Beethoven--the master spirit of his age-- Has passed away to his eternal rest, His name belongs to history's page, Enrolled with men the noblest and the best.
We to whom it was not given to view His living lineaments with wond'ring eye, May in his tones behold him pictured true In breathing colours that can never die.
For he could paint in tones of magic force The moody passions of the varying soul; Now winding round the heart with playful course; Now storming all the breast with wild control.
Forthdrawing from his unexhausted store, 'Twas his to bid the burden'd heart o'erflow, Infusing joys it never knew before, And melting it with soft luxuriant woe!
He liveth! It is wrong to say he's dead-- The sun, tho' smoking in the fading west, Again shall issue from his morning bed, Like a young giant vigorous from his rest.
He lives! for that is truly living when Our fame is a bequest from mind to mind, His life is in the breathing hearts of men, Transmitted to the latest of his kind.
The earliest copy of the tune, as far as is known, stands in a Genevan edition of a portion of the English Psalter, preserved as an article of rare value in the library of St. Paul's Cathedral. The date of the Psalter is 1561. The tune is therein given to Sternhold's version of the Hundredth Psalm.
This fairly settles the _vexata questio_ as to the authorship of the tune. There is no evidence that it originated with Luther, to whom it is generally attributed--but there is evidence that it did originate with Franc, of Geneva; and the only claim to originality is grounded on the discovery of the sources from whence Franc derived the phrases of the tune. Those phrases are so palpably Gregorian, that Franc's construction of the tune can be regarded only a fragmentary compilation.
Considered, then, as Gregorian in its texture, "The Old Hundredth" is, indeed, very old, much older than is commonly imagined. Its several strains had been sung by Christian voices not only one thousand years before Luther was born, but for centuries before the Papal system was developed. Viewed in this light, the old tune assumes a new interest, and its antique tones vibrate with freshened impulse.
In 1699 and the following years many schools were established under the agency of the Christian Knowledge Society, in and about the metropolis; and, in the year 1704, when the first meeting of the children educated in these charity schools took place, in St. Andrew's Church, Holborn, the number of children present amounted to no less than two thousand!