Ysenda Maxtone Graham

High and mighty | 13 December 2018

Her hymns express with such unpretentious clarity and perfect scansion the essence of Christianity

In this 200th anniversary of the birth of Mrs C.F. Alexander, author of ‘Once in Royal David’s City’, all of us for whom Christmas properly begins when we hear the treble solo of verse one on Christmas Eve should remember her and be thankful.

She was born Cecil Frances Humphreys, ‘Fanny’, to a successful land agent in Dublin in 1818, and she seems to have been genuinely mild, obedient, good as He. From an early age she had an instinctive liking for vicars, rectors, deans, bishops and archbishops, although she was shy and at her most relaxed with children and dogs. She eventually married a Church of Ireland rector of her own, William Alexander, who later became a bishop, and they lived a long, happy life of parenthood and charitable works.

She wrote her book of Hymns for Little Children in 1848, before her marriage, hoping that the simple poetry would be helpful in fixing the understanding of Christian beliefs in children’s minds. One of her heroes, the High Anglican priest and poet John Keble, wrote, in his introduction to the book: ‘Children, and those interested in children, will feel at once whether it suits them or not.’

Well, it certainly did suit them. Mrs Alexander’s hymns express with such unpretentious clarity and perfect scansion the essence of Christianity that anyone who sang them in childhood has the words going round in their head all through adulthood. We see the imagery in our minds and cling to it as the comforting could-be truth. ‘And his shelter was a stable, and his cradle was a stall.’ We name our moment of reaching maturity as the day when it dawned on us that the line ‘without a city wall’, from her hymn ‘There Is a Green Hill Far Away’, doesn’t mean that the green hill didn’t have a city wall.

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