Hymns by Horatius Bonar. Selected and arranged by his son, H.N.Bonar. Henry Frowde, London &c. 1904
[ Transcript of (parts of) the Introduction to this book, from a copy in the Elias Library, Westminster College, Cambridge]
Horatius Bonar was born on December 19, 1808, in Edinburgh, and, like his brothers, was educated at the High School and University of that city. He had not a mathematical turn of mind, but early in life showed a great liking for English literature and the ancient classics. At school he was fortunate enough to be under masters who grounded him thoroughly in these latter subjects. The only relic of his school-work which I possess is a wonderfully accurate prose translation of the Philoctetes of Sophocles, written by him in his thirteenth year. It is impossible to tell when he first began to write verse, but some pieces of his have been preserved in a Students' Magazine, The College Observer, of which he seems to have been one of the editors. The first of these poems appeared in November 1827, at which date the writer was not quite nineteen years of age. The titles of a few of these may give some indication of their nature: `All that's Bright . . .
[ transcription incomplete ] . . .
(p. xiv)
. . . down in one or other of his many notebooks stray poetical ideas of his own, suggestions for verses, and there and there a hymn or a poem, though years passed before any of them were published. Most of these notebooks are in my possession: as I write now I have seven or eight of them lying before me. They contain most of the better-known hymns, hastily written down in pencil in his spare moments; they are full of contractions, with an occasional word or phrase in shorthand; sometimes a line is struck out and another substituted, yet in nearly every case the complete hymn, almost as it was afterwards published, can be gleaned from this rough draft. Sometimes on the margin, or in a blank corner of a page, several possible rhymes are written down. Sometimes, again, there are quaint little sketches or profiles of faces, drawn half-unconsciously while the poet's thoughts were busy working out the theme of his hymn.
It is not always easy to ascertain when some of these hymns were written, but I find that three can be placed within a year or two of 1840. I mention them specially, because they were among the first pieces written, not for singing, but because the writer had now found that he could speak his message in verse quite as clearly and profitably as in prose. These hymns are not very well known, but they may be of interest as showing how it was that my father was led on towards poetry when he had as yet published nothing but prose. The hymns are:
`The Son of God, in mighty love,'
of which there are two or three manuscript versions;
`That clime is not like this dull clime of ours';
and
`I thought upon my sins, and I was sad.'
Then followed the Disruption in 1843, during which year the busy man's life and thoughts were occupied with matters which demanded action rather than contemplation, and I am not able to say with certainty that any hymn was written about this time. But my father began to find that a few of his first hymns had crept into religious periodicals, and had thus reached people outside his own circle, and indeed outside his own country; and this fact showed him that others were being helped by his poetry, and made him turn his thoughts more seriously to this part of his work.
In 1845 he published a neatly-bound little collection of three hundred hymns by various authors, called The Bible Hymn-Book. Some sixteen or seventeen of his own pieces were included in it, but the authorship of none of them (or indeed of any in the book) was indicated; and no name appeared on the title-page or in the preface, which merely stated very briefly that the volume was `designed both for general use and for Sabbath-schools.' Among the hymns now associated with the name of Bonar which appeared in print for the first time were:
`This is not my place of resting';`All that I was, my sin, my guilt';
and
`The Church has waited long.'
Somewhere about this time he wrote the very familiar hymn:
`I heard the voice of Jesus say,'
though he did not publish it until several years had passed. In the manuscript book it occupies the next place to `The Church has waityed long.' Though there are several interlineations and alternative readings in rough pencil draft, a study of it shows that before the author laid it aside, the hymn as we now know it was almost complete. The lines which differ are only (1) `The Living Water freely take' instead of `The Living Water, thirsty one,' and (2)
- `Look unto Me, thy day shall break,
- And all thy path be bright,'
instead of
- `Look unto Me, thy morn shall rise,
- and all thy day be bright.'
Once `and' is changed to `my' and `the' into `this', but otherwise the published hymn is the same as the first pencilled version of it. The accompanying facsimile of the page of the notebook will help to explain the remarks.
[ the facsimile, which is poorly reproduced in the printed copy seen, is not included here ]
During the ten years following 1846 many more well-known hymns were written. In one of the notebooks used prior to 1850 I find the manuscript of:
- `Oppressed with noonday's scorching heat,
- To yonder cross I flee';
which, however, in the original version began:
`I come in haste to yonder cross.'
On the next page, written in a bold hand, occurs an idea, to be used at some future time for a hymn. Evidently my father committed it to paper lest the thought should escape him. The two unrhymed lines are of special value and interest, as they are . . . . .
[ transcription incomplete ]
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