The Hon. Henry Kemble Oliver, author of "Federal St.," was born in Salem, Mass., March, 1800, and was addicted to music from his childhood. His father compelled him to relinquish it as a profession, but it remained his favorite avocation, and after his graduation from Harvard the cares of none of the various public positions he held, from schoolmaster to treasurer of the state of Massachusetts, could ever wean him from the study of music and its practice. At the age of thirty-one, while sitting one day in his study, the last verse of Anne Steele's hymn-- So fades the lovely blooming flower, --floated into his mind, and an unbidden melody came with it. As he hummed it to himself the words shaped the air, and the air shaped the words. Then gentle patience smiles on pain, Then dying hope revives again, --became-- See gentle patience smile on pain; See dying hope revive again; --and with the change of a word and a tense the hymn created the melody, and soon afterward the complete tune was made. Two years later it was published by Lowell Mason, and Oliver gave it the name of the street in Salem on which his wife was born, wooed, won, and married. It adds a pathos to its history that "Federal St." was sung at her burial. This first of Oliver's tunes was followed by "Harmony Grove," "Morning," "Walnut Grove," "Merton," "Hudson," "Bosworth," "Salisbury Plain," several anthems and motets, and a "Te Deum." In his old age, at the great Peace Jubilee in Boston, 1872, the baton was put into his hands, and the gray-haired composer conducted the chorus of ten thousand voices as they sang the words and music of his noble harmony. The incident made "Federal St." more than ever a feature of New England history. Oliver died in 1885. "MY GOD, HOW ENDLESS IS THY LOVE." The spirited tune to this hymn of Watts, by Frederick Lampe, variously named "Kent" and "Devonshire," historically reaches back so near to the poet's time that it must have been one of the earliest expressions of his fervent words. Johan Friedrich Lampe, born 1693, in Saxony, was educated in music at Helmstadt, and came to England in 1725 as a band musician and composer to Covent Garden Theater. His best-known secular piece is the music written to Henry Carey's burlesque, "The Dragon of Wantley." Mrs. Rich, wife of the lessee of the theater, was converted under the preaching of the Methodists, and after her husband's death her house became the home of Lampe and his wife, where Charles Wesley often met him. The influence of Wesley won him to more serious work, and he became one of the evangelist's helpers, supplying tunes to his singing campaigns. Wesley became attached to him, and after his death--in Edinburgh, 1752--commemorated the musician in a funeral hymn. In popular favor Bradbury's tune of "Rolland" has now superseded the old music sung to Watts' lines--