ALMOST the first decided taste in my life was the love of hymns.
Committing them to memory was as natural to me as breathing.Ifollowed my mother about with the hymn-book ("Watts'and Select"),reading or repeating them to her,while she was busy with her baking or ironing,and she was always a willing listener.She was fond of devotional reading,but had little time for it,and it pleased her to know that so small a child as Ireally cared for the hymns she loved.
I learned most of them at meeting.I was told to listen to the minister;but as I did not understand a word he was saying,Igave it up,and took refuge in the hymn-book,with the conscientious purpose of trying to sit still.I turned the leaves over as noiselessly as possible,to avoid the dreaded reproof of my mother's keen blue eyes;and sometimes I learned two or three hymns in a forenoon or an afternoon.Finding it so easy,Ithought I would begin at the beginning,and learn the whole.
There were about a thousand of them included in the Psalms,the First,Second,and Third Books,and the Select Hymns.But I had learned to read before I had any knowledge of counting up numbers,and so was blissfully ignorant of the magnitude of my undertaking.I did not,I think,change my resolution because there were so many,but because,little as I was,I discovered that there were hymns and hymns.Some of them were so prosy that the words would not stay in my memory at all,so I concluded that I would learn only those I liked.
I had various reasons for my preferences.With some,I was caught by a melodious echo,or a sonorous ring;with others by the hint of a picture,or a story,or by some sacred suggestion that attracted me,I knew not why.Of some I was fond just because Imisunderstood them;and of these I made a free version in my mind,as I murmured them over.One of my first favorites was certainly rather a singular choice for a child of three or four years.I had no idea of its meaning,but made up a little story out of it,with myself as the heroine.It began with the words--"Come,humble sinner,in whose breast A thousand thoughts revolve."The second stanza read thus:--"I'll go to Jesus,though my sin Hath like a mountain rose."I did not know that this last line was bad grammar,but thought that the sin in question was something pretty,that looked "like a mountain rose."Mountains I had never seen;they were a glorious dream to me.And a rose that grew on a mountain must surely be prettier than any of our red wild roses on the hill,sweet as they were.I would pluck that rose,and carry it up the mountain-side into the temple where the King sat,and would give it to Him;and then He would touch me with his sceptre,and let me through into a garden full of flowers.There was no garden in the hymn;I suppose the "rose"made me invent one.But it did read--"I know his courts;I'll enter in,Whatever may oppose;"and so I fancied there would be lions in the way,as there were in the Pilgrim's,at the "House Beautiful";but I should not be afraid of them;they would no doubt be chained.The last verse began with the lines,--"I can but perish if I go:
I am resolved to try:"and my heart beat a brave echo to the words,as I started off in fancy on a "Pilgrim's Progress"of my own,a happy little dreamer,telling nobody the secret of my imaginary journey,taken in sermon-time.
Usually,the hymns for which I cared most suggested Nature in some way,--flowers,trees,skies,and stars.When I repeated,--"There everlasting spring abides,And never-withering flowers,"-I thought of the faintly flushed anemones and white and blue violets,the dear little short-lived children of our shivering spring.They also would surely be found in that heavenly land,blooming on through the cloudless,endless year.And I seemed to smell the spiciness of bay berry and sweet-fern and wild roses and meadow-sweet that grew in fragrant jungles up and down the hillside back of the meeting-house,in another verse which Idearly loved:--"The hill of Zion yields A thousand sacred sweet,Before we reach the heavenly fields,Or walk the golden streets."We were allowed to take a little nosegay to meeting sometimes:a pink or two (pinks were pink then,not red,nor white,nor even double)and a sprig of camomile;and their blended perfume still seems to be a part of the June Sabbath mornings long passed away.
When the choir sang of "Seas of heavenly rest,"a breath of salt wind came in with the words through the open door,from the sheltered waters of the bay,so softly blue and so lovely,I always wondered how a world could be beautiful where "there was no more sea."I concluded that the hymn and the text could not really contradict other;that there must be something like the sea in heaven,after all.One stanza that I used to croon over,gave me the feeling of being rocked in a boat on a strange and beautiful ocean,from whose far-off shores the sunrise beckoned:--"At anchor laid,remote from home,Toiling I cry,Sweet Spirit,come!
Celestial breeze,no longer stay!
But spread my sails,and speed my way!"
Some of the chosen hymns of my infancy the world recognizes among its noblest treasures of sacred song.That one of Doddridge's,beginning with "Ye golden lamps of heaven,farewell!"made me feel as if I had just been gazing in at some window of the "many mansions"above:--"Ye stars are but the shining dust Of my divine abode-"Had I not known that,ever since I was a baby?But the light does not stream down even into a baby s soul with equal brightness all the time.Earth draws her dark curtains too soon over the windows of heaven,and the little children fall asleep in her dim rooms,and forget their visions.
That majestic hymn of Cowper's,--
"God moves in a mysterious way,"
