Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v4.djvu/87

 Earlier Hymns 499 Wendell Holmes are broadly representative of tendencies up to i860. Dwight's contribution, / Love Thy Kingdom Lord, belongs to the period of Hail Columbia (which is sometimes wrongly ascribed to him), and is involved in the theology of Jonathan Edwards, Dwight's grandfather. After the confusion of the second stanza. Her walls before Thee stand, Dear as the apple of Thine eye. And graven on Thy hand, and after the Calvinistic prospect of death in the third, it rises to a tone of solemn and hopeful self -dedication ; and, set to the eighteenth-century tune "St. Thomas," it becomes an austere but not unlovely choral. Palmer's My Faith Looks up to Thee (1830) is strictly orthodox in its theology, represent- ing life as a vale of tears, a period of durance before an ultimate ransom; but in its way it has reinforced the faith of millions who are no less indebted to its sentiments than to Lowell Mason's rather sentimental "Olivet," which he composed for it and which perfectly fits it. Holmes's Sun-Day Hymn, better known as Lord of All Being Throned Afar (1859), is very properly described by one hymnologist as "always a favourite in gatherings ... of different denominations and creeds" since it "admits of the widest doctrinal divergencies." The Professor at the Breakfast Table composed with this intent, prefacing his hymn with the hope that men would "forget for the moment the difference in the hues of truth we look at through our human prisms, and join in singing (inwardly) this hymn to the Source of the light we all need to lead us, and the warmth which alone can make us all brothers." And his hope has been more than fulfilled, for the hymn has not only found its adequate melody, but has transformed "Louvan" from the utterly saccharine thing it was when set to Bowring's How Sweetly Flowed the Gospel Sound. The Sun-Day Hymn belongs to the slender anthology of sacred songs that are indubitable poetry. The theme of My Faith Looks up to Thee is the theme of Phoebe Gary's One Sweetly Solemn Thought (1852), which deserves far less congregational attention than it receives, as