The first group of Unitarian hymn-writers whose names are known and whose productions have survived did not begin to write until the opening decades of the 19^th century. Of this group the earliest born was John Quincy Adams, (1767-1848), best remembered as the sixth President of the United States. That he was also a hymn writer, and the only president of the country who was one, has generally been forgotten. Two or three hymns by him were written earlier but most of them came from the period following his retirement from the presidency in 1829. Soon after that event he wrote one for the 200^th anniversary of the First Church in Quincy, of which he was a member, and later in life he composed a metrical paraphrase of the whole Book of Psalms. When Dr. Lunt, minister of the Quincy church, was preparing his _Christian Psalter_, 1841, Mrs. Adams put into his hands the mss. of her husband’s poems, and Lunt included in his book five hymns and seventeen psalms by his distinguished parishioner. None of them rose above the level of respectable verse but his version of Psalm 43 survived in one or more hymn books 100 years later. Rev. John Pierpont (1785-1866) was a poet of considerable abilities whose verses were in demand for special occasions and whose hymns were the best lyrical expressions of the developing new thought in religion. W. Garrett Horder, the English hymnologist, wrote that Pierpont’s hymn of universal praise was “the earliest really great hymn I have found by an American author.” It is still in use, as are two others by him. Prof. Andrews Norton (1786-1853) of the Harvard Divinity School, published a hymn as early as 1809 and a good deal of verse in later years, much of it in a rather sombre introspective mood, but with one fine hymn still in use. He was followed by Rev. Nathaniel Langdon Frothingham (1793-1870) who wrote a good many hymns for special occasions, one of which survives today, and by Rev. Henry Ware, Jr. (1794-1843) who wrote a number of hymns highly valued as utterances of the religious idealism of the period, but long since dropped from use, except for an excellent one for the dedication of an organ, probably the only hymn in the English language written expressly for such an occasion. William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878), a lay man of letters, was another of the elder members of the famous group of New England poets of the 19^th century, and as early as 1820 he contributed 5 hymns to Sewall’s _New York Collection_, published in that year, and he later wrote others.