Bid Time and Nature gently spare
The shaft we raise to them and Thee.
This does not appear in the hymnals and owns no special tune. Its niche of honor is in the temple of anthology, but it will always be called the “Concord Hymn”—and the fourth line of its first stanza is a perennial quotation.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, LL.D., the renowned American essayist and poet, was born in Boston, 1803. He graduated at Harvard in 1821, and was ordained to the Unitarian ministry, but turned his attention to literature, writing and lecturing on ethical and philosophical themes, and winning universal fame by his original and suggestive prose and verse. He died April 27, 1882.
BATTLE HYMN OF THE REPUBLIC.
After a visit to the Federal camps on the Potomac in 1861, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe returned to her lodgings in Washington, fatigued, as she says, by her “long, cold drive,” and slept soundly. 393 / 341 Awakening at early daybreak, she began “to twine the long lines of a hymn which promised to suit the measure of the ‘John Brown’ melody.”
This hymn was written out after a fashion in the dark, by Mrs. Howe, and she then went back to sleep.
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword;