And they reverenced their poor
halting tunes in a way quite beyond our modern power of fathoming. Whenever
a Puritan, even in road or field, heard at a distance the sound of a
psalm-tune, though the sacred words might be quite undistinguishable, he
doffed his hat and bowed his head in the true presence of God. We fain must
believe, as Arthur Hugh Clough says,--
"There is some great truth, partial, very likely, but needful, Lodged,
I am strangely sure, in the tones of an English psalm-tune."
Judge Sewall often writes with tender and simple pathos of his being moved
to tears by the singing,--sometimes by the music, sometimes by the words.
"The song of the 5th Revelation was sung. I was ready to burst into tears
at the words, _bought with thy blood_." He also, with a vehemence of
language most unusual in him and which showed his deep feeling, wrote that
he had an intense passion for music. And yet, the only tunes he or any of
his fellow-colonists knew were the simple ones called Oxford, Litchfield,
Low Dutch, York, Windsor, Cambridge, St. David's and Martyrs.
About the year 1714 Rev. John Tufts, of Newbury, who had previously
prepared "A very Plain and Easy Introduction to the Art of Singing
Psalm-tunes," issued a collection of tunes in three parts. These
thirty-seven tunes, all of which but one were in common metre, were bound
often with "The Bay Psalm-Book.
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