Part of an Article on the Plymouth Collection, in the N. Y. | They are the jewels which the Church has Independent. HYMNS. worn; the pearls, the diamonds and precious stones, formed into amulets more potent against sorrow and sadness than the most famous charms of wizard or magician. And he who knows the way that hymns flowed, knows where the blood of piety ran, and can trace its veins and arteries to the very heart. THE work required to compile a large collection of hymns no one will ever know until he has had it to perform. And the longer a man labors, the less satisfied is he apt to be with the results. If we had known, at the No other composition is like an experibeginning, the task which we imposed upon mental hymn. It is not a mere poetic imourselves in attempting the Plymouth Collec- pulse. It is not a thought, a fancy, a feeling tion, we should have been far less eager than threaded upon words. It is the voice of we were. The first year or two of our work experience speaking from the soul a few words we felt only the glow and pleasure of dis- that condense and often represent a whole covery and acquisition. But when, by our life. It is the life, too, not of the natural very working, we were educated into clearer feelings growing wild, but of regenerated conceptions of what a hymn should be, and feeling, inspired by God to a heavenly destiny, what a hymn-book, the work to be done and making its way through troubles and augmented before us, and our own accom- hindrances, through joys and victories, dark plishment grew insignificant. And, often, or light, sad or serene, yet always struggling but for the joy given us by such company of forward. Forty years the heart may have hymns, but for their communion and sweet been in battle, and one verse shall express the voices, that at times rose up about us as if fruit of the whole. One great hope may the sainted dead had come back again, and come to fruit only at the end of many years, were voicing the truth of heaven in our ears, and as the ripening of a hundred experiences. we would have relinquished the endeavor. As there be flowers that drink up the dews of spring and summer, and feed upon all the rains, and only just before the winter comes burst forth into bloom, so is it with some of the noblest blossoms of the soul. The bolt that prostrated Saul gave him the exceeding brightness of Christ; and so some hymns could never have been written but for a heart-stroke that well-nigh crushed out the life. It is cleft in two by bereavement, and out of the rift comes forth, as by resurrection, the form and voice that shall never die out of the world. Angels sat at the grave's mouth; and so hymns are the angels that rise up out of our griefs, and darkness, and dismay. The ground to be gone over in searching English hymnology is immense. The old collections, the partial contributions of single authors, the modern effusions, which have been numerous, need to be narrowly examined. The work is complicated by the almost wanton liberty which compilers have taken with hymns; so that, with the exception of a few artistically perfect hymns, which even hymn compilers dare not mutilate, it may almost be said that there are as many versions of hymns as there have been collections. One is liable, at every step, to be betrayed into diluted forms of hymns instead of that in which they were conceived. Thus born, a hymn is one of those silent ministers which God sends to those who are to be heirs of salvation. It enters into the tender imagination of childhood, and casts down upon the chambers of its thought a holy radiance which shall never quite depart. It goes with the Christian, singing to him all the way, as if it were the airy voice of some guardian spirit. When darkness of trouble, settling fast, is shutting out every star, a hymn bursts through and brings light like a a torch. It abides by our side in sickness. It goes forth with us in joy to syllable that joy. The discovery of a statue, a vase, or even of a cameo, inspires art-critics and collectors with enthusiastic industry, to search whether it be a copy or an original, of what age, and by what artist. But I think that a hearthymn, sprung from the soul's deepest life, and which is, as it were, the words of the heart in those hours of transfiguration in which it beholds God and heavenly angels, is nobler by far than any old simulacrum, or carved ring, or heathen head, however exquisite in lines and feature! To trace back hymn to its source, to return upon the path along which it has trodden on its mission of mercy through generations, to witness its changes, its obscurations and reäppearances, is a work of the truest religious enthusiasm, and far surpasses in importance the tracing of the ideas of mere art. For hymns are the exponents of the inmost piety of the Church. They are crystalline tears, or blossoms of joy, or holy prayers, or incarnated raptures. And thus, after a time, we clothe a hymn with the memories and associations of our own life. It is garlanded with flowers which grew in our hearts. Born of the experience of one mind, it becomes the unconscious record of many minds. We sang it perhaps the morning that our child died. We sang this one on that Sabbath evening when, after ten years, the family were once more all together. There be hymns that were sung below, and ten thousand palm-leaves whiswhile the mother lay a-dying; that were pered and kept time above! Other hymns, sung when the child, just converted, was fulfilling the promise of God that his saints filling the family with the joy of Christ new- should mount up with wings as eagles, have born, and laid, not now in a manger, but in borne up the sorrows, the desires, and the a heart. And, thus sprung from a wondrous aspirations of the poor, the oppressed, and life, they lead a life yet more wonderful. the persecuted, of