_MUSIC._ DULCE DOMUM is an arrangement from the composer’s popular song, “One sweetly solemn song,” later published as an anthem. Robert Steele Ambrose, 1824-1908, born in England, came with his parents to Canada in his first year. He prepared himself for the musical profession and became organist successively in churches in Guelph, Kingston, and Hamilton, Ontario. He is known best by the above-mentioned song. 265. Sunset and evening star _Alfred Tennyson_, 1809-92 A song of immortality, written in ten minutes in the author’s eighty-first year. It is always printed at the end of Tennyson’s poems. Tennyson once said: “I can hardly understand how any great, imaginative man, who has lived, suffered, thought and wrought, can doubt of the soul’s continuous progress in the after life.” The poem was written on an October day in 1889, as the poet was crossing from Aldworth to Farringford. Tennyson’s son wrote in his _Memoir_ of his father, concerning its origin: Before he reached Farringford he had the moaning of the bar in his mind, and after dinner he showed me this poem written out. I said: “That is the crown of your life’s work.” He answered: “It came in a moment.” He explained the “Pilot” as “that Divine and Unseen who is always guiding us.” A few days before my father’s death, in 1892, he said to me: “Mind you put ‘Crossing the Bar,’ at the end of all editions of my poems.” My father considered Edmund Lushington’s translation into Greek of “Crossing the Bar” one of the finest translations he had ever read. _MUSIC._ CROSSING THE BAR was composed for these words. The tune, in the nature of an unaccompanied quartet anthem, may be sung with freedom in regard to time and shading. For comments on the composer, Joseph Barnby, see Hymn 21. 266. Blest be the everlasting God _Isaac Watts_, 1674-1748 A paraphrase of I Peter 1:3-5. The original by Watts was published in his _Hymns and Spiritual Songs_, 1707, from which it was taken over unchanged into the _Scottish Paraphrases_ of 1745 and of 1751. In the final 1781 edition, the third stanza was omitted and the fourth altered from There’s an inheritance divine Reserved against that day; ’Tis incorrupted, undefiled, And cannot waste away. The improvements are attributed to William Cameron, 1751-1811, who, as a young licentiate, was entrusted with the final revision of the _Scottish Paraphrases_. For comments on Isaac Watts see Hymn 11. _MUSIC._ ST. STEPHEN (ABRIDGE) is described by Archibald Jacob as a “beautifully fluent and graceful melody ... in the best 18th-century style of this class of tune.” It appeared originally in _A Collection of Psalm Tunes in Three Parts_ ... by Isaac Smith, _c._ 1770, under the name ABRIDGE, by which it continues to be known in England. In _Sacred Harmony for Use in St. George’s_, Edinburgh, 1820, it appeared under the name ST. STEPHEN, with slight modification of the last line.