Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v4.djvu/88

 500 Patriotic Songs and Hymns Mrs. Stowe's beautiful Still, Still with Thee, When Purple Morning Breaketh (1855) deserves far more. Mrs. Stowe shook off the spell of the mortuary muse so that, though mind- ful of death, she was first concerned with a living faith. This faith is the burden, too, of Whittier's Our Master (1866), a devotional poem from which several hymns have been excerpted, the best known of which is the passage beginning We may not climb the heavenly steeps, To bring the Lord Christ down. With this mid-century group arrived a new set of composers, such as Bamby and Dykes and Bradbury, whose music is a departure from the sturdy four-four rhythms of Lowell Mason's "Laban" or "Uxbridge" or "Hamburg." Their newer melo- dies tend to the use of three-four and six-four measures, and to consequent sweetness rather than vigour. They are attuned to the emotional appeals of the non-conformist pulpit rather than to the stately traditions of Rome or England. They mark the difference between Longfellow and Newman, or between Calkin's "Waltham" for Bishop Doane's Fling out the Ban- ner and Sherwin's "Chautauqua" for Mary A. Lathbury's Day is Dying in the West, each a high example of its kind in the seventies. In other words, the new hymns, both text and music, were at one with the theology and the secular poetry of the day — fervent, aspiring, confident. The period could produce such triumphant songs as the Doane-Calkin Fling out the Banner or the Baring-Gould-Sullivan Onward, Christian Soldiers (the latter, of course, English), and such hymns of tenderness and serenity as those of Whittier and Lathbury already alluded to; but the pursuit of these inclina- tions led to the edge of a precipice. For, unhappily, the influences at work in uniting the breadth and dignity of older song with the warmth and colour of the later generation led very easily from sentimental ornateness to tawdry sensationalism. The decline in hymn-writing from Bernard of Clairvaux by way of the Wesleys to Phoebe Cary, and in composition from the Gregorian chants via Lowell Mason and Bradbury to P. P. BUss, reached the popular descensus Averni in the Moody and Sankey "gospel hymns." The banaUties