Huguenots, of Covenanters, When they first come to us, they are like the and of Puritans, and winged them to the single strokes of a bell ringing down to us bosom of God. from above; but, at length, a single hymn becomes a whole chime of bells, mingling and discoursing to us the harmonies of a life's Christian experience. And oftentimes, when in the mountain country, far from noise and interruption, we wrought upon these hymns for our vacation tasks, we almost forgot the living world, and were lifted up by noble lyrics as upon mighty wings, and went back to the days when Christ sang with his disciples, when the disciples sang too, as in our churches they have almost ceased to do. O! but for one moment even, to have sat transfixed, and to have listened to the hymn that Christ sang and to the singing! But the olive-trees did not hear his murmured notes more clearly than, rapt in imagination, we have heard them! There, too, are the hymns of St. Ambrose and many others, that rose up like birds in the early centuries, and have come flying and singing all the way down to us. Their wing is untired yet, nor is the voice less sweet now than it was a thousand years ago. Though they sometimes disappeared, they never sank; but, as engineers for destruction send bombs that, rising high up in wide curves, overleap great spaces and drop down in a distant spot, so God, in times of darkness, seems to have caught up these hymns, spanning long periods of time, and letting them fall at distant eras, not for explosion and wounding, but for healing and consolation. There are crusaders' hymns, that rolled forth their truths upon the oriental air, while a thousand horses' hoofs kept time In our own time, and in the familiar experiences of daily life, how are hymns mossed over and vine-clad with domestic associations! One hymn hath opened the morning in ten thousand families, and dear children with sweet voices have charmed the evening in a thousand places with the utterance of another. Nor do I know of any steps now left on earth by which one may so soon rise above trouble or weariness as the verses of a hymn and the notes of a tune. And if the angels that Jacob saw sang when they appeared, then I know that the ladder which he beheld was but the scale of divine music let down from heaven to earth. It is impossible that one, in this spirit, and with unfeigned love for his work, should attempt a collection of hymns large enough for the wants of the family, the social meeting, and the public congregation of the church, and representing every phase of personal experience or religious want, without a more thorough conviction of its imperfections than any other one could have. And when to the inherent difficulties of a hymn collection were added the even greater difficulty of combining with them a sufficient body of tunes for congregational uses, difficulties not only of selection and adaptation, but mechanical difficulties in mating and placing, page by page, the materials required, no more, no less; subjecting the whole body of hymns and tunes to the necessities of space measurement, the obstacles were increased a thousand fold. From the New York Times, 11 Dec. THE UNDER-STRATA OF NEW YORK. bauch and brutify themselves; they trap the unwary, and ruin the pure and innocent; they are the hired bullies of electioneers, the claqueurs at primary meetings; they live on plunder and rapine and robbery. night; and they are wild in riot or plunder, when other men sleep. Their hands are stained with blood, and their pockets lined Ir any one has watched the testimony in with the gold of the innocent. They are the trial of Baker, now going on, he will be pimps and seducers. The houses of crime most of all surprised at the revelations it send them out to the simple-hearted and unmakes of City-life below the surface. We wary in city and country, to fill the ranks of had all known, of course, that there were the wretched and debauched. Still their own sharpers and rowdies and criminal charac- lives are black with acts of lust and treachters enough among us; still, few had realized ery, wrought on those who trusted them. the existence of such organized and profes- They know the windings of crime in the vasional bands of desperadoes. But they come rious countries; the gambling tricks of Calione after another to the witness-stand, or fornia, the skill of the burglar and thief of they speak of companions, and business, and London, the quick evasion of the Police in scenes, in such a way as to show that down Paris, and the ready use of knife and pistol in the depths of society there is a class where in America. They have the slang language to cheat, to gamble, to bully, to fight, is as of the flash men. They belong to the great much a regular profession as in the upper community of desperadoes, who abound strata to cure, or to plead, or to do honest wherever English is spoken. Of course, as labor. What are they these men- that for with all men, there are good qualities among a little while come forth from their haunts them: instances of honor and generosity, and dens, and stand up in full day before and of a courage which wounds and death New York? How do they live? What do do not shake. But, generally speaking, their they do to earn their genteel clothes, their lives are hideous-stained with crimes, anicontinual pleasures, and their host of follow-mal, brutal, selfish, and debauched. They ers? What is our lower class made up of? rob, gamble, and cheat; they fight and brawl These men are like the athletes and and murder; they live in the dark; they deprize-fighters and freed slaves who composed the lowest population of Rome in classic days, whose characters, with their deep lines of villany, yet stand out under the strong touch of Cicero's pen. He warned his countrymen of them then, as moralists do of these Such