Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 12.djvu/607

591 BRITISH.] HYMNS 591 enumerates above 150. Some of them have been real poets the celebrated earl of Surrey, Sir Philip Sidney and his sister the countess of Pembroke, George Sandys, George Wither, John Milton, and John Keble. 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 transla tion, always great, are in this case insuperable ; and that, while the Psalms (like other parts of Scripture) are abund antly suggestive of motive and material for hymnographers, it is by assimilation and adaptation, and not by any attempt to transform their exact sense into modern poetry, that they may be best used for this purpose. The order in council of 1703 is the latest act of any public autho rity by which an express sanction has been given to the use of psalms or hymns in the Church of England. At the end, indeed, of many modern Prayer-books, there will be found, besides some of the hymns sanctioned by that order in council, or of those contained in the book of 1562, a Sacramental and a Christmas hymn by Dod- dridge ; a Christmas hymn (varied by Martin Madan) from Charles Wesley; an Easter hymn of the 18th century, beginning &quot;Jesus Christ has risen to daj r ; &quot; and abridgments of Bishop Ken s Morn ing and Evening Hymns. These additions first began to be made in or about 1791, in London editions of the Prayer-book and Psalter, at the mere will and pleasure (so far as appears) of the printers. They have no sort of authority. In the state of authority, opinion, and practice disclosed by the preceding narrative may be found the true explana tion of the fact that, in the country of Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, and notwithstanding the example of Germany, no native congregational hymnody worthy of the name arose till after the commencement of the 18th century. Yet there was no want of appreciation of the power and value of congregational church music. Milton could write, before 1645, &quot; There let the pealing organ blow To the full- voiced quire below In service high, and anthems clear, As may with sweetness through mine ear Dissolve me into ecstasies, And bring all Heaven before mine eyes.&quot; Thomas Mace, in his Music s Monument (1676), thus described the effect of psalm-singing before sermons, by the congregation in York Minster on Sundays, during the siege of 1644 : &quot;When that vast concording unity of the whole congregational chorus came thundering in, even so as it made the very ground shake under us, oh, the unutterable ravishing soul s delight ! in the which I was so transported and wrapt up in high contemplations that there was no room left in my whole man, body, soul, and spirit, for any thing below divine and heavenly raptures ; nor could there possibly be anything to which that very singing might be truly compared, except the right apprehension or conceiving of that glorious and miraculous quire, recorded in the Scriptures at the dedication of the Temple.&quot; Nor was there any want of men well-qualified, and by the turn of their minds predisposed, to shine in this branch of litera ture. Some (like Sandys, Boyd, and Barton) devoted them selves altogether to paraphrases of other Scriptures as well as the Psalms. Others (like George Herbert, and Francis and John Quarles) moralized, meditated, soliloquized, and allegorixcd in verse. Without reckoning these, there were a few, even before the Restoration, who came very near to the ideal of hymnody. First time is the Scottish poet John Wcdderburn, who translated several of Luther s hymns, and in his Compendi ous Book of Godly and Spiritual Songs added others of his own (or his brothers ) composition. Some of these poems, published before 1560, are of uncommon excellence, uniting ease and melody of rhythm, and structural skill, with grace of expression, and simplicity, warmth, and reality of religious feeling. Those entitled &quot;Give me thy heart,&quot; &quot; Go, heart,&quot; and &quot; Leave me not &quot; (which will be found in a collection of 1860 called Sacred Songs of Scotland), require little, beyond the change of some archaisms of language, to adapt them for church or domestic use at the present clay. Next gome the two hymns of &quot; The New Jerusalem,&quot; by an English Roman Catholic priest signing himself F. B. P. (supposed by the late Mr Sedgwick to be &quot; Francis Baker, Presbyter &quot;), and by another Scottish poet, David Dickson, Dickson. of which the history is given by Dr Bonar in his edition of Dickson s work. This (Dickson s), which begins &quot;O mother dear, Jerusalem,&quot; and has long been popular in Scotland, is a variation and amplification (by the addition of a large number of new stanzas) of the English original, beginning &quot; Jerusalem, my happy home,&quot; written in Queen Elizabeth s time, and printed (as appears by a copy in the British Museum) about 1616, when Dickson was still young. Both have an easy natural flow, and a simple happy render ing of the beautiful Scriptural imagery upon the subject, with a spirit of primitive devotion uncorrupted by mediaeval peculiarities. The English hymn (of which some stanzas are now often sung in churches) is the true parent of the several shorter forms, all of more than common merit, which, in modern hymn-books, begin with the same first line, but afterwards deviate from the original. Kindred to these is the very fine and faithful translation, by Drummond of Hawthornden (who was Dickson s contem porary), of the ancient &quot; Urbs beata Hierusalem &quot; (&quot; Jeru salem, that place divine&quot;). Other ancient hymns (two of Thomas Aquinas, and the &quot; Dies Irae &quot;) were also well translated, in 1646, by Crashaw, after he had become a Roman Catholic, and had been deprived by the parliament of his fellowship at Cambridge. Conspicuous among the sacred poets of the first two Wither. Stuart reigns in England is the name of George Wither, an accomplished layman, of strong church principles, whose fate it was to be opposed and slighted while he was a staunch churchman and Royalist, and afterwards to be driven into the parliamentary and Puritan ranks ; for which cause, probably, recognition was denied to his genius as a poet by Dryden, Swift, and Pope. He had almost fallen into oblivion, when attention was recalled to his merits by the more discerning criticisms of Charles Lamb and Southey ; and, when his Hallelujah was republished in 1857 by Mr Farr, only two copies of it were known to exist, one in the British Museum, and another which had been in Mr Heber s library. His Hymns and Songs of the Church appeared in 1622-1623, under a patent of King James I., by which they were declared &quot;worthy and profitable to be inserted, in convenient manner and due place, into every English Psalm- book to metre.&quot; This patent was opposed, as inconsistent with their privilege to print the &quot; singing-psalms,&quot; by the Stationers Company, to Wither s great mortification and loss. His Halldvjah (in which some of the former Hymns and Songs were repeated) followed, after several intermediate publications of a different kind, in 1641. The Hymns and Songs were set to music by Orlando Gibbons, and those in both books were written to be sung, though for the most part privately, there being no evidence that the author contemplated the use of any of them in churches. They included, however, hymns for every day in the week (founded, as those contributed nearly a century afterwards by Coflin to the Parisian Brevhry also were, upon the successive works of the days of creation) ; hymns for all