THE TUNE.
Dr. Dykes' “Rivaulx” is a sober choral that articulates the hymn-writer's sentiment with sincerity and with considerable earnestness, but breathes too faintly the interrogative and expostulary tone of the lines. To voice the devout solicitude and self-remonstrance of the hymn there is no tune superior to “Federal St.”
The Hon. Henry Kemble Oliver, author of “Federal St.,” was born in Salem, Mass., March, 1800, and was addicted to music from his childhood. His father compelled him to relinquish it as a profession, but it remained his favorite avocation, and after his graduation from Harvard the cares of none of the various public positions he held, from schoolmaster to treasurer of the state of Massachusetts, could ever wean him from the study of music and its practice. At the age of thirty-one, while sitting one day in his study, the last verse of Anne Steele's hymn—
So fades the lovely blooming flower,
—floated into his mind, and an unbidden melody came with it. As he hummed it to himself the words shaped the air, and the air shaped the words.
Then gentle patience smiles on pain,
Then dying hope revives again,
—became—
See gentle patience smile on pain;
See dying hope revive again;
—and with the change of a word and a tense the hymn created the melody, and soon afterward the complete tune was made. Two years later it was published by Lowell Mason, and Oliver gave it the name of the street in Salem on which his wife was born, wooed, won, and married. It adds a pathos to its history that “Federal St.” was sung at her burial.
This first of Oliver's tunes was followed by “Harmony Grove,” “Morning,” “Walnut Grove,” “Merton,” “Hudson,” “Bosworth,” “Salisbury Plain,” several anthems and motets, and a “Te Deum.”
In his old age, at the great Peace Jubilee in Boston, 1872, the baton was put into his hands, and the gray-haired composer conducted the chorus of ten thousand voices as they sang the words and music of his noble harmony. The incident made “Federal St.” more than ever a feature of New England history. Oliver died in 1885.