Unheard the dews around me fall.
[Peace amid silence.] This hymn appeared anonymously in Dr. G. W. Briggs's (Unitarian) Hymns for Public Worship, Boston, 1845, in 4 stanzas of 4 lines. It was repeated in Hedge and Huntington's Hymns for the Church of Christ, 1853, and later American collections; and in Martineau's Hymns, &c, 1873. In Stopford A. Brooke's Christian Hymns, 1881, No. 177, it is slightly altered, and another stanza (iv.) is added. This text is repeated in Horder's Congregational Hymns, 1884, No. 438.
John Julian, Dictionary of Hymnology (1907)
Philip Doddridge (b. London, England, 1702; d. Lisbon, Portugal, 1751) belonged to the Non-conformist Church (not associated with the Church of England). Its members were frequently the focus of discrimination. Offered an education by a rich patron to prepare him for ordination in the Church of England, Doddridge chose instead to remain in the Non-conformist Church. For twenty years he pastored a poor parish in Northampton, where he opened an academy for training Non-conformist ministers and taught most of the subjects himself. Doddridge suffered from tuberculosis, and when Lady Huntington, one of his patrons, offered to finance a trip to Lisbon for his health, he is reputed to have said, "I can as well go to heaven from Lisbon as from Nort… Go to person page >
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