American Unitarian Hymn Writers and HymnsFoote, Henry Wilder
Religion
American Unitarian Hymn Writers and Hymns
Foote, Henry Wilder
Hymn writers; Hymns, English -- History and criticism; Unitarian Universalist churches -- Hymns -- History and criticism
Longfellow, Rev. Samuel, Portland, Maine, June 18, 1819—October 3,
1892, Portland, was the youngest of the eight children of Stephen and
Zilpah (Wadsworth) Longfellow. Stephen Longfellow had graduated from
Harvard and had become one of the most prominent citizens of Portland.
His son Samuel entered Harvard with the Class of 1839, just after his
brother, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, more than twelve years his
senior, had returned from Europe to begin his professorship at
Harvard.
Samuel entered the Harvard Divinity School, from which he graduated in
1846, and served as minister of the Unitarian Church in Fall River,
Massachusetts, 1848-51; the Second Unitarian Church, Brooklyn, New
York, 1853-1860; and the Unitarian Church, Germantown, Pennsylvania,
1878-1883. In the intervals between these pastorates he did much
occasional preaching, and, having independent means and no marital
ties, made several prolonged visits to Europe. He had an attractive
personality, was witty and highly intelligent, and was an acceptable
though outspoken preacher, but he is now remembered for his
contribution to American hymnody through the hymns which he wrote and
the books which he edited. His accomplishment in this field was
greater and more lasting than that of any other American in the middle
period of the 19^th century. Its development can best be traced in the
books which he published.
The first of these was _A Book of Hymns for Public and Private
Devotions_, which he and his classmate in the Divinity School, Samuel
Johnson, daringly compiled while still students in the School. A not
improbable story of the origin of the book reports that their friend,
Rev. Francis Parker Appleton, then a young minister at Peabody,
Massachusetts, had complained to them about the antiquated hymn-book
which he found in use in his church, to which they replied that they
would prepare a book for him which would express the religious
aspirations of the rising generation. The book appeared in 1846,
before either of the young editors had been ordained, and was an
immediate success. It was first used in the First Unitarian Church at
Worcester, Massachusetts, where Longfellow’s classmate and lifelong
friend, Edward Everett Hale, had just been ordained at a service for
which Longfellow wrote the ordination hymn, and it was promptly
adopted by Theodore Parker for his congregation in Music Hall. The
book was re-published in somewhat revised and enlarged form in 1848,
and ran to 12 editions. It marked a new epoch in American hymnody
because it was the product of young and adventurous but well-trained
minds seeking to give utterance to the emotions stirred by the
intellectual and political ferment of the times, and because of the
new sources to which they turned. They were the first to see and make
use of the hymnic possibilities of the poems of John Greenleaf
Whittier, and to include in an American hymn-book Newman’s “Lead,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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