THE TUNE.
It is interesting, not to say curious, testimony to the vital quality of this meek production that so many composers have set it to music, or that successive hymn-book editors have kept it, and printed it to so many different harmonies. All the chorals that carry it have substantially the same movement—for the spondaic accent of the long lines is compulsory—but their offerings sing “to one clear harp in divers tones.”
The appearance of the words in one hymnal with Sir William Davenant's air (full scored) to Moore's love-song, “Believe me, if all those 357 / 307 endearing young charms,” now known as the tune of “Fair Harvard,” is rather startling at first, but the adoption is quite in keeping with the policy of Luther and Wesley.
“St. Kevin” written to it forty years ago by John Henry Cornell, organist of St. Paul's, New York City, is sweet and sympathetic.
The newest church collection (1905) gives the beautiful air and harmony of “Athens” to the hymn, and notes the music as a “Greek Melody.”
But the nameless English tune, of uncertain authorship* that accompanies the words in the smaller old manuals, and which delighted Sunday-schools for a generation, is still the favorite in the memory of thousands, and may be the very music first written.
* Harmonized by Hubert P. Main.