Long have we roamed in want and pain,
Long have we sought Thy rest in vain;
’Wildered in doubt, in darkness lost,
Long have our souls been tempest-tost;
Low at Thy feet our sins we lay,
Turn not, O Lord, Thy guests away!
Henry Hart Milman (1791-1868), who died Dean of St. Paul’s, is famous as an historian rather than a hymn-writer, but his few hymns have a wide popularity. In
Ride on, ride on in majesty!
he has shown how fine and true a hymn may be, though it departs from recognized devotional form. It is a meditation of a highly rhetorical kind, and apostrophizes but does not address our Lord. By some editors this is regarded as fatal to its inclusion in a collection of hymns, but the common judgement of Christian congregations is right. It has proved itself a hymn in spite of all rules, and is an excellent spiritual song for Palm Sunday.
In the year (1827) of the publication of Heber’s Hymns, written and adapted to the Weekly Church Services of the Year, Keble issued anonymously the most influential devotional work of the nineteenth century, The Christian Year: Thoughts in Verse for the Sundays and Holy Days throughout the Year. Like Ken’s festival hymns, it was not a hymn-book, and was not meant for use in Church services, though from a few of the poems verses may be taken which make hymns of the very best type. Pusey regarded it as ‘the real source of the Oxford Movement,’ of which Newman also thought Keble ‘the true and primary author,’ though he ‘ever considered and kept’ July 14, 1832, the day when Keble preached his sermon on ‘National Apostasy,’ ‘as the start of the religious movement.’ Of the Christian Year Newman says, ‘Keble struck an original note, and woke up in the hearts of thousands a new music, the music of a school long unknown in England.’ But the teaching of the Oxford Movement was rather latent than patent in the Christian Year, and it would be a great mistake to regard it as influencing that religious revival or even the English Church alone. On the other hand, Hurrell Froude feared that the authorship of the Christian Year would be attributed to a Methodist.[172] It was as important an element in the Movement as Charles Wesley’s hymns were in the Evangelical Revival. In each case the influence extended far beyond those who claim the poems as their special heritage.