is as follows:

Bridle of untaught foals,
Wing of unwandering birds,
Helm and Girdle of babes,
Shepherd of royal lambs!
Assemble Thy simple children
To praise holily,
To hymn guilelessly
With innocent mouths
Christ, the Guide of children.

Figures like--

Catching the chaste fishes,

Heavenly milk, etc.

--are necessarily avoided in making good English of the lines, and the
profusion of adoring epithets in the ancient poem (no less than
twenty-one different titles of Christ) would embarrass a modern song.

Dr. Dexter might have chosen an easier metre for his version, if (which
is improbable) he intended it to be sung, since a tune written to sixes
and fours takes naturally a more decided lyrical movement and emphasis
than the hymn reveals in his stanzas, though the second and fifth
possess much of the hymn quality and would sound well in Giardini's
"Italian Hymn."

More nearly a translation, and more in the cantabile style, is the
version of a Scotch Presbyterian minister, Rev. Hamilton M. Macgill,
D.D., two of whose stanzas are these:

Thyself, Lord, be the Bridle
These wayward wills to stay;
Be Thine the Wing unwand'ring,
To speed their upward way.

* * * * *

Let them with songs adoring
Their artless homage bring
To Christ the Lord, and crown Him
The children's Guide and King.

The Dexter version is set to Monk's slow harmony of "St. Ambrose" in the
_Plymouth Hymnal_ (Ed. Dr. Lyman Abbott, 1894) without the writer's
name--which is curious, inasmuch as the hymn was published in the
_Congregationalist_ in 1849, in _Hedge and Huntington's_ (Unitarian)
_Hymn-book_ in 1853, in the _Hymnal of the Presbyterian Church_ in 1866,
and in Dr. Schaff's _Christ in Song_ in 1869.

Clement died about A.D. 220.

Rev. Henry Martyn Dexter, D.D., for twenty-three years the editor of the
_Congregationalist_, was born in Plymouth, Mass., Aug. 13, 1821. He was
a graduate of Yale (1840) and Andover Divinity School (1844), a
well-known antiquarian writer and church historian. Died Nov. 13, 1890.

"HOW HAPPY IS THE CHILD WHO HEARS."

This hymn was quite commonly heard in Sunday-schools during the
eighteen-thirties and forties, and, though retained in few modern
collections, its Sabbath echo lingers in the memory of the living
generation. It was written by Michael Bruce, born at Kinneswood,
Kinross-