Before he reached Farringford he had the moaning of the bar in his mind, and after dinner he showed me this poem written out. I said: “That is the crown of your life’s work.” He answered: “It came in a moment.” He explained the “Pilot” as “that Divine and Unseen who is always guiding us.” A few days before my father’s death, in 1892, he said to me: “Mind you put ‘Crossing the Bar,’ at the end of all editions of my poems.” My father considered Edmund Lushington’s translation into Greek of “Crossing the Bar” one of the finest translations he had ever read.
MUSIC. CROSSING THE BAR was composed for these words. The tune, in the nature of an unaccompanied quartet anthem, may be sung with freedom in regard to time and shading.
For comments on the composer, Joseph Barnby, see [Hymn 21].
266. Blest be the everlasting God
Isaac Watts, 1674-1748
A paraphrase of I Peter 1:3-5.
The original by Watts was published in his Hymns and Spiritual Songs, 1707, from which it was taken over unchanged into the Scottish Paraphrases of 1745 and of 1751. In the final 1781 edition, the third stanza was omitted and the fourth altered from
There’s an inheritance divine
Reserved against that day;
’Tis incorrupted, undefiled,