Page:The Methodist Hymn-Book Illustrated.djvu/232

 220 THE METHODIST HYMN-BOOK ILLUSTRATED

Hymn 330. Thy life was given for me. FRANCES RIDLEY HAVERGAL.

This hymn originally began, I gave My life for thee. Miss Havergal was in Germany, and had come in tired on January 10, 1858. Sitting down she read the motto, I did this for thee ; what hast thou done for Me ? placed under a picture of our Saviour in the study of a German divine. This resembles the story of Count Zinzendorf, who was led to decision by the Ecce Homo in the gallery at Diisseldorf, which represented the Saviour crowned with thorns. Over the picture were the words, All this have I done for thee. What doest thou for Me ? Miss Havergal was at school at Diisseldorf, and it was probably a copy of the same picture which suggested her hymn. The lines of this hymn flashed upon her, and she wrote them in a few minutes in pencil on the back of a circular. When she read them over she thought, Well, this is not poetry. I will not go to the trouble to copy this. She stretched out her hand to put it into the fire, but a sudden impulse made her draw back, and she put the paper, crumpled and singed, into her pocket.

She was quite a young girl, and this was the first thing she wrote that could be called a hymn. Soon after she went to see an old woman in an almshouse. She began to talk to me, as she always did, about her dear Saviour, and I thought I would see if the simple old woman would care for these verses, which I felt sure nobody else would care to read. So I read them to her, and she was so delighted with them that, when I went back, I copied them out, and kept them, and now the hymn is more widely known than any. Some months later she showed them to her father, who encouraged her to preserve her verses, and wrote the tune Baca for them. The hymn was printed on a leaflet in 1859, and in Good Words, February, 1860. In CJmrch Hymns, 1871, the appeal of Christ to the disciple is changed into an appeal from the disciple to Christ : Thy life was given for me. Miss Havergal consented to the alteration, though she thought the first form more strictly carried out the idea of the motto. She once said, All my best poems have come in that way, Minerva fashion, full grown. Writing is praying with me. I ask that at every line He would give me, not merely thoughts and power, but also every word, even the very rhymes. Very often I have a most distinct and happy

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