Compiled incidents of its heavenly service would fill a chapter. A venerable minister tells of the supernal comfort that lightened his after years of sorrow from the dying bed of his wife who whispered with her last breath, "Hide me, O my Saviour, hide." A childless and widowed father in Washington remembers with a more than earthly peace, the wife and mother's last request for Wesley's hymn, and her departure to the sound of its music to join the spirit of her babe. A summer visitor in Philadelphia, waiting on a hot street-corner for a car to Fairmount Park, overheard a quavering voice singing the same hymn and saw an emaciated hand caressing a little plant in an open window--and carried away the picture of a fading life, and the words-- Other refuge have I none, Hangs my helpless soul on Thee. On one of the fields of the Civil War, just after a bloody battle, the Rev. James Rankin of the United Presbyterian Church bent over a dying soldier. Asked if he had any special request to make, the brave fellow replied, "Yes, sing 'Jesus, Lover of my Soul.'" The clergyman belonged to a church that sang only Psalms. But what a tribute to that ubiquitous hymn that such a man knew it by heart! A moment's hesitation and he recalled the words, and, for the first time in his life, sang a sacred song that was not a Psalm. When he reached the lines,-- Safe into the haven guide, O receive my soul at last, --his hand was in the frozen grip of a dead man, whose face wore "the light that never was on sea or land." The minister went away saying to himself, "If this hymn is good to die by, it is good to live by." _THE TUNE._ Of all the tone-masters who have studied and felt this matchless hymn, and given it vocal wings--Marsh, Zundel, Bradbury, Dykes, Mason--none has so exquisitely uttered its melting prayer, syllable by syllable, as Joseph P. Holbrook in his "Refuge." Unfortunately for congregational use, it is a duo and quartet score for select voices; but the four-voice portion can be a chorus, and is often so sung. Its form excludes it from some hymnals or places it as an optional beside a congregational tune. But when rendered by the choir on special occasions its success in conveying the feeling and soul of the words is complete. There is a prayer in the swell of every semitone and the touch of every accidental, and the sweet concord of the duet--soprano with tenor or bass--pleads on to the end of the fourth line, where the full harmony reinforces it like an organ with every stop in play. The tune is a rill of melody ending in a river of song.[36] [Footnote 36: Holbrook has also an arrangement of Franz Abt's, "When the Swallows Homeward Fly" written to "Jesus, Lover of my Soul," but with Wesley's words it is far less effective than his original work. "Refuge" is not a manufacture but an inspiration.]