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Sung and recited from memory at all manner of public and private occasions , hymns permeated nineteenth-century thought, private writings, and conversation. Americans interpreted and expressed their experiences in terms of a hymnic language at once authoritative and familiar.The expressive power of that language is articulated in a letter that Ann Hasseltine Judson wrote in 1823 to her missionary husband in Burma: “Your last letter lies before me, and Winchell’s Collection [of Psalms and hymns also; open at the hymn ‘Blest be the tie that binds.’] Not that I cannot repeat it without the book, but I wish to refresh myself with a view of the very words. How exactly suited to our case! How it describes the manner in which we have lived together, . . . the pain which we feel in being parted, and the glorious hopes and prospects before us!”1 Judson’s respect for “the very words” on the page re®ects the unexamined ideal of the hymn as an authoritative, permanent text: it was “true” to Christian experience and therefore seemed timeless, ¤xed like verses from the King James Bible. Accordingly, phrases from hymns were engraved on believers’ tombstones. Yet anyone who read hymnbooks carefully or listened to hymn singing would notice that hymn texts were not actually ¤xed in the sense of being unchangeable. Hymnologists de¤ned the genuine hymn as “true”—scriptural, doctrinally sound, and based in Christian experience. Clergymen and other commentators who reviewed hymnbooks and sought to in®uence editors’ work identi-¤ed additional criteria for the hymn suitable for congregational performance. It must be “singable”; commentators therefore advocated formal regularity; pleasing, preferably exact rhyme; rhythmic ®uency; “re¤nement of poetic taste”; and freedom from irreverent associations.2 Many writers asserted that a hymn should not be conspicuously or merely didactic. (There must be no dogmatic “pills of doggerel,”stipulated one clergyman.)3 Yet reviewers would 4 Textual Editing and the “Making” of Hymns in Nineteenth-Century America Mary De Jong praise hymnals that possessed “doctrinal wealth”and censure books “without doctrine.”4 The Second Great Awakening of 1790–1835 kindled interest in evangelical hymnody.5 Hymnbooks offering to rejuvenate congregational singing proliferated by midcentury in such numbers that many reviewers remarked on their number and the competition among them.6 Selecting promising lyrics from other hymnbooks and periodicals, and soliciting new hymns from devout poets, editors proceeded to make the hymns they wanted by changing words and phrases, recasting and deleting entire stanzas, and occasionally inserting new ones. They also accepted texts that had been made by previous editors, often because they were unable or unwilling to locate the poets’ original lyrics. The century was well advanced before accurate attributions and authentic texts even of some well-known hymns were established. Most nineteenth-century editors did not mark even texts they had substantially revised as “alt.” In 1850 at least two secular periodicals reported an incident that illustrates both the common conviction that there is just one authentic text of a favorite hymn and the reality of editorial alteration. Eminent clergyman George Washington Bethune, himself a hymnist, became incensed while giving out “There is a fountain ¤lled with blood” in Boston’s Park Street (Congregational ) Church. At the ¤fth stanza he “rather suddenly” stopped reading and “startled” the audience by declaring, “This last stanza is not as Cowper wrote it! As he wrote it, it runs thus.” Laying down the hymnal, Bethune recited the hymn he knew by heart. “I should like to know,” he continued, “who has had the audacity to alter Cowper’s poetry! The choir will sing only the ¤rst four stanzas of the hymn.”7 Ironically, the gentleman himself was altering a printed text on the spot, as many eighteenth-century clergymen and song leaders had done. Isaac Watts (1674–1748) stated in the preface to his Hymns and Spiritual Songs (2nd ed., 1709) that persons in charge of singing were free to alter his texts as they saw ¤t.8 Nevertheless, the idea of the text as ¤xed became ingrained over time. By the early nineteenth century, Watts’s own paraphrases of the Psalms and his original hymns had near-biblical authority for many American evangelicals, especially in churches with Calvinist roots.9 John Wesley (1703–1791) contributed to the idea of a ¤xed text by directing future hymnbook makers not to alter the lyrics in his Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People Called Methodists (1780).10 British hymnist James Montgomery (1771...

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