are the men who form the foundation now. And the censors, who lived amid a of society in New York; whose existence is corrupt race, only ceased to warn when these hardly known till a case like this of such desperadoes had overturned society and horrible bloodshed and violence calls them seized the Government itself. These men in out of their holes to the daylight! Yet the New York are the brawlers, fighters, and Police know these men. Every one, - name "pugilists," for we are told by one wit- and history,- we doubt not, is familiar to ness that there is a great distinction between the Police records. Their haunts, their busithe two latter. They train themselves to ness, even the dark suspicion of their crimes, batter each other at a few dollars a head; are perfectly open to the guardians of our they lead the rows and brawls at elections public order. Our politicians can tell you and on race-courses; they go armed each by name each leader in the desperate gangs. night with revolvers and knives, and when Thousands and thousands of dollars have the devil of liquor is in them, they commit the murders and the brutal acts of violence which stain our city's Police record. Almost every one of them is marked by these hideous quarrels: his nose broken, or his ear bitten off, or his body marred by the scars of bullet or knife-gash. They are gamblers; they throw the dice, or shuffle the cards, or push the billiard-ball, the whole night long. They cheat as well as stake, and live on the pickings of young gentlemen of means who fall into their vulturous claws. The gas-light is the day-light for them; rooms hot and reeking with the smell of debauch their natural atmosphere. They take no note of time-as one witness apologetically explained with regard to his memory of dates-for their day is in the gone from the pockets of our wealthy partyleaders to the hands of such desperadoes. During some years these villains have almost lived on the gold of rich office-seekers, and of moral, perhaps religious, merchants, who gave blindly to support their candidate. Thank Heaven! that is for the present over. If the Know-Nothings do nothing better, they will receive the thanks of posterity for having at least broken up the system of employing foreign and native bullies in our elections. For the last few years, the abandoned characters who live at the bottom of New York seem to have frightfully increased. Poole's murder served to show people first what a numerous and terrible class of worthless men lay hidden here. What should be done? Sometimes, as not Commend us to him for baiting that bugbear, Conventionality. Let whoso will, "praise the busy town He loves to rail against it still, 6 thinking what a shrewd man you are, Duns- belongs too much to books, set creeds and ford, when you choose to be 80," and to articles, and not enough to living men maintain that it is Dunsford, after all, who admitting easily of those modifications which ought to conduct great law-cases, and write life requires, and which guard life by adaptessays, instead of leaving such things to his ing it to what it has to bear. two Friends in Council, and affecting the part of a simple, unworldly, retired man, content to receive his impressions of men and things from his pupils. We share the essayist's admiration of Dunsford's mild wisdom of the spectacle of old age gracefully filling its high calling of a continually-enlarging sympathy with the young, and tolerance for them. "A man has only to become old to be tolerant," says Goethe; and adds: "I see no fault committed which I also might not have committed." Dunsford is described as having reached to the same level of toleration by sheer goodness of nature. For ground in yonder social mill Thousands are grateful to him for his complaint how often in society a man goes out from interested or vain motives, at most unseasonable hours, in very uncomfortable clothes, to sit or stand in a constrained position, inhaling tainted air, suffering from great The essayist is, in a good sense, a free-heat, and his sole occupation or amusement thinking and free-speaking man. Practical, to talk, only to talk. Grateful for his sagacious, earnest, manly, opposed to what-exposeé of those assemblies of fine people in ever is mean, narrow, or illiberal. "Years London, where nobody has anything to do, ago," he says, an old college friend defined where nothing is going on but vapid converthis present writer as a man who could say sation, where the ladies dare not move freely the most audacious things with the least about, and where a good chorus, a childish offence." Puritanism comes in again and game, or even the liberty to work or read, again for no left-handed blow from this good would be a perfect godsend to the whole asstrong arm. Every social mischief for two sembly. Grateful for his dead-set against centuries past, he says, has been darkened and the notion that all activity must move in cerdeepened by Puritanism. It is beyond mel-tain grooves to be owned as successful and ancholy, it verges on despair, he says, to see respectable. Grateful for his cross-examinaministers of religion immersed in heart-break- tion, conviction, and condemnation of the ing trash from which no sect is free-here theory, that self-development, or even the defopperies of discipline—there (still more dan-velopment of others, is not the end of life, but gerous) fopperies of doctrine. His exegesis the getting or doing something which can be of the text which gives as a main feature of weighed, measured, ticketed, and in some way pure and undefiled religion, the keeping oneself proved to the world. "As for the world," says unspotted from the world, assures many ex- Ellesmere, "I am one of the few persons who cellent clergymen that their "world," their really care but little for it. The hissing of coltemptation to err, lies