but a hymn never. A poem may argue; a hymn must
not. In short to be a hymn, what is written must express spiritual
feelings and desires. 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 is nothing in them on which the
creative imagination can be exercised. Hymns can be little more than
the incense of a worshipping soul."
A fellow-student of Phillips Brooks tells us that "most of his verse he
wrote rapidly without revising, not putting much thought into it but
using it as the vehicle and outlet of his feelings. It was the sign of
responding love or gratitude and joy."
To produce a hymn one needs something more exalting than poetic
fancy; an influence
"--subtler than the sun-light in the leaf-bud That thrills thro' all the
forest, making May."
It is the Divine Spirit wakening the human heart to lyric language.
Religion sings; that is true, though all "religions" do not sing. There is

no voice of sacred song in Islamism. The muezzin call from the
minarets is not music. One listens in vain for melody among the
worshippers of the "Light of Asia." The hum of pagoda litanies, and the
shouts and gongs of idol processions are not psalms. But many historic
faiths have lost their melody, and we must go far back in the annals of
ethnic life to find the songs they sung.
Worship appears to have been a primitive human instinct; and even
when many gods took the place of One in the blinder faith of men it
was nature worship making deities of the elements and addressing them
with supplication and praise. Ancient hymns have been found on the
monumental tablets of the cities of Nimrod; fragments of the Orphic
and Homeric hymns are preserved in Greek anthology; many of the
Vedic hymns are extant in India; and the exhumed stones of Egypt have
revealed segments of psalm-prayers and liturgies that antedate history.
Dr. Wallis Budge, the English Orientalist, notes the discovery of a
priestly hymn two thousand years older than the time of Moses, which
invokes One Supreme Being who "cannot be figured in stone."
So far as we have any real evidence, however, the Hebrew people
surpassed all others in both the custom and the spirit of devout song.
We get snatches of their inspired lyrics