Their flowing robes in brightness shine;
A crown is on each head;
Say, mother, will not such be mine
When I am with the dead?
Then do not weep, sweet mother, now,
’Twill break this body frail;
Those burning tears fall o’er my brow,
Farewell, O fare thee well.
The Sacred Harp says this was “composed by H. S. Rees, 1859”. Is it perhaps a parody of Wm. Haines Lytle’s ‘I’m Dying, Egypt, Dying’? Lytle was a cousin of Stephen Collins Foster whose own song ‘For the Dear Old Flag I Die’ shows close kinship in words and tune to ‘Dying Boy’. (See my article in The Musical Quarterly, xxii., No. 2.) There is a resemblance also between the ‘Dying Boy’ tune and a seventeenth century psalm tune called variously ‘Bella’, ‘Leeds’, ‘Needham’ and ‘Derby’; see Hymns Ancient and Modern, Historical ed., London, Clowes, 1909, p. 79.