There Is A Fountain: A Song History
William Cowper (1731–1800), remembered as a leading English poet as well as a writer of hymns, suffered severe depression for much of his life.[1][2] In 1763 the prospect of a public examination for a House of Lords clerkship set off a crisis and a suicide attempt, and he spent 1763 to 1765 in an asylum.[2][3] In 1767 John Newton invited Cowper and the widowed Unwin household to settle in Olney, where Newton was curate, and he encouraged Cowper's hymn writing.[3] "There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood" was probably written in 1771.[1][4] It first appeared without Cowper's name in Richard Conyers's Collection of Psalms and Hymns (1772), in seven four-line stanzas.[3] In Olney Hymns (1779), to which Cowper contributed sixty-eight texts, the hymn bore the heading "Praise for the fountain opened" and a reference to Zechariah 13:1.[2][3]
Francesco Zuccarelli, Landscape with Peasants at a Fountain, oil on canvas. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). Shown for the title; it has no connection to the hymn.
The vivid opening image has drawn complaints, and several editors have tried to revise the hymn.[3] John Rippon's Selection of 1787 shifted the second stanza from past to present tense, and a related wording came into frequent use in the early 1800s.[3] For the eighth edition of Thomas Cotterill's Selection (1819), James Montgomery substantially rewrote the text, starting with an entirely new first stanza, but his version saw little use and Cowper's wording has prevailed.[3]
The text first appeared with music in the March 1779 issue of The Gospel Magazine, set to a tune by an unknown composer that other collections call CARTHAGE or TUNBRIDGE.[3] In the United States, Lowell Mason set the text to a tune printed without attribution in Spiritual Songs No. 1 (1831), a booklet he co-edited with Thomas Hastings that was later combined into Spiritual Songs for Social Worship (1832).[3] There it was named FOUNTAIN, though other collections more often call it COWPER.[3] A composition date of 1830 is often given for it, but the Hymnology Archive could not confirm it.[3] CLEANSING FOUNTAIN, which has become far more popular than Mason's original, is a slightly altered and lengthened form of his tune with an added refrain of the kind camp-meeting revivalists attached to hymns, and it appeared under that name in Hallowed Songs (1865).[3] Hymnals disagree about its origin: many label it an early American or camp-meeting melody, while others name Mason as composer.[5] The Hymnology Archive judges it "best credited as a tune by Lowell Mason, adapted," with the refrain's source unknown.[3]
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