With hearts in love abounding

‘Ride forth singing!’ said King Alfred the Great in the late 9th cent. With this Psalm, entitled ‘A love song’ and clearly written for a royal wedding, we reach another unique item in the Hebrew repertoire which needs some interpretation for its continued use in Christian worship. It has been called colourful, dazzling, oriental, exotic—even profane or barbaric! The NT (Heb 1) sees it as clearly Messianic, and so it has been taken by many versifiers from Watts onwards: ‘Now be my heart inspired to sing/ the glories of my Saviour-King/ Jesus the Lord! How heavenly fair/ his form! how bright his beauties are!’ John Ryland’s Let us sing the King Messiah includes ‘Gird thy sword on, mighty Hero!/ make the word of truth thy car’; less happily, Doddridge had ‘With conscious worth/ all clad in arms/ all bright in charms/ he sallies forth’, while Kelly contributed Jesus, immortal King, go on, and Joseph Irons, Warm with love my heart’s inditing. Henriette Auber’s version chosen here appeared in her The Spirit of the Psalms (1829). A more recent approach to the opening verses is found at 494, while the Wesleyan treatment, invariably shortened, appears at 734; vv6–7 are clearly seen in their Hebrews context at 322, and v4 more famously in 408. This text has been brought into ‘you’ form, with other small changes including ‘shafts’ for ‘darts’ (2.7), ‘worked’ for ‘wrought’ (3.8), and ‘Let every tribe and nation’ for ‘And let each Gentile nation’ (4.1). George Webb composed MORNING LIGHT on a voyage from England to America, and it appeared first in The Odeon: a Collection of Secular Melodies published in Boston, Mass, by him and Lowell Mason in 1837, set to ’Tis dawn, the lark is singing. A mere 5 years later it became a hymn tune for Samuel Smith’s The morning light is breaking in Scudder’s The Wesleyan Psalmist, but from Wm Bradbury’s Golden Chain (1861) onwards it has usually been set to Stand up, stand up for Jesus. Other names for the tune include GOODWIN (until 1850), WEBB (in America), and STAND UP.

(often ‘Harriet’ in error), b Spitalfields, Middx (E London) 1773, d Hoddesdon, Herts 1862. She was a descendant of Huguenot refugees from the revoked Edict of Nantes (1685), many of whom settled in Spitalfields; her father became Rector of Tring. Later she moved to Broxbourne (Herts) and then Hoddesdon, living a apparently uneventful life, latterly with her friend Mary Jane Mackenzie (‘two saintly ladies’—K L Parry). Her best-known writing was The Spirit of the Psalms; or, a Compressed Version of the Psalms of David, 1829 (see also the notes to H F Lyte). This included verses by others but consisted mostly of her own paraphrases aimed at recapturing the poetic quality of the Pss in English metre, moving on in the tradition of Isaac Watts. Writing in Julian in an extensive feature on ‘Psalters, English’, H Leigh Bennett says that ‘She uses evangelical interpretation freely. Several renderings are full of gentle [verbal] melody.’
Spurgeon included some 20 of her versions at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, in Our Own Hymn Book (1866). Nos.45, 526.