Flint, Rev. James, D.D. Reading, Massachusetts, December 10, 1779—March 4, 1855. He graduated from Harvard College in 1802, and was ordained an orthodox Congregational minister at East Bridgewater in 1806, where he soon adopted more liberal beliefs, and carried most of his congregation with him. In 1821 he accepted a call to the East Church (Unitarian) Salem, Massachusetts, where he served until his death. In 1843 he published A Collection of Hymns for the Christian Church and Home, to replace the [earlier collection (1788) by Rev. William Bentley], q.v., for use in the East Church. Flint’s Collection included several hymns by himself. One of them, “On leaving an old house of worship,” beginning

Here to the high and holy One

was included in Lunt’s Christian Psalter, 1841, as was a second, written in 1840 for the 200th anniversary of the incorporation of the town of Quincy, Massachusetts, beginning,

In pleasant lands have fallen the lines

That bound our goodly heritage.

This second hymn has been included in a number of later hymnbooks, among them The New Hymn and Tune Book, 1914, and Hymns of the Spirit, 1937.

J. 379 H.W.F.

Follen, Mrs. Eliza Lee (Cabot), Boston, Massachusetts, August 15, 1787—January 26, 1860, Brookline, Massachusetts. In 1828 she married Dr. Charles Follen, a German scholar who had sought freedom in this country and who was then teaching German Literature and Ecclesiastical History at Harvard. Later he was minister of the Unitarian Church (now called the Follen Church Society) at East Lexington, Massachusetts. Mrs. Follen both before and after her marriage contributed verse and prose articles to various periodicals and published a number of small books, including Hymns for Children, Boston, 1825; Poems, 1839, and, while she was in England in 1854, another small volume for children, entitled The Lark and the Linnet. These books contain some translations from the German and the versions of a few Psalms.

Her best known hymns are

1. How sweet to be allowed to pray, (Resignation)

This first appeared in The Christian Disciple, September 1818, then in her Poems, 1839, entitled “Thy will be done.”

2. How sweet upon this sacred day (Sunday)

In The Christian Disciple, September, 1828, and in Poems, entitled “Sabbath Day.”

3. Lord deliver, thou canst save, (Prayer for the Slave)

In Songs of the Free, 1836; in Adams and Chapin’s (Universalist) Hymns for Christian Devotion, Boston, 1845; in Hedge and Huntington’s Hymns for the Church of Christ, 1853; and in other collections, but not included in her Poems.

4. God, thou art good, each perfumed flower, (God In Nature)

This first appeared in Hymns for Children, Boston, 1825, beginning with a defective line (7s instead of 8s)

(a) God is good! each perfumed flower

and altered as above in her Poems and in The Lark and the Linnet.

This hymn underwent further transformations in England. In Emily Taylor’s Sabbath Recreations, 1826, it was included as an original piece never before printed, and signed “E.L.C.”, the initials of Mrs. Follen’s maiden name. Possibly she sent a ms. copy to Miss Taylor before it appeared in Boston. In J. R. Beard’s British Unitarian Collection of Hymns, 1837, it appears as

(b) Yes, God is good! each perfumed flower,

J. H. Gurney, the Anglican hymn writer and editor, included it in his Lutterworth Collection of Hymns for Public Worship, 1838, but, while retaining Mrs. Follen’s opening stanza, rewrote about half of the remaining four stanzas, and in his later Marylebone Collection, 1851, rewrote it further, beginning it

(c) Yes, God is Good.—in earth and sky,

and in a note appended to the Index of first lines he wrote that he had found the hymn “in a small American volume —— well conceived, but very imperfectly executed,” and that because of “successive alterations—the writer has not scrupled to put his name to it, J.H.G.” In these altered forms the hymn had considerable use in England (For further details see Julian, Dictionary, 1298).

5. Will God, who made the earth and sea, (Child’s Prayer)

In Poems, 1839. In Dr. Allan’s (English) Children’s Worship it is erroneously attributed to “H. Bateman.”