IV. Jehovah, is our Head, and we We'll have none else, till Time is done; V. As we march down the stream of Time, East, West, North, South, on sea and land, VI. Be every part, to each, most dear; VII. Stand in thy strong integrity, The North and South united be With East and West, join heart and hand, By our good Union firm to stand. Our President, elected be, By people's voice, plurality; And the Vice-President the same; The highest offices of fame. VIII. Free governments o'er earth will go; The righteous wise shine as the sun; His kingdom come, o'er men to reign, JONATHAN This hymn is dated from one of the remotest and most primitive of the rural districts of northern New England; and its chirography betrays a hand used to the plough and the hoe, not to the pen. The writer is plainly in a condition in life which in any other country would limit his knowledge to the delving of the few acres on which he lived. But rustic and unlettered as he is, what knowledge and intelligent comprehension his verses exhibit of the structure and the main principles of our government! How many statesmen and journalists abroad, undertaking to enlighten their colleagues or their readers on American affairs, do not speak five minutes, or write five sentences, without committing blunders which this unpretending rustic would at once discover and correct. Nor is his "hymn" or himself at all peculiar in this. Many of those received from various similar quarters showed a like knowledge and apprehension; each one of these, too, being the production of a man who in this regard was but one of hundreds and thousands of his neighbors. For we must remember that thought and knowledge are not to be measured by the power to put them into rhyme. True, these men are better farmers and blacksmiths than poets. But there is need that they should be. Said Prince Napoleon, when he was told that a Lieutenant-Colonel, whom he saw at one of our volunteer camps, had been an epicier, "I cannot but see that a French Lieutenant-Colonel would be a better officer; but what I most think of is, how different a man in France the epicier would be." The writer of this "Hymn," if he be not himself a type of the men who have made this country what it is, where slavery has not blighted it, has embodied in his verses the spirit and the principles which have animated those men, the very rudest and humblest of them, and enabled them to build up in the wilderness States, independent, self-sustaining, with as intelligent a purpose as that which they brought to the reclaiming of their fields and the raising of their log-houses. A statesman or a publicist trained in the schools and practised in politics, would set forth his theory of a state in which the best ends of government should be attained in language very different from that of this rustic hymn-writer. But, is there one, even among the best and wisest, who would not be obliged to confess that he could neither add to nor take from the plan in any important point? We are so familiar with this knowledge and with its diffusion that we take its presence, in any quarter and under all circumstances, as a matter of course. But if we will think of it, we shall see that in the comprehensiveness and exactness of its setting forth of the essential features of our governmental structure, this is a very remarkable production. The reader has smiled at the quaint rudeness of the verses; but if he should read them again, I am in error if he do not smile also in a kind of admiration at the dexterity with which the writer has worked sound political and moral truth into them. Such men as this are worth more to a nation than colonels and poets. Such compositions, coming from such men, though falling short, or shooting wide of a national hymn, show that there is an unuttered hymn ever sounding in the breast of this nation, to embody which would task the powers of the mightiest poet that has ever sung. 3 VIII. With the hymns sent to the committee, and after them, came many communications, some of a few lines and others of pages in length. With exceedingly rare exceptions, however, they were of interest only to the writers. Of those exceptions the following letter from "a lone female " is one of the most noticeable. It will be observed that publication is not only permitted but enjoined by the writer. I have, however, taken the liberty of suppressing her name and address. The letter has little to do with national hymns; but it is a most characteristic production. It is a genuine handful of the soil whence sprout Bloomers and Woman's Rights Conventions. CONN., May, 1861. Maunsell B Field and others of the National Hymn Committee New York City God the Father and Creator of all things has Caused Me to See a Notice in the N York Tribune that you |