Thro' sorrow or thro' joy
Conduct me as Thine own,
And help me still to say,
My Lord, Thy will be done.
The last line is the refrain of the hymn of four eight-line stanzas.
THE TUNE.
“Sussex,” by Joseph Barnby, a plain-song with a fine harmony, is good congregational music for the hymn.
But “Jewett,” one of Carl Maria Von Weber's exquisite flights of song, is like no other in its intimate interpretation of the prayerful words. 565 / 501 We hear Luther's “bird in the heart” singing softly in every inflection of the tender melody as it glides on. The tune, arranged by Joseph Holbrook, is from an opera—the overture to Weber's Der Freischutz—but one feels that the gentle musician when he wrote it must have caught an inspiration of divine trust and peace. The wish among the last words he uttered when dying in London of slow disease was, “Let me go back to my own (home), and then God's will be done.” That wish and the sentiment of Schmolke's hymn belong to each other, for they end in the same way.
My Jesus, as Thou wilt:
All shall be well for me;