“No hostile chiefs to furious combat ran.”
Three stanzas are also added, by the Rev. H.O. Dwight, missionary to Constantinople. The substituted line, which is also, perhaps, the composition of Mr. Dwight, rhymes with—
“His reign of peace upon the earth began,”
—and as it is not un-Miltonic, few singers have ever known that it was not Milton's own.
Dr. John Knowles Paine, Professor of Music at Harvard University, and author of the Oratorio of “St. Peter,” composed a cantata to the great Christmas Ode of Milton, probably about 1868.
Professor Paine died Apr. 25, 1906.
It is worth noting that John Milton senior, the great poet's father, was a skilled musician and a composer of psalmody. The old tunes “York” and “Norwich,” in Ravenscroft's collection and copied from it in many early New England singing-books, are supposed to be his.
The Miltons were an old Oxfordshire Catholic family, and John, the poet's father, was disinherited for turning Protestant, but he prospered in business, and earned the comfort of a country gentleman. He died, very aged, in May, 1646, and his son addressed a Latin poem (“Ad Patrem”) to his memory.
“HARK! THE HERALD ANGELS SING.”
This hymn of Charles Wesley, dating about 1730, was evidently written with the “Adeste Fideles” in mind, some of the stanzas, in fact, being almost like translations of it. The form of the two first lines was originally—