For The Beauty Of The Earth: A Song History

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Folliott Sandford Pierpoint (1835–1917) was a Bath-born, Cambridge-educated classicist whose private means let him teach only now and then at Somersetshire College while he wrote verse and hymns.[1][2] Tradition holds that springtime scenery around Bath, his home city, moved him to write his best-known text.[3] The sources consulted here differ on whether he wrote it in 1863 or 1864,[1][4] but they agree that it was first printed in 1864, in the second edition of Lyra Eucharistica, edited by Orby Shipley.[3] It began life as a Communion hymn[4] of eight four-line stanzas titled “The Sacrifice of Praise,” its refrain echoing a phrase from the post-communion prayer of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer.[3]

Oil sketch of the English countryside on Hampstead Heath beneath a broad, cloud-filled sky

John Constable, Hampstead Heath, Looking Toward Harrow, c. 1821. Oil on paper mounted on canvas. The Cleveland Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).

Later editors loosened those eucharistic ties, recasting the refrain as broad thanksgiving for creation rather than an offering tied to Christ’s sacrifice, and trimming the stanzas; the United Methodist Hymnal, for example, prints six.[4][2] In that broader form the hymn has spread into at least 723 hymnals indexed by Hymnary.org, which calls it “the only Pierpoint hymn still sung today.”[4][1] Other tunes have been tried, and John Rutter’s 1978 choral anthem brought the words fresh attention,[4][2] but in the United States it is most often sung to DIX.[2]

DIX grew from a chorale melody by the German musician Conrad Kocher (1786–1872) printed in his Stimmen aus dem Reiche Gottes of 1838. William H. Monk revised and shortened it for Hymns Ancient & Modern in 1861, where it carried William Chatterton Dix’s Epiphany hymn “As with Gladness Men of Old”; Dix himself reportedly regretted the pairing.[5] The tune is a compact AAB form in which the opening line is repeated before a closing phrase,[5] and the hymn appears in Stephen Seifert’s mountain dulcimer collection Join the Jam: Gospel Edition.[6]

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Sources

  1. Hymnary.org: "Folliott Sandford Pierpoint".
  2. Discipleship Ministries (United Methodist Church), C. Michael Hawn: "History of Hymns: For the Beauty of the Earth".
  3. The Canterbury Dictionary of Hymnology: "For the beauty of the earth".
  4. Hymnary.org: "For the Beauty of the Earth".
  5. Hymnary.org: "DIX (Kocher)".
  6. Stephen Seifert: "Join the Jam Gospel Edition".