For the beauty of the earth

This hymn has proved useful for many of the occasions also served by 204, but has raised a different kind of controversy leading to much textual variation. Folliott Pierpoint wrote it after a springtime view from the hills above Bath, possibly in the 1850s, had lifted his heart at the beauty of what he saw and well beyond it. But he intended it as a communion hymn, as is clear from the full 8-stz version and from its first appearance in Lyra Eucharistica, the 1864 edn of Orby Shipley’s high-Anglican collection. It is headed ‘The Sacrifice of Praise’, and its refrain reflects the author’s view of the sacrament as precisely and pre-eminently that. Evangelical Anglicans have consequently preferred to substitute ‘grateful hymn’ for ‘sacrifice’; liberal ones prefer ‘Lord of all’ to ‘Christ our God’. Free Church books, less threatened by alien concepts of ‘eucharistic sacrifice’, have often been content to retain the original refrain (as here) while omitting stzs about the Bride of Christ offering up ‘her pure sacrifice of love’, and so on. The ‘sacrifice of praise’ seems sufficiently justified by Hebrews 13:15, innocent as this is of 19th-c Anglo-catholicism. With pardonable exaggeration, one scholar says that ‘Practically every hymnal has a different version of the refrain’. The author was not unaware of the arguments on all sides. Other changes in Praise!, some already seen elsewhere, include ‘mind’ for ‘brain’ and ‘secret’ for ‘mystic’ in stz 3; a now familiar 4.4 to replace ‘for all gentle thoughts and mild’; and in stz 5 a gentle (?) rewrite following that in HTC.

The tune ENGLAND’S LANE (67) became a ‘natural’ partner from 1906 onwards; NORICUM (25) is named here as an alternative. But the first printed choice is Robert Jackson’s lesser-known ASHBURTON (also in HTC), named after the Devonshire town near Newton Abbot. The composer was a nearcontemporary of the author.

b Spa Villa, Bath (Som) 1835; d Newport, Monmouthshire 1917. Bath Grammar Sch and Queen’s Coll Cambridge (BA in classics 1857, MA). For a short time he was Classics master at Somersetshire Coll, and then moved several times but lived chiefly at Babbacombe, Devon, in modest circumstances with occasional teaching jobs, being described as ‘a man of letters’. He published 3 books of verse, including The Chalice of Nature and other Poems, collected in one volume in 1878. He contributed hymns to at least 3 collections including The Hymnal Noted (1852) and The Churchman’s Companion, and is now best known for the one which has proved enduringly popular, in its varied forms. No.206.