And still my soul in slumber lie?

* * * * *

God calling yet! I cannot stay;
My heart I yield without delay.
Vain world, farewell; from thee I part;
The voice of God hath reached my heart.

The hymn was translated from the German by Miss Jane Borthwick, born in
Edinburgh, 1813. She and her younger sister, Mrs. Findlater, jointly
translated and published, in 1854, _Hymns From the Land of Luther_, and
contributed many poetical pieces to the _Family Treasury_. She died in
1897.

Another translation, imitating the German metre, is more euphonious,
though less literal and less easily fitted to music not specially
composed for it, on account of its "feminine" rhymes:

God calling yet! and shall I never hearken?
But still earth's witcheries my spirit darken;
This passing life, these passing joys all flying,
And still my soul in dreamy slumbers lying?

_THE TUNE._

Dr. Dykes' "Rivaulx" is a sober choral that articulates the
hymn-writer's sentiment with sincerity and with considerable
earnestness, but breathes too faintly the interrogative and expostulary
tone of the lines. To voice the devout solicitude and self-remonstrance
of the hymn there is no tune superior to "Federal St."

The Hon. Henry Kemble Oliver, author of "Federal St.," was born in
Salem, Mass., March, 1800, and was addicted to music from his childhood.
His father compelled him to relinquish it as a profession, but it
remained his favorite avocation, and after his graduation from Harvard
the cares of none of the various public positions he held, from
schoolmaster to treasurer of the state of Massachusetts, could ever wean
him from the study of music and its practice. At the age of thirty-one,
while sitting one day in his study, the last verse of Anne Steele's
hymn--

So fades the lovely blooming flower,

--floated into his mind, and an unbidden melody came with it. As he
hummed it to himself the words shaped the air, and the air shaped the
words.

Then gentle patience smiles on pain,
Then dying hope revives again,

--became--

See gentle patience smile on pain;
See dying hope revive again;

--and with the change of a word and a tense the hymn created the melody,
and soon afterward the complete tune was made. Two years later it was
published by Lowell Mason, and Oliver gave it the name of the street in
Salem on which his wife was born, wooed, won, and marr