THE STORV OF THE HYMNS AND THEIR WRITERS 65
and design it to be chanted ? Again, the great length of the canons renders them unsuitable for our churches as wholes. Is it better simply to form centos of the more beautiful passages ? Or can separate odes, each necessarily imperfect, be employed as separate hymns ? How Dr. Neale triumphed over all diffi culties every modern hymn-book shows. Archbishop Trench paid high tribute to the research which he had lavished in bringing out these unknown treasures and the skill with which his versions overcome the almost insuperable difficulties which many of them present to the translator. Neale was a discoverer and scientist to whom we owe an untold debt as the interpreter of the praise-literature of the early and mediaeval Church.
Dr. Neale felt that he was working for the whole Church. He said in the preface to his Hymns on the Joys and Glories of Paradise, 1866, Any compiler of a future hymnal is perfectly welcome to make use of anything contained in this little book. And I am very glad to have this opportunity of saying how strongly I feel that a hymn, whether original or translated, ought, the moment it be published, to become the common property of Christendom, the author retaining no private right in it whatever. I suppose that no one ever sent forth a hymn without some faint hope that he might be casting his two mites into that treasury of the Church, into which the " many that were rich " Ambrose and Hildebert, and Adam and Bernard of Cluny, and St. Bernard ; yes, and Santeiiil and Coffin " cast in much." But having so cast it in, is not the claiming a vested interest in it something like " keeping back part of the price of the land"?
Hymn 28. Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty! REGINALD HEBER, D.D.
For Trinity Sunday. It appeared in his posthumous hymns, 1827, but is found a year earlier in a Banbury Supplement to Psalms and Hymns. It is a paraphrase of Rev. iv. 8-ir. This majestic anthem is the flower of his hymns.
Bishop Welldon told Mr. Stead that in his judgement this was the finest hymn ever written, considering the abstract, difficult nature of its theme, its perfect spirituality, and the devotion and purity of its language. The late Poet Laureate Tennyson once told Bishop Welldon he thought so also.
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