y and here and there in the scattered homes
of country parishes. Their intent was the same as that of "revival
meetings," since so called, though the method--and the music--were
different. The results in winning sinners, so far as they owed anything
to the hymns and hymn-tunes, were apt to be a new generation of
Christian recruits as sombre as the singing. "Lebanon" set forth the
appalling shortness of human life; "Windham" gave its depressing story
of the great majority of mankind on the "broad road," and other minor
tunes proclaimed God's sovereignty and eternal decrees; or if a psalm
had His love in it, it was likely to be sung in a similar melancholy
key. Even in his gladness the good minister, Thomas Baldwin, of the
Second Baptist Church, at Boston, North End, returning from Newport,
N.H., where he had happily harmonized a discordant church, could not
escape the strait-lace of a C minor for his thankful hymn--

From whence doth this union arise,
That hatred is conquered by love.

"The Puritans took their pleasures seriously," and this did not cease to
be true till at least two hundred years after the Pilgrims landed or
Boston was founded.

Time, that covered the ghastly faces on the old grave-stones with moss,
gradually stole away the unction of minor-tune singing.

The songs of the great revival of 1740 swept the country with positive
rather than negative music. Even Jonathan Edwards admitted the need of
better psalm-books and better psalmody.

Edwards, during his life, spent some time among the Indians as a
missionary teacher; but probably neither he nor David Brainerd ever saw
a Christian hymn composed by an Indian. The following, from the early
years of the last century, is apparently the first, certainly the only
surviving, effort of a converted but half-educated red man to utter his
thoughts in pious metre. Whoever trimmed the original words and measure
into printable shape evidently took care to preserve the broken English
of the simple convert. It is an interesting relic of the Christian
thought and sentiment of a pagan just learning to prattle prayer and
praise:

In de dark wood, no Indian nigh,
Den me look heaben, send up cry,
Upon my knees so low.
Dat God on high, in shinee place,
See me in night, with teary face,
De priest, he tell me so.

God send Him angel take me care;
Him come Heself and hear um prayer,
If Indian heart do pray.
God s