To you, O Lord, our hearts we raise

William Dix’s harvest hymn enjoyed a generous ‘top 6’ ranking for the season through much of the 20th cent. Its beginnings were local; written in 1863, it was one of his Hymns for the Service of the Church (in an appendix) compiled for St Raphael’s Bristol in 1864, entering Church Hymns with Tunes 10 years later, A&M in 1904, and then very many other books. It presents another small crux for editors; do we accept its Victorian mode as a period piece, reject it as having too blinkered or even escapist a view of God’s world, or attempt some surgery in order to extend its useful life? Michael Perry believed in the third option, and it was his draft, notably of a new stz 3 (replacing ‘We bear the burden of the day [do we?] … / May we, the angelreaping o’er …) which was broadly accepted by the HTC words group and became the Jubilate version. It is used here except for the final stz; the 2nd halves of stzs 1 and 2 are reversed, ‘earthly bread’ becomes ‘daily …’, and ‘what gifts of grace supernal/ give us the Bread eternal’ is replaced with 2.6,8. 2.2–3 had ‘thy bounteous hand confess,/ upon thine altar …’ The ‘Perry’ stz 3 is an attempt to widen our perspective, which he extended in part to the 4th. Dix concluded (4.1,5,7) with ‘O blessèd … / the strains of … / thrice blessèd …’ The complete revision, whether in HTC or Praise! form, may seem radical; but those who find it unacceptably so are often those who are most critical of the original.

Arthur Sullivan, editor of Church Hymns, paired his characteristic tune GOLDEN SHEAVES with these words in 1874. As it happens, the phrase ‘golden sheaves’ was a casualty of the omitted stz 3.

b Bristol 1837, d Cheddar, Axbridge, Som 1898. He was named after the young poetic genius Thos Chatterton, whose tragically brief life had been chronicled by WCD’s father; Wm J Dix was a high church Bristol surgeon who nevertheless wrote a vivid and appreciative account of the preaching of Thos Binney (qv). William junr attended Bristol Grammar Sch; trained for a mercantile career and he became manager of a marine insurance company in Glasgow. He also wrote some very competent verse, marked by the high Anglicanism of his adult convictions. Among his published collections were Hymns of Love and Joy (1861), Altar Songs; verses on the Holy Eucharist (1867), Vision of All Saints (1871) and Seekers of a City (1878). He published two other devotional works and a children’s book on the life and example of Christ, and put into metrical form the prose translations of Gk and Abyssinian (Ethiopian) hymns made respectively by Richard Littledale and Rodwell. Many late-19th-c Anglocatholic books such as Lyra Eucharistica included his hymns; 5 of them were in EH and in the 1950 A&M. Two of his most popular have each been titled ‘The manger throne’: Like silver lamps in a distant shrine, and What child is this who, laid to rest, the latter written for and set to GREENSLEEVES. Both appeared in Christmas Carols New and Old (ed Bramley and Stainer, 1871) and many other collections since then. Nos.386, 918.