The natural wonders on the biggest island of the group, Hawaii, beggar description. You must go there yourselves. But I have always been more interested in human nature than in nature. I have seldom seen the latter and never the former show to better advantage than in these delectable oases of the ocean.
XXXVII
HYMNS
The church to which I belong has this very day furnished itself with a new set of hymn-books; when I enter my accustomed pew tomorrow morning I shall find there attractive new volumes. Which fact leads me to the consideration of hymns in general.
The worst verses in the world are to be found among epitaphs and encomiums of the dead. I remember a certain town in Connecticut where the local poet hovered over the bedside of the dying, like a vulture watching a sick horse. Before the corpse was cold, this poetical ghoul had his poem on the “remains” in the village paper. You had to get up very early in the morning to die before he beat you to it, as Matthew Arnold would not say. He added new terrors to death.
Well, probably, in the number of bad verses, hymns rank a good second to epitaphs. There are so many bad hymns that some scoffers think there are few good ones. Such a generalisation is wide of the truth. The literature of hymnology contains many masterpieces; innumerable hymns of the church are as beautiful in poetic art as they are devout in aspiration. If we took all the hymns out of English literature, the loss would be huge.
If a secret ballot could be taken among all classes of people to discover the choice of the favourite hymn, I think it would appear that Cardinal Newman’s Lead, Kindly Light had a majority of votes.
I happened to be in London at the time of Newman’s death in 1890, himself just as old as the nineteenth century. Then were the old bitter controversies forgotten; Catholics, Protestants and the unclassed united in tributes to the genius and beauty of the great Cardinal’s mind and character. And as creeds were for the moment forgotten, so there came instinctively to every one’s lips the words of Newman’s creedless hymn, as creedless as the Lord’s Prayer.
The vicissitudes of literary fame are beyond divination. Who, including first of all Newman, could have dreamed that when the young man composed that poem, it would outlast his scholarly, controversial, pietistic and literary prose of eighty years? Yet such is the fact.
On June 16, 1833, while in a calm at sea, on board an orange-boat and thinking of his doctrinal perplexities, these lines came into Newman’s mind; as suddenly, as inexplicably, as fortunately as the stanzas Crossing the Bar came to Tennyson on a ferryboat crossing the Solent. Newman called the poem, The Pillar and the Cloud.
For details concerning its composition and for some interesting criticisms on the poem itself I will refer readers to Dr. Joseph J. Reilly’s admirable book, Newman as a Man of Letters.