The last line has been changed to read—
Seraphic music pour,
—and finally the hymnals have dropped the verse and substituted others. The new line is an 587 / 523 improvement in melody but not in rhyme, and, besides, it robs the stanza of its leading thought—heaven and earth offsetting each other, and heavenly music drowning earthly noise—a thought that is missed even in the rich cantos of “Jerusalem the Golden.”
THE TUNES.
Nearly the whole school of good short metre tunes, from “St. Thomas” to “Boylston” have offered their notes to Montgomery's “At Home in Heaven,” but the two most commonly recognized as its property are “Mornington,” named from Lord Mornington, its author, and I.B. Woodbury's familiar harmony, “Forever with the Lord.”
Garret Colley Wellesley, Earl of Mornington, and ancestor of the Duke of Wellington, was born in Dagan, Ireland, July 19, 1735. Remarkable for musical talent when a child, he became a skilled violinist, organ-player and composer in boyhood, with little aid beyond his solitary study and practice. When scarcely twenty-one, the University of Dublin conferred on him the degree of Doctor of Music, and a professorship. He excelled as a composer of glees, but wrote also tunes and anthems for the church, some of which are still extant in the choir books of the Dublin Cathedral Died March 22, 1781.
“HARK! HARK, MY SOUL!”
The Methodist Reformation, while it had found no practical sympathy within the established church, left a deep sense of its reason and purpose in the minds of the more devout Episcopalians, and this feeling, instead of taking form in popular revival methods, prompted them to deeper sincerity and more spiritual fervor in their traditional rites of worship. Many of the next generation inherited this pious ecclesiasticism, and carried their loyalty to the old Christian culture to the extreme of devotion till they saw in the sacraments the highest good of the soul. It was Keble's “Christian Year” and his “Assize Sermon” that began the Tractarian movement at Oxford which brought to the front himself and such men as Henry Newman and Frederick William Faber.
The hymns and sacred poems of these sacramentarian Christians would certify to their earnest piety, even if their lives were unknown.
Faber's hymn “Hark, Hark My Soul,” is welcomed and loved by every Christian sect for its religious spirit and its lyric beauty.