With thorns, Thine only crown.
THE TUNE.
A plain-song by Alexander Reinagle is used by some congregations, but is not remarkably expressive. Reinagle, Alexander Robert, (1799–1877) of Kidlington, Eng., was organist to the church of St. Peter-in-the-East, Oxford.
The great “Hymn of Trust” could have found no more sympathetic interpreter than the musician of Gerhardt's own land and language, Schumann, the gentle genius of Zwickau. It bears the name “Schumann,” appropriately enough, and its elocution makes a volume of each quatrain, notably the one—
Who points the clouds their course,
Whom wind and seas obey;
He shall direct thy wandering feet,
He shall prepare thy way.
Robert Schumann, Ph.D., was born in Zwickau, Saxony, June 8, 1810. He was a music director and conservatory teacher, and the master-mind of the pre-Wagnerian period. His compositions became popular, having a character of their own, combining the intellectual and beautiful in art. He published in Leipsic a journal promotive of his school of music, and founded a choral society in Dresden. Happy in the coöperation of his wife, herself a skilled musician, he extended his work to Vienna and the Netherlands; but his zeal wore him out, and he died at the age of forty-six, universally lamented as “the eminent man who had done so much for the happiness of others.”
Gerhardt's Hymn (ten quatrains) is rarely printed entire, and where six are printed only four are usually sung. Different collections choose portions according to the compiler's taste, the stanza beginning—