One of the t.i.tles which the Roman Catholic world applied to the Mother of Jesus, in the Middle Ages, was "Stella Maris," "Star of the Sea."
Columbus, being a Catholic, sang this hymn, or caused it to be sung, every evening, it is said, during his perilous voyage to an unknown land. The marine epithet by which the Virgin Mary is addressed is admirable as a stroke of poetry, and the hymn--of six stanzas--is a prayer which, though offered to her as to a divine being, was no doubt sincere in the simple sailor hearts of 1492.
The two following quatrains finish the voyagers" pet.i.tion, and point it with a doxology--
Vitam praesta puram, Iter para tutum, Ut videntes Jesum Semper collaetemur.
Sit laus Deo Patri, Summo Christo decus, Spiritui Sancto, Tribus honor unus!
A free translation is--
Guide us safe, unspotted Through life"s long endeavor Till with Thee and Jesus We rejoice forever.
Praise to G.o.d the Father, Son and Spirit be; One and equal honor To the Holy Three.
Inasmuch as this ancient hymn did not attain the height of its popularity and appear in all the breviaries until the 10th century, its a.s.sumed age has been doubted, but its reputed author, Venantius Fortunatus, Bishop of Poitiers, was born about 531, at Treviso, Italy, and died about 609. Though a religious teacher, he was a man of romantic and convivial instincts--a strange compound of priest, poet and _beau chevalier_. Duffield calls him "the last of the cla.s.sics and first of the troubadours," and states that he was the "first of the Christian poets to begin that worship of the Virgin Mary which rose to a pa.s.sion and sank to an idolatry."
_TUNES_
To this ancient rogation poem have been composed by Aiblinger (Johann Caspar), Bavarian, (1779-1867,) by Proch (Heinrich), Austrian, (1809-1878,) by Tadolini (Giovanni), Italian, (1803-1872,) and by many others. The "Ave, Maris Stella" is in constant use in the Romish church, and its English translation by Caswall is a favorite hymn in the _Lyra Catholica_.
"AVE, SANCTISSIMA!"
This beautiful hymn is not introduced here in order of time, but because it seems akin to the foregoing, and born of its faith and traditions--though it sounds rather too fine for a sailor song, on ship or sh.o.r.e. Like the other, the tuneful prayer is the voice of ultramontane piety accustomed to deify Mary, and is ent.i.tled the "Evening Song to the Virgin."
Ave Sanctissima! we lift our souls to Thee Ora pro n.o.bis! "tis nightfall on the sea.
Watch us while shadows lie Far o"er the waters spread; Hear the heart"s lonely sigh; Thine, too, hath bled.
Thou that hast looked on death, Aid us when death is near; Whisper of heaven to faith; Sweet Mother, hear!
Ora pro n.o.bis! the wave must rock our sleep; Ora, Mater, ora! Star of the Deep!
This was first written in four separate quatrains, ""Tis nightfall on the sea" being part of the first instead of the second line, and "We lift our souls," etc., was "Our souls rise to Thee," while the apostrophe at the end read, "Thou Star of the Deep."
The fact of the modern origin of the hymn does not make it less probable that the earlier one of Fortunatus suggested it. It was written by Mrs.
Hemans, and occurs between the forty-third and forty-fourth stanzas of her long poem, "The Forest Sanctuary."
A Spanish Christian who had embraced the Protestant faith fled to America (such is the story of the poem) to escape the cruelties of the Inquisition, and took with him his Catholic wife and his child. During the voyage the wife pined away and died, a martyr to her conjugal loyalty and love. The hymn to the Virgin purports to have been her daily evening song at sea, plaintively remembered by the broken-hearted husband and father in his forest retreat on the American sh.o.r.e with his motherless boy.
The music was composed by a sister of Mrs. Hemans, Mrs. Hughes, who probably arranged the lines as they now stand in the tune.
The song, though its words appear in the _Parochial Hymn-book_, seems to be in use rather as parlor music than as a part of the liturgy.
"JESUS, LOVER OF MY SOUL."
The golden quality of this best-known and loved of Charles Wesley"s hymns is attested by two indors.e.m.e.nts that cannot be impeached; its perennial life, and the blessings of millions who needed it.
Jesus, Lover of my soul Let me to Thy bosom fly, While the billows near me roll, While the tempest still is high.
Hide me, O my Saviour, hide, Till the storm of life is past, Safe into the haven guide, O receive my soul at last!
Wesley is believed to have written it when a young man, and story and legend have been busy with the circ.u.mstances of its birth. The most poetical account alleges that a dove chased by a hawk dashed through his open window into his bosom, and the inspiration to write the line--
Let me to Thy bosom fly,
--was the genesis of the poem. Another report has it that one day Mr.
Wesley, being pursued by infuriated persecutors at Killalee, County Down, Ireland, took refuge in a milk-house on the homestead of the Island Band Farm. When the mob came up the farmer"s wife, Mrs. Jane Lowrie Moore, offered them refreshments and secretly let out the fugitive through a window to the back garden, where he concealed himself under a hedge till his enemies went away. When they had gone he had the hymn in his mind and partly jotted down. This tale is circ.u.mstantial, and came through Mrs. Mary E. Hoover, Jane Moore"s granddaughter, who told it many years ago to her pastor, Dr. William Laurie of Bellefonte, Pa. So careful a narrative deserves all the respect due to a family tradition. Whether this or still another theory of the incidental cause of the wonderful hymn shall have the last word may never be decided nor is it important.
There is "antecedent probability," at least, in the statement that Wesley wrote the first two stanzas soon after his perilous experience in a storm at sea during his return voyage from America to England in 1736.
In a letter dated Oct. 28 of that year, he describes the storm that washed away a large part of the ship"s cargo, strained her seams so that the hardest pumping could not keep pace with the inrushing water, and finally forced the captain to cut the mizzen-mast away. Young Wesley was ill and sorely alarmed, but knew, he says, that he "abode under the shadow of the Almighty," and finally, "in this dreadful moment," he was able to encourage his fellow-pa.s.sengers who were "in an agony of fear,"
and to pray with and for them.
It was his awful hazard and bare escape in that tempest that prompted the following stanzas--
O Thou who didst prepare The ocean"s caverned cell, And teach the gathering waters there To meet and dwell; Toss"d in our reeling bark Upon this briny sea, Thy wondrous ways, O Lord, we mark, And sing to Thee.
Borne on the dark"ning wave, In measured sweep we go, Nor dread th" unfathomable grave, Which yawns below; For He is nigh who trod Amid the foaming spray, Whose billows own"d th" Incarnate G.o.d, And died away.
And naturally the memory of his almost shipwreck on the wild Atlantic colored more or less the visions of his muse, and influenced the metaphors of his verse for years.
The popularity of "Jesus, Lover of my Soul" not only procured it, at home, the name of "England"s song of the sea," but carried it with "the course of Empire" to the West, where it has reigned with "Rock of Ages,"
for more than a hundred and fifty years, joint primate of inspired human songs.
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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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, d.y.k.es, 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 ba.s.s--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]