By Thomas Moore--about 1814. The poem in its original form differed
somewhat from the hymn we sing. Thomas Hastings--whose religious
experience, perhaps, made him better qualified than Thomas Moore for
spiritual expression--changed the second line,--

Come, at God's altar fervently kneel,

--to--

Come to the mercy seat,

--and in the second stanza replaced--

Hope when all others die,

--with--

Hope of the penitent;

--and for practically the whole of the last stanza--

Go ask the infidel what boon he brings us,
What charm for aching hearts he can reveal.
Sweet as that heavenly promise hope sings us,
"Earth has no sorrow that heaven cannot heal,"

--Hastings substituted--

Here see the Bread of life, see waters flowing
Forth from the throne of God, pure from above!
Come to the feast Love, come ever knowing
Earth has no sorrow but heaven can remove.

Dr. Hastings was not much of a poet, but he could make a _singable_
hymn, and he knew the rhythm and accent needed in a hymn-tune. The
determination was to make an evangelical hymn of a poem "too good to
lose," and in that view perhaps the editorial liberties taken with it
were excusable. It was to Moore, however, that the real hymn-thought and
key-note first came, and the title-line and the sweet refrain are his
own--for which the Christian world has thanked him, lo these many
years.

_THE TUNE._

Those who question why Dr. Hastings' interest in Moore's poem did not
cause him to make a tune for it, must conclude that it came to him with
its permanent melody ready made, and that the tune satisfied him.

The "German Air" to which Moore tells us he wrote the words, probably
took his fancy, if it did not induce his mood. Whether Samuel Webbe's
tune now wedded to the hymn is an arrangement of the old air or wholly
his own is immaterial. One can scarcely conceive a happier yoking of
counterparts. Try singing "Come ye Disconsolate" to "Rescue the
Perishing," for example, and we shall feel the impertinence of divorcing
a hymn that has found its musical affinity.

"JESUS, I MY CROSS HAVE TAKEN."

This is another well-known and characteristic hymn of Henry Francis
Lyte--originally six stanzas. We have been told that, besides his bodily
affliction, the grief of an unhappy division or difference in his church
weighed upon his spirit, and that it is alluded to in these lines--

Man may trouble and dis