Sarnia Collegiate Institute and Technical School - Collegiate Yearbook (Sarnia, Ontario Canada)

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96 THE COLLEGIIATE mortal hymn XYhile shepherds watched their Hocks by night . He liived in an age when it was not considered disgraceful to drink, and he was a drunkard. Frances .lan Crosby, a very noble woman, lost her sight as a baby and never regained it. She received her education at a school for the blind, and devoted her life to malaing others good and happy. She wrote Over three thousand hymns. of which one, Safe in the arms of Jesus' is sung everywhere. To ,Phillips l-Brooks, Protestant Episcopal Bishop of Massa- chusetts, the world owes a favorite Christmas hymn: O Little Town of llethlehemf' Bishop Brooks was a celebrated preacher and an independent thinker. lle died in Boston in 1893. Yery few men receive such affection- ate tributes as are paid to Henry Frances Lyte. an English clergyman who has laid in his tomb at Nice since 1847. Among the hymns that Lyte wrote was Abide with me. lle wrote it on the nlight that he preached his last sermon, thinking not of that one night's repose, but of his eternal rest. Now we sing it at the close of evening service in churches all over the world. Over a period of hundreds of years, the works of these composers have accumulated and been compiled to form our present day hymn books. How few of us realize the number of people who contributed to them. Surely they have played a large part in the growth of the Church through the centuries. 1 Q2 lex Q ,ti 1 ' .... - SCHOOL BAND Top Row tleft to rightl-J. Cramrford, D. Eyre M. 'Wilson, K. Sutton, XV. Marshall, Doug. Shanks, G. Gander, R. Dailey, I. lViclner, F. Dagg. Middle ROW tleft to rightl-Mr. Brush tConductOrl, B. Van Alstyne, D. Park, A. Milner. D. Lewis, R. Allen, R. Geere, A. Mustard, Don Shanks. Bottom Row lleft to riehtl-G. Barnes. S. Shanks, H. Hellfwell, B. Barry, T. Kenny, R. Treitz, L. Dennis.

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THE COLLEGIATE 95 ' 0? Q X .fi 1 X X 3' o I J - f EDITORS-Pauline W1'ay, Bill Wilkinson THE WRITERS OF THE HYMNS HAT is a hymn? The word comes from the Greek word hymnos, which means song, generally a song of praise. And that is what a hymn is or should be to-day - a song of praise and thanksgiving. The writers of hymns are very important peoplet in the his- tory of the world. Many of them are more intluential than they ever dreamed. One of our grand old hymns: Let us with a gladsome mind, Praise the Lord, for He is kind. was written by a boyl lt was written by John Milton, the great poet, when he was only fifteen, studying at St. Paul's School. The -lews sang hymns before Christ was born, and we still sing hymns written in Greek or Latin by the saints. The hymn beginning O 'lr:s.u, Lord of heavenly grace, was written by1 St. Ambrose, who lived his noble life fifteen centuries ago. A more famous hymn, The day is past and over, is a translation from the Greek, in which it was written centuries ago by St. Anatoluis. Martin Luther was a very great hynm maker. A mighty fortress is our God is one of his best known hymns. People wandered all over Europe singing them as they went. They were carried into the castle of the noble and into the cottage of the peasant. XYe also owe a great debt for our hymns to the XYesley brothers. John XYesley wrote some hymns, but Charles XVesley, his brother and disciple, wrote about sixty-live hundred hymns. No other man ever had such a record. Oi course they were not all high-class poetry, but some of them are still among the noblest verses in the hymn-book. Dr. Isaac XYatts wrote over live hundred hymns, among them such treasures as O God, our help in ages past and jesus shall reign where'er the sunu. . The authors of some of the linest poems in the English language are unknown, for we have many fine hymns that cannot be traced to their writers. lYe have some written as they first appeared in English: we have some from unknown German and ltalian authors, and nearly fifty from unknown Latin authors. Adeste Fideles or Come, all ye faithful'. is one of the most famous of those translated 'from Latin. But of the man who lirst conceived those grand old words we know nothing. On the other hand, we know rather too much about Nakum Tate, the author of the im-

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THE COLLEGIATE 97 THE DEAF COMPOSER ECALL for a moment the great musical composer. Haydn. lYhen Haydn was dying in Yienna, in ISOQ, the French were bom- barding the town. Haydn's servants were terrified, but he took it all very calmly. He asked to be lifted from his bed to the piano' and when he was seated, he played his own Austrian Hymn three times over, while 'the guns were pounding outside. Now at that very moment, there was another composer in Vienna, crouching in a cellar, with cotton-wool stutfed in his ears. This composer was Beethoven. His hearing was beginning to go and he was afraid that the sound of the explosives would still further endanger it. Think of a musician being deaf! You might as well think of a painter being blind! Yet Beethoven, in some respects the greatest composer that ever lived, be- came almost totally deaf. The inliiction embittered all his later years, and turned an originally lovable man into a kind of surly bear. Beethoven, like Handel, did not marry. He would throw the soup in his housekeeper's eyes when it did not please him, and stamp and rage and howl over the most trivial annoyances. Let us be charitable to him when we- read these things. But Beethoven with his deafness, had a very hard life. Born in I77O, at Bonn, a pretty little university town on the Rhine, where they have pre- served his birthplace just as it was, he had to work his way up in a home directed by a father who was a habitual drunkard. The father, who was musical had heard something about the triumphs of the Mozart children in Vienna, Paris and London, and he thought he would make some money out of his own Ludwig. So he set him to work at the piano, and visitors would often see the child late at night shedding tears over the keytboard. XYhen he was about seventeen he went to Vienna, where, it is said Mozart gave him some lessons in composition, A few years later he went again to Yi- enna to study, and made his home in that city the rest of his life. lVhen Mozart tirst heard him play he exclaimed: Pay attention to this youngster, for he will yet make a noise in the world. XYel know how true that prophecy was. Beethoven's works for the Piano, particularly his Sonatas. are the grandest things of their kind ever written. Take away Beethoven's nine symphonies-the immortal nine, as they are sometimes called-and we would take away the very backbone of music. He did not write very much for the voice, for he was essentia.lly an instrumenta'l composer. but he left one beautiful song, Adelaide, and one great opera, Fedelio. He passed away in March, 1837, at the age of 57, and Vienna never before saw such a funeral as his, the crowds being so immense that the soldiers had to be called out to clear a passage lfor the magnificent procession. NNY: Marion Schell: Hey, Bet, what is a military objective? Bet Buchanan: lValk by the boys on that corner and you'll hnd out. Xflfrlsils l-'le had just stolen a hurried kiss. M. L. XVadham frather disgustedlyl: Don't you know any better than that? Dean Hawley: Sure, but they take more time.