Here see the Bread of life, see waters flowing
Forth from the throne of God, pure from above!
Come to the feast Love, come ever knowing
Earth has no sorrow but heaven can remove.
Dr. Hastings was not much of a poet, but he could make a singable hymn, and he knew the rhythm and accent needed in a hymn-tune. The determination was to make an evangelical hymn of a poem “too good to lose,” and in that view perhaps the editorial liberties taken with it were excusable. It was to Moore, however, that the real hymn-thought and key-note first came, and the title-line and the sweet refrain are his own—for which the Christian world has thanked him, lo these many years.
THE TUNE.
Those who question why Dr. Hastings' interest in Moore's poem did not cause him to make a tune for it, must conclude that it came to him with its permanent melody ready made, and that the tune satisfied him.
The “German Air” to which Moore tells us he wrote the words, probably took his fancy, if it did not induce his mood. Whether Samuel Webbe's tune now wedded to the hymn is an arrangement of the old air or wholly his own is immaterial. One can scarcely conceive a happier yoking of counterparts. Try singing “Come ye Disconsolate” to “Rescue the Perishing,” for example, and we shall feel the impertinence of divorcing a hymn that has found its musical affinity.
“JESUS, I MY CROSS HAVE TAKEN.”
This is another well-known and characteristic hymn of Henry Francis Lyte—originally six stanzas. We have been told that, besides his bodily affliction, the grief of an unhappy division or difference in his church weighed upon his spirit, and that it is alluded to in these lines—