2. Its like choice oyle that fell
the head upon
that down did flow
the beard unto
beard of Aron:
The skirts of his garment
that unto them went down:
3. Like Hermons dews descent
Sions mountains upon
for there to bee
the Lords blessing
life aye lasting
commandeth hee.
How this contorted song could have been sung even to the simplest tune by unskilled singers who possessed no guiding notes of music is difficult to comprehend. Small wonder that Judge Sewall was forced to enter in his diary, "In the morning I set York tune and in the second going over, the gallery carried it irresistibly to St. Davids which discouraged me very much." We can fancy him stamping his foot, beating time, and roaring York at the top of his old lungs, and being overcome by the strong-voiced gallery, and at last sadly succumbing to St. David's. Again he writes: "I set York tune and the Congregation went out of it into St. Davids in the very 2nd going over. They did the same 3 weeks before. This is the 2nd Sign. It seems to me an intimation for me to resign the Praecentor's Place to a better Voice. I have through the Divine Long suffering and Favour done it for 24 years and now God in his Providence seems to call me off, my voice being enfeebled." Still a third time he "set Windsor tune;" they "ran over into Oxford do what I would." These unseemly "running overs" became so common that ere long each singer "set the tune" at his own will and the loudest-voiced carried the day. A writer of the time, Rev. Thomas Walter, says of this reign of concordia discors: "The tunes are now miserably tortured and twisted and quavered, in some Churches, into a horrid Medly of confused and disorderly Voices. Our tunes are left to the Mercy of every unskilful Throat to chop and alter, to twist and change, according to their infinitely divers and no less Odd Humours and Fancies. I have myself paused twice in one note to take breath. No two Men in the Congregation quaver alike or together, it sounds in the Ears of a Good Judge like five hundred different Tunes roared out at the same Time, with perpetual Interfearings with one another."
Still, confused and poor as was the singing, it was a source of pure and unceasing delight to the Puritan colonists,--one of the rare pleasures they possessed,--a foretaste of heaven;
"for all we know
Of what the blessed do above
Is that they sing and that they love."
And to even that remnant of music--their few jumbled cacophonous melodies--they clung with a devotion almost phenomenal.
Nor should we underrate the cohesive power that psalm-singing proved in the early communities; it was one of the most potent influences in gathering and holding the colonists together in love. And they reverenced their poor halting tunes in a way quite beyond our modern power of fathoming. Whenever a Puritan, even in road or field, heard at a distance the sound of a psalm-tune, though the sacred words might be quite undistinguishable, he doffed his hat and bowed his head in the true presence of God. We fain must believe, as Arthur Hugh Clough says,--
"There is some great truth, partial, very likely, but needful, Lodged, I am strangely sure, in the tones of an English psalm-tune."
Judge Sewall often writes with tender and simple pathos of his being moved to tears by the singing,--sometimes by the music, sometimes by the words. "The song of the 5th Revelation was sung. I was ready to burst into tears at the words, bought with thy blood." He also, with a vehemence of language most unusual in him and which showed his deep feeling, wrote that he had an intense passion for music. And yet, the only tunes he or any of his fellow-colonists knew were the simple ones called Oxford, Litchfield, Low Dutch, York, Windsor, Cambridge, St. David's and Martyrs.
About the year 1714 Rev. John Tufts, of Newbury, who had previously prepared "A very Plain and Easy Introduction to the Art of Singing Psalm-tunes," issued a collection of tunes in three parts. These thirty-seven tunes, all of which but one were in common metre, were bound often with "The Bay Psalm-Book." They were reprinted from Playford's "Book of Psalms" and the notes of the staff were replaced with letters and dots, and the bars marking the measures were omitted. To the Puritans, this great number of new tunes appeared fairly monstrous, and formed the signal for bitter objections and fierce quarrels.