When on My Day of Life the Night has Fallen

John Greenleaf Whittier, 1882

“I am really not a hymn-writer,” said the author of our Hymn of the Week, John Greenleaf Whittier, “for the good reason that I know nothing of music. Only a very few of my pieces were written for singing. A good hymn is the best use to which poetry can be devoted, but I do not claim that I have succeeded in composing one.”

Who was the most amiable of American men of letters? William Dean Howells, the excellent novelist, went well out of his way to help many writers, and doesn’t seem to have harbored any envy in his soul. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had good friends on both sides of the Atlantic, but children loved him best of all, and though his work came in for some trenchant criticism, I don’t think it ruffled his spirit. But I think my vote would go for Whittier. That quote above shows why. We’ve featured Whittier before at Word and Song, for the hymn Dear Lord and Father of Mankind, and a couple of other pieces too, and for a man who says he never composed a good hymn, I can only agree by saying that he composed many a very good one, and sometimes a great one, too.

Whittier was a Quaker, back when that did imply a different kind of life from that of most of your neighbors, as Hollywood once deigned to show, in William Wyler’s great film Friendly Persuasion. One of my heroes, Dr. Horatio Storer, was raised as a Quaker and went to a Quaker boarding school for boys, on Cape Cod. We’ve got a big collection of his letters, which began when he was just a little boy writing home. He didn’t remain a Quaker — his road brought him deeper into the reality of the person of Christ, if I may say so without intending anything ill; but that’s another story. In any case, I am very fond of one of the letters he wrote while he was still a Quaker lad. He was on a ship in the Strait of Canso, in Nova Scotia. It was winter, and they’d had rough weather. If I drive a mile or so down the road from where I’m writing these words, I can look across that strait to the town of Canso, which John Paul Jones once sacked — “the notorious privateer Paul Jones,” says the bill of damages mounted on the wall of the town’s museum, because that’s what he was to the Canadians here, while Americans hail him as a patriot and a hero. Anyway, Storer was 17 years old, a Harvard boy, and he’d taken a sailing trip to the Maritimes to do some biological research, and of course to have a great adventure. On the night before Christmas, the ship put in at the mainland, and Storer went to the services at the Methodist church there. He wrote home, saying that he was really impressed by their singing — it did his heart good. And it did my heart good too, to find today’s hymn in an old Methodist hymnal. No, Storer couldn’t have heard them singing it then, because Whittier wrote it many years later, when he was 75 years old, and by then, Horatio Storer was one of the most renowned medical doctors in America, a staunch defender of innocent and sacred human life.

What kind of hymn do you write when you’re 75 years old? One of the melodies for “When on My Day of Life the Night is Falling” is called Journey’s End, and I guess that’s what you might be thinking of. I’m not that old yet, but such thoughts come to my mind often enough. You look back on the ways you’ve taken — sometimes rambling, and that can be a beautiful thing, if it’s just going your calm and grateful way once in a while, close to play, as I’ve said, and so also close to spontaneous prayer. But sometimes it’s not rambling, but straying, and you’d still be straying, if the Lord didn’t go find you, lost sheep that you are — that I was!

Or you can write a hymn about where you hope to go. It isn’t a “where” that you can locate on a star chart, of course. Lead me into the mysterious mustard seed, O Lord! Whittier longs for a place that isn’t a location, at least not as we’d think of a location, but a life. And there is no life without the Father.

I told my students once that if they want a way to think about the blessedness of inequality, they should consider the lowliest of all the souls in Heaven. “Imagine him,” I said, “as the elevator operator, bringing everyone to the heights God has given to them. What gift would be his, belonging to nobody else? He’d enjoy the gift of looking up to the glory and the beauty of every soul he meets: and so in his gratitude he’d be participating in their greatness. It’s the opposite of envy.” I think Whittier was like that elevator operator. He didn’t take himself too seriously as a poet, and that’s part of his appeal. He writes simply and directly and honestly, and his feelings are sound and sweet.

We have below one of the melodies this hymn is set to, called Flemming. It’s all we could find on line. It’s a gentle and pleasant melody, more melodious than Journey’s End, but not as mysterious.

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When on my day of life the night is falling,
And, in the wind from unsunned spaces blown,
I hear far voices out of darkness calling
My feet to paths unknown,

Thou, who hast made my home of life so pleasant,
Leave not its tenant when its walls decay;
O Love Divine, O Helper ever present,
Be Thou my strength and stay.

Be near me when all else is from me drifting,
Earth, sky, home's pictures, days of shade and shine,
And kindly faces to my own uplifting
The love which answers mine.

I have but Thee, my Father! let thy Spirit
Be with me then to comfort and uphold;
No gate of pearl, no branch of palm I merit,
No street of shining gold.

Suffice it if -- my good and ill unreckoned,
And both forgiven through Thine abounding grace --
I find myself by hands familiar beckoned
Unto my fitting place,

Some humble door among Thy many mansions,
Some sheltering shade where sin and striving cease,
And flows forever through Heaven's green expansions
The river of Thy peace.

There, from the music round about me stealing,
I fain would learn the new and holy song,
And find at last, beneath thy trees of healing,
The life for which I long.

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