anc
1500-1570) will sing for it, or some new composer may rise up to put the
spirit of the psalm into inspired notes.

"WHY DO WE MOURN DEPARTED FRIENDS?"

This hymn of holy comfort, by Dr. Watts, was long associated with a
remarkable tune in C minor, "a queer medley of melody" as Lowell Mason
called it, still familiar to many old people as "China." It was composed
by Timothy Swan when he was about twenty-six years of age (1784) and
published in 1801 in the _New England Harmony_. It may have sounded
consolatory to mature mourners, singers and hearers in the days when
religious emotion habitually took a sad key, but its wild and thrilling
chords made children weep. The tune is long out of use--though, strange
to say, one of the most recent hymnals prints the hymn with a _new
minor_ tune.

Why do we mourn departed friends,
Or shake at death's alarms?
'Tis but the voice that Jesus sends
To call them to His arms.

Are we not tending upward too
As fast as time can move?
Nor should we wish the hours more slow
To keep us from our Love.

The graves of all His saints He blessed
And softened every bed:
Where should the dying members rest
But with their dying Head?

Timothy Swan was born in Worcester, Mass., July 23, 1758, and died in
Suffield, Ct., July 23, 1842. He was a self-taught musician, his only
"course of study" lasting three weeks,--in a country singing school at
Groton. When sixteen years old he went to Northfield, Mass., and learned
the hatter's trade, and while at work began to practice making
psalm-tunes. "Montague," in two parts, was his first achievement. From
that time for thirty years, mostly spent in Suffield, Ct., he wrote and
taught music while supporting himself by his trade. Many of his tunes
were published by himself, and had a wide currency a century ago.

Swan was a genius in his way, and it was a true comment on his work that
"his tunes were remarkable for their originality as well as
singularity--unlike any other melodies." "China," his masterpiece, will
be long kept track of as a curio, and preserved in replicates of old
psalmody to illustrate self-culture in the art of song. But the major
mode will replace the minor when tender voices on burial days sing--

Why do we mourn departed friends?

Another hymn of Watts,--

God is the refuge of His saints
When storms of sharp distress invade,

--sung to Lowell Mason