in clerical niceness and lected Europe, provided I knew the hissers could over-sancitity, and making more and longer not touch me, would be a grateful sound rather sermons than there is any occasion for, and than the reverse- that is, if heard at a reasoninsisting upon needless points of doctrine, and able distance." The essayist may not subscribe making Christianity a stumbling-block to to all the flighty things Ellesmere is pleased many, and turning Sunday into a ghastly to say, but they may pretty nearly all be idol. If all clergymen had been Christians, taken, in spirit, as his own, cum grano, it is observed, there would by this time have it being his express design to represent Ellesbeen no science of theology. An English mere as a most accomplished and a thorough Churchman though he be, he avows his long-gentleman; not exactly the conventional genentertained belief, that our Church stands tleman, but a man whom savages would cerupon foundations which need more breadth tainly take to be a chief in his own country, and solidity, both as regards the hold it ought showing high courtesy to others with a sort to have on the reason and on the affections of coolness as regards himself, the result of of its members that it is too impersonal - being free from many of the usual small shames, petty ends, trivial vanities, and iner avec eux les règles que le monde s'est marked social operations, which, he says, faites, et de les vivifier par un peu de controdwarf men in their intercourse with others, verse: car, si le doute tue la morale, la rouor make them like clowns daubed over in ugly tine la tue aussi." Or, as Mrs. Browning's patches. hero words it, " "For this age shows, to my thinking, still more Than directly, by profession, simple infidels to Thus, in regard to dress, he avows his own private opinion to be, that the discomfort caused by injudicious dress worn entirely in deference to the most foolish of mankind, in fact to the tyrannous majority, would outweigh many an evil that sounds very big. Much might be said about the essayist's And he conjectures that, were angels to make earnest advocacy of the cause of progress, 'perfect returns" of statistics in these mat- and the true rights of man. The most adters, it might be seen that perhaps our every- mirable precepts, he sees, are thrown from day shaving, severe shirt-collars, and other time to time upon this cauldron of human ridiculous garments, are equivalent to a great affairs, and seem oftentimes only to make it European war once in seven years, and that blaze the higher; but that hinders not his women's stays do about as much harm, i. e. proffering admirable precepts of his own, nor cause as much suffering, as an occasional pes- represses his sanguine aspirations on behalf of tilence—say, for instance, the cholera. the world, his faith in the increasing purpose Talk about this age being free from fear that through the ages runs. He is cheery of the fagot or the torture-chamber? For and genial suspects that Solomon was his part, our essayist refers us to fear of the rather melancholy than wise, when he prosocial circle, fear of the newspaper, fear of nounced that Wisdom is sorrow - holds that being odd, fear of what may be thought by the more variety men have in their amusepeople who never did think, still greater fear ments the better—and believes that some day of what somebody may say and asks, Are it will be found out, that to bring up a man not these things a clinging dress of torture? with a genial nature, a good temper, and a The subjects of terror, he reminds us, vary so happy form of mind, is a greater effect than much in different times, that it is difficult to to perfect him in much knowledge and many estimate the different degrees of courage shown accomplishments. He knows of no way so in resisting them." Men fear public opinion sure of making others happy as of being so now as they did in former times the star- oneself, to begin with: not that people are chamber and those awful goddesses, Appear- to be self-absorbed; but they are to drink in ances, are to us what the Fates were to the nature and life a little from a genial, wiselyGreeks." Especially are women indebted to developed man, good things radiate; whereas him for what he stoutly says for them, and your philanthropical, cut-and-dried benevosatirically says to them, in respect of conven- lent people are very apt to be one-sided and tionality. He advocates such changes in fe- fussy, and not of the sweetest temper if male education as shall free them from that others will not be good and happy in their "absurd timidity of mind more than of body way. Certainly one of the most charming which prevents their seeing things as they characteristics of our essayist is the kindly, are, and makes them, and consequently men, unpretentious, unpolemical tact with which the victims of conventionality." So wedded he rather suggests than argues out, rather is the feminine nature to what it is accus-intimates than demonstrates, what he has to tomed to, that Ellesmere asserts his conviciion teach. that if it were customary to have the right In touching on his style, and art of comhand thumbs of all people in the upper classes position, some notice is due to that lavish use cut off, the women would all vow that it was of imagery and illustration to which he more an elegant custom. The way in which the than once calls attention. Milverton is much Friends in Council" ventilate" conventional given to the figurative and metaphoric. bumdrums, illustrates the advice given by" O, I am no match for you if you once get St. Marc Girardin in one of his Essais de amongst metaphors," says Ellesmere to him: Morale: "Ayez des amis, si vous vivez dans "it is your trade." To which Milverton les temps tranquilles et calmes, afin d'exam-replies, that these are subjects the truth of |
