Jesus, the very thought of you

From the singular of a contemporary song, the book moves back again to a translation of medieval Lat, framed in the plural but with the same devotional fervour. Edward Caswall’s version of this 12th-c text comes from the same source as 337 and 731; see notes. This is probably the paraphrased selection most in current use, having arrived in his Lyra Catholica of 1849. He added to it later, in all putting 46 of the Lat stzs into 50 English ones. The commonly-used version in A&M (from 1861) is closer to his original than, for example, 731, although the Lat singular pronouns are made plural by most editors as in stz 5 here. A&M prints Jesu, the very thought and O Jesu, King most wonderful as parts 1 and 2 of the same hymn, while many other books treat them as separate items. The Jubilate version adopted for stzs 1–3 involves changing ‘thee/see’ to ‘you/view’ in stz 1, the 2nd line formerly being ‘with sweetness fills the breast.’ Stz 2 was ‘No voice can sing, no heart can frame,/ nor can the memory find/ … the Saviour of mankind’; stz 3, ‘O hope of every … / O joy … / To those who fall [‘ask’ in A&M, Lat ‘quaerentibus’], how kind thou art …’ The 4th stz is unchanged from Caswall, and the last alters only ‘Jesu, our only joy be thou’ and ‘in thee’ (line 3). GH puts 1 Peter 2:7 at the head of the hymn. Earlier attribution of the original to Bernard of Clairvaux is now thought to be unlikely or at best unsupported.

The alternative tune, Dykes’ ST AGNES (657) is in common use, but William H Harris’s SENNEN COVE was composed for the 1950 A&M where it was set to How bright those glorious spirits shine. An older tune is called SENNEN; Sennen Cove is close to the western extremity of Cornwall, just N of Land’s End.

b Yateley, Hants 1814, d Edgbaston (nr Birmingham), Warwicks 1878. 4th son of the Vicar of Yateley; Chigwell Grammar Sch, Essex; Marlborough Coll, Wilts; Brasenose Coll Oxford (BA 1836, MA). As a student he issued a witty academic pamphlet ‘after the fashion of Aristotle’. He was ordained (CofE) in 1838; served in the parishes of Bishop’s Norton nr Gloucester; Milverton nr Warwick; and from 1840 at Stratford-sub-Castle, nr Salisbury. But in 1846, in his early 30s, he resigned his living, and a few months later became a Roman Catholic, Jan 1847. From then on his work of translating Lat hymns, already well advanced, gathered momentum; he published nearly 200 in Lyra Catholica (etc) in 1848, and ten years later The Masque of Mary and other poems. Other books of verse and drama followed. Widowed in 1849, he moved to J H Newman’s ‘Oratory’ in Birmingham, where in 1852 he was ordained as an RC. He remained there for the rest of his life; his collected hymns and poems were published posthumously, with a biographical preface, in 1908. He became one of those Roman converts of whom Ellerton, possibly a little biased, judged that ‘it can scarcely be said that they contributed much to the strength of the church of their adoption’. Of the 250 English hymn texts in The Westminster Hymnal of 1912, more than 50 are by Caswall, mostly translations. He is often the best-represented RC author in protestant hymn-books (5 in CH2004, 12 in The BBC Hymn Book of 1951, 9 in the 1965 Anglican Hymn Book and 13 in Common Praise 2000). As a Victorian hymntranslator he has been praised for the ‘great spirit and facility’ of his work; he ranks second only to the masterly and generally more accurate J M Neale, qv. Nos.217, 337, 347, 376, 421, 741.