The hymn was translated from the German by Miss Jane Borthwick, born in Edinburgh, 1813. She and her younger sister, Mrs. Findlater, jointly translated and published, in 1854, Hymns From the Land of Luther, and contributed many poetical pieces to the Family Treasury. She died in 1897.
Another translation, imitating the German metre, is more euphonious, though less literal and less easily fitted to music not specially composed for it, on account of its “feminine” rhymes:
God calling yet! and shall I never hearken?
But still earth's witcheries my spirit darken;
This passing life, these passing joys all flying,
And still my soul in dreamy slumbers lying?
THE TUNE.
Dr. Dykes' “Rivaulx” is a sober choral that articulates the hymn-writer's sentiment with sincerity and with considerable earnestness, but breathes too faintly the interrogative and expostulary tone of the lines. To voice the devout solicitude and self-remonstrance of the hymn there is no tune superior to “Federal St.”
The Hon. Henry Kemble Oliver, author of “Federal St.,” was born in Salem, Mass., March, 1800, and was addicted to music from his childhood. His father compelled him to relinquish it as a profession, but it remained his favorite avocation, and after his graduation from Harvard the cares of none of the various public positions he held, from schoolmaster to treasurer of the state of Massachusetts, could ever wean him from the study of music and its practice. At the age of thirty-one, while sitting one day in his study, the last verse of Anne Steele's hymn—
So fades the lovely blooming flower,