Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

Christian himself, it was some time before he mustered courage to face White's ridicule and resentment. He simply drew away from him. When White demanded the reason he was obliged to tell him that they two must henceforth walk different paths.

"Good God!" exclaimed White, "you surely think worse of me than I deserve!"

The separation was a severe shock to Henry, and the real grief of it sobered his anger to reflection and remorse. The light of a better life came to him when his heart melted-and from that time he and Almond were fellows in faith as well as friendship.

In his hymn the young poet tells the stormy experience of his soul, and the vision that guided him to peace.

When, marshalled on the nightly plain,

The glittering host bestud the sky,

One star alone of all the train

Can fix the sinner's wandering eye.
Hark, hark! to God the chorus breaks,
From every host, from every gem,
But one alone the Saviour speaks;
It is the Star of Bethlehem.

Once on the raging seas I rode:

The storm was loud, the night was dark;
The ocean yawned, and rudely blowed

The wind that tossed my foundering bark.
Deep horror then my vitals froze,

Death-struck, I ceased the tide to stem,
When suddenly a star arose;

It was the Star of Bethlehem.

It was my guide, my light, my all,

It bade my dark forebodings cease;
And through the storm and danger's thrall,
It led me to the port of peace.
Now, safely moored, my perils o'er,

I'll sing, first in night's diadem,
For ever and for evermore,

The Star, the Star of Bethlehem!

Besides this delightful hymn, with its graphic sea-faring metaphors, two others, at least, of the same boy-poet hold their place in many of the church and chapel collections:

And

The Lord our God is clothed with might,

The winds obey His will;

He speaks, and in his heavenly height

The rolling sun stands still.

Oft in danger, oft in woe,

Onward, Christians, onward go.

Henry Kirke White died in the autumn of 1806, when he was scarcely twenty years old. His "Ode to Disappointment," and the miscellaneous flowers and fragments of his genius, make up a touching volume. The fire of a pure, strong spirit burning through a consumptive frame is in them all.

THE TUNE.

"When, marshalled on the mighty plain" has a choral set to it in the Methodist Hymnal—credited to Thos. Harris, and entitled "Crimea❞— which divides the three stanzas into six, and

[graphic][merged small]

breaks the continuity of the hymn. Better sing i in its original form-long metre double-to the dear old melody of "Bonny Doon." The voices of Scotland, England and America are blended in it.

The origin of this Caledonian air, though sometimes fancifully traced to an Irish harper and sometimes to a wandering piper of the Isle of Man, is probably lost in antiquity. Burns, however, whose name is linked with it, tells this whimsical story of it, though giving no date save "a good many years ago,"-(apparently about 1753). A virtuoso, Mr. James Millar, he writes, wishing he were able to compose a Scottish tune, was told by a musical friend to sit down to his harpsichord and make a rhythm of some kind solely on the black keys, and he would surely turn out a Scotch tune. The musical friend, pleased at the result of his jest, caught the string of plaintive sounds made by Millar, and fashioned it into "Bonny Doon."

"LAND AHEAD!"

The burden of this hymn was suggested by the dying words of John Adams, one of the crew of the English ship Bounty who in 1789 mutinied, set the captain and officers adrift, and ran the vessel to a tropical island, where they burned her. In a few years vice and violence had decimated the wicked crew, who had exempted themselves from all divine and human restraint, until the last man alive was left with only native women and

« AnteriorContinuar »