“You ought to write some new words to go with that tune.”
“I will,” she earnestly replied.
FANEUIL HALL
She went back to Washington, went to bed, and finally fell asleep. She awoke in the night to find her now famous hymn beginning to form itself in her brain. As she lay still in the dark room, line after line and verse after verse shaped themselves. When she had thought out the last of these, she felt that she dared not go to sleep again lest they should be effaced by a morning nap. She sprang out of bed and groped about in the dim December twilight to find a bit of paper and the stump of a pencil with which she had been writing the evening before. Having found these articles, and having long been accustomed to jot down stray thoughts with scarcely any light in a room made dark for the repose of her infant children, she very soon completed her writing, went back to bed, and fell fast asleep.
What sublime and splendid words she had written! There is in them the spirit of the old prophets. Nothing could be grander than the first line:—
“Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”
In the second verse one sees through her eyes the vivid picture she had witnessed in her afternoon’s visit to the army:—
“I have seen him in the watchfires of a hundred circling camps;
They have builded him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read his righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps;
His day is marching on.”
In the third and fourth verses there is a triumphant note of daring faith and prophecy that was wonderfully contagious, and millions of men and women took heart again as they read or sang and caught its optimistic note:—