s probable
that the earlier one of Fortunatus suggested it. It was written by Mrs.
Hemans, and occurs between the forty-third and forty-fourth stanzas of
her long poem, "The Forest Sanctuary."

A Spanish Christian who had embraced the Protestant faith fled to
America (such is the story of the poem) to escape the cruelties of the
Inquisition, and took with him his Catholic wife and his child. During
the voyage the wife pined away and died, a martyr to her conjugal
loyalty and love. The hymn to the Virgin purports to have been her daily
evening song at sea, plaintively remembered by the broken-hearted
husband and father in his forest retreat on the American shore with his
motherless boy.

The music was composed by a sister of Mrs. Hemans, Mrs. Hughes, who
probably arranged the lines as they now stand in the tune.

The song, though its words appear in the _Parochial Hymn-book_, seems to
be in use rather as parlor music than as a part of the liturgy.

"JESUS, LOVER OF MY SOUL."

The golden quality of this best-known and loved of Charles Wesley's
hymns is attested by two indorsements that cannot be impeached; its
perennial life, and the blessings of millions who needed it.

Jesus, Lover of my soul
Let me to Thy bosom fly,
While the billows near me roll,
While the tempest still is high.

Hide me, O my Saviour, hide,
Till the storm of life is past,
Safe into the haven guide,
O receive my soul at last!

Wesley is believed to have written it when a young man, and story and
legend have been busy with the circumstances of its birth. The most
poetical account alleges that a dove chased by a hawk dashed through
his open window into his bosom, and the inspiration to write the line--

Let me to Thy bosom fly,

--was the genesis of the poem. Another report has it that one day Mr.
Wesley, being pursued by infuriated persecutors at Killalee, County
Down, Ireland, took refuge in a milk-house on the homestead of the
Island Band Farm. When the mob came up the farmer's wife, Mrs. Jane
Lowrie Moore, offered them refreshments and secretly let out the
fugitive through a window to the back garden, where he concealed himself
under a hedge till his enemies went away. When they had gone he had the
hymn in his mind and partly jotted down. This tale is circumstantial,
and came through Mrs. Mary E. Hoover, Jane Moore's granddaughter, who
told it many years ago to her pastor, Dr. William Laur