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There is a poet, as yet unknown to fame, who, judging from internal evidence only, we take to be the author of several of the hymns in this collection. His name is not given. His distinguishing peculiarity is an utter disregard of the tenses. Past and present seem strangely jumbled in his verses, but then his rhymes are, for the most part, faultless. Hymn 279 begins thus:

O, where is he that trod the sea?

O, where is he that spake?
And lepers from their pains are free,
And slaves their fetters break.

The second stanza is like unto the first:

O, where is he that trod the sea?
O, where is he that spake?

And demons from their victims flee,

The dead from slumber wake.

Hymn 957 is entitled "The precious Son of Zion," of whom we are told many precious things; among others, in the second stanza:

God did love them in his Son
Long before the world begun.

Hymn 529 is from the same source, or from some other
poetaster equally ignorant, or equally regardless of his tenses:
Come to the ark, ere yet the flood
Your lingering steps oppose;

Come, for the door which open stood

Is now about to close.

What may be the state of that door just now? The penultimate line seems to imply, to say, indeed, that it did stand (stood) open once; but it must be standing open yet if the last line be true, that it

Is now about to close.

We judge,

Hymn 661 we attribute to the same source. however, only from the strange jumbling of the tenses. In verse 3 it is done without even the excuse of its being necessary for the rhyme's sake:

My pathway is not hid;

Thou knowest all my need;
And I would do as Israel did,
Follow where thou wilt lead.

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That is certainly very prosaic, and the whole hymn is in the same style. The fourth stanza was evidently concocted with violent effort:

Lead me, and then my feet

Shall never, never stray;
But safely I shall reach the seat
Of happiness and day.

Hymn 233 is another "novelty."

The author's name is not

given. It is under the general head, "Sovereign Decrees of God." Thus readeth the first stanza:

Ere earth's foundations yet were laid,

Or heaven's fair roof were (!) spread abroad;
Ere man a living soul was made,

Love stirred within the heart of God.

That will do. We need copy no more of it, and comment is unnecessary.

Another candidate for hymnological honors is permitted to have his own way, and to torture the English language at his pleasure in hymn 791. There is certainly a difference between being blessed and being merely blest, but we never before saw it brought out so clearly. Thus the hymn commences:

Blessed be God! forever blest,

And glorious be his name!

His Son he gave our souls to save
From everlasting shame.

In the next verse the author indulges in a propensity to iterate which sounds rather flippant:

Th' eternal Life his life laid down-
Such was his wondrous plan-

And Christ, the Son of God, was made

A curse for cursed man!

But the concluding stanza caps the climax of iterations:

Bless, then, Jehovah's blesséd name,
And bless our blesséd King!
And songs of glad de-liv-er-ance
Forever, ever sing!

Readers of sacred poetry are frequently annoyed by the use of feeble expletives. "Do" and "did" are often dragged in

to eke out the requisite number of feet. Every good poet avoids them so far as he can, and almost every reader regards them as blemishes. One of the authors of the "novelties" of the Sabbath Hymn Book' appears to think them beauties. In this respect the following stanza, from hymn 792, has never been exceeded:

This fleshly robe the Lord did wear;
This watch the Lord did keep;
These burdens sore the Lord did bear;
These tears the Lord did weep.

A few of the hymns have been materially altered by the compilers. These, for the gratification of the reader, are marked in the index with a dagger. Here is one thus designated. It is No. 1140, and is entitled: "They are no more twain, but one flesh :"

We join to pray, with wishes kind,

A blessing, Lord, from thee,

On those who now the bands have twined

Which ne'er may broken be.

To pray a blessing is not grammatical, but well meant; and to twine bands is scarcely English, but sentimental. The whole hymn is in the same strain. Never having met with it as it came from the author, whose name we are told is Gaskell, we are not prepared to estimate the value of the emendations it has undergone.

But leaving these specimens of doggerel, which never deserved place in a manual intended for the "service of song in the house of the Lord," we notice another peculiarity of our compilers. It is that of printing the same hymn twice, and giving it in each case a separate number. Thus Cowper's hymn,

There is a fountain filled with blood,

is first given as written by the author, and then as improved by omissions and alterations. Then we have the hymn,

Guide me, O thou great Jehovah!

in its original form as No. 1221. No. 1222 is said to be "another form of the preceding hymn," which it certainly is

but a form ludicrously worse, as witness the cockneyism of the rhythm in the second stanza:

Feed us with the heavenly manna;

Fainting, may we feel thy might;
Go before us as our banner, etc.

Mrs. Barbauld's beautiful hymn,

How blest the righteous when he dies,

which is here numbered 1192, is also duplicated. called "another form of the preceding hymn."

No. 1193 is

The original

has five stanzas, the improvement but three. Of the former the first stanza is:

How blest the righteous when he dies!
When sinks a weary soul to rest,
How mildly beam the closing eyes,
How gently heaves th' expiring breast!

The "other form" reads:

Sweet is the scene when Christians die;
When holy souls retire to rest,

How mildly beams the closing eye!

How gently heaves th' expiring breast!

In our judgment the "improvement" is infinitely inferior to the original. Mrs. Barbauld is scriptural in her first line: "Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord." How tame, flat, and false indeed is the emendation which tells us that the scene when Christians die is-sweet. And what a falling off is there in the next line:

When holy souls retire to rest,

instead of the nervous and poetic strain:

When sinks a weary soul to rest.

The two remaining lines are unaltered, save that while the poet allows two eyes to one righteous person, "the improvement" has but one eye for all dead Christians.

So, again, hymn 1253 is that well-known lyric of Doddridge's: Lord of the Sabbath hear our vows;

and 1254 is the same thing in what the compilers call an "abridged form;" that is to say, there are five stanzas in the

former and only four in the latter. This same sort of reduplication might have been indulged in, so far as we see, with almost every other hymn in the book; and the reason why it was not, in many other cases, is as hard to find as any satisfactory answer to the question why it was done in the instances referred to.

There is ample internal evidence that the compilers had the standard Methodist Hymn Book before them when they prepared this volume. They have copied therefrom stanzas and entire hymns, but they seem carefully to have avoided all public recognition of its existence, and specially to have ignored its authority in assigning the names of the poets whose hymns they appropriate. Thus, with the most consum mate coolness, their readers are assured that, with all their painstaking, they are unable to tell who wrote their hymn 426, beginning

Light of those whose dreary dwelling.

It was written by Charles Wesley, and is No. 367 of the Methodist collection. If our word may not be taken for this statement, we refer the gentlemen and all others interested in the subject to a collection of hymns published originally by John Wesley, and still in use among the Wesleyans in England and in Canada. In that collection it is No. 606, and contains two additional verses.

We had thought that the authorship of that favorite lyric,

Blow ye the trumpet, blow,

was definitely settled, and so indeed it was; every man capable of compiling a selection of hymns knows that it was written by Charles Wesley. We place on record here, once more, the incontrovertible fact that it first appeared in a small volume published by him in 1755, and that although Mr. Top lady inserted it, with alterations, in his collection published many years afterward, yet it is most unquestionably the offspring of Charles Wesley's muse.

Hymn 694,

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Jesus! thy boundless love to me,

is also one of those the authorship of which is unknown to our compilers. It is No. 833 of our collection, and is found with

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