Page:The Methodist Hymn-Book Illustrated.djvu/73

 THE STORY OF THE HYMNS AND THEIR WRITERS 6 1

It is prefaced by these sentences

And so my year s record is finished. The Professor has talked less than his predecessor (The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table), but he has heard and seen more. Thanks to all those friends who from time to time have sent their messages of kindly recognition and fellow-feeling. Peace to all such as may have been vexed in spirit by any utterance the pages have repeated. They will doubtless forget for the moment the difference in the lines 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.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, son of Rev. Abiel Holmes, Congre gational minister at Cambridge (U.S.A.), was born in 1809. He graduated at Harvard in 1829, and studied medicine in Europe and at Harvard, where he became Professor of Anatomy in 1847. He published his first poem in 1830. The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table appeared in the Atlantic Monthly for 1857. His genial humour, his fun and fancy, make all he wrote delightful. He was one of the best known and best loved men of his day on both sides of the Atlantic. He died at Boston, October 7, 1894.

When Henry Drummond visited Boston in 1894, he called on Oliver Wendell Holmes. He is eighty-four, but the chirpiest old man I ever saw : talked straight on for an hour and a quarter, and then apologized that no one that day had previously called to &quot;run off the electricity.&quot; He says he usually gets ladies to call first, and &quot;go into the water like horses to take the electricity off the electric eels before the men cross. &quot;

Hymn 24. For the beauty of the earth.

FOLLIOTT SANDFORD PIERPOINT, M.A.

Contributed to Orby Shipley s Lyra Eiicharistica, 1864, in eight stanzas of eight lines, to be sung at the celebration of Holy Communion. This form is not much used, but in the four or five stanza form it is extensively in use for flower services and children s services.

Mr. Pierpoint was born at Bath in 1835, and educated at Queens College, Cambridge, where he gained honours in classics. He published in 1878 Songs of Lme, The Chalice of Nature, and Lyra Jesu.

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