“WHY DO WE MOURN DEPARTED FRIENDS?”
This hymn of holy comfort, by Dr. Watts, was long associated with a remarkable tune in C minor, “a queer medley of melody” as Lowell Mason called it, still familiar to many old people as “China.” It was composed by Timothy Swan when he was about twenty-six years of age (1784) and published in 1801 in the New England Harmony. It may have sounded consolatory to mature mourners, singers and hearers in the days when religious emotion habitually took a sad key, but its wild and thrilling chords made children weep. The tune is long out of use—though, strange to say, one of the most recent hymnals prints the hymn with a new minor tune.
Why do we mourn departed friends,
Or shake at death's alarms?
'Tis but the voice that Jesus sends
To call them to His arms.
Are we not tending upward too
As fast as time can move?
Nor should we wish the hours more slow
To keep us from our Love.
The graves of all His saints He blessed
And softened every bed:
Where should the dying members rest
But with their dying Head?
Timothy Swan was born in Worcester, Mass., July 23, 1758, and died in Suffield, Ct., July 23, 1842. He was a self-taught musician, his only “course of study” lasting three weeks,—in a country singing school at Groton. When sixteen years old he went to Northfield, Mass., and learned the hatter's trade, and while at work began to practice making psalm-tunes. “Montague,” in two parts, was his first achievement. From that time for thirty years, mostly spent in Suffield, Ct., he wrote and taught music while supporting himself by his trade. Many of his tunes were published by himself, and had a wide currency a century ago.
Swan was a genius in his way, and it was a true comment on his work that “his tunes were remarkable for their originality as well as singularity—unlike any other melodies.” “China,” his masterpiece, will be long kept track of as a curio, and preserved in replicates of old psalmody to illustrate self-culture in the art of song. But the major 236 / 196 mode will replace the minor when tender voices on burial days sing—
Why do we mourn departed friends?
Another hymn of Watts,—
God is the refuge of His saints
When storms of sharp distress invade,
—sung to Lowell Mason's liquid tune of “Ward,” and the priceless stanza,—
Jesus can make a dying bed
Feel soft as downy pillows are,
doubly prove the claim of the Southampton bard to a foremost place with the song-preachers of Christian trust.
The psalm (Amsterdam version), “God is the refuge,” etc., is said to have been sung by John Howland in the shallop of the Mayflower when an attempt was made to effect a landing in spite of tempestuous weather. A tradition of this had doubtless reached Mrs. Hemans when she wrote—
Amid the storm they sang, etc.