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The National Music of America. 257
effect as a marching song. Rev. Dr. James Freeman Clarke, who was of the party, noticed her enthusiasm, and said, " You ought to write new words to that." Mrs. Howe readily consented to the suggestion, and " Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord," was the result. Therefore the evolution of the chief Northern song of the war can be briefly summed up thus : — A Methodist camp-meeting song, sung in some of the coloured churches of the South, familiar in Charleston, and even made into a firemen's song in that city ; then a camp-song of rather ribald style, carried into fame by the Twelfth Massachusetts Regiment; then an abolition ode by Edna Dean Proctor; finally "The Battle-hymn of the Republic," by Julia Ward Howe.1
One may add to the above that it was the
1 To these we must add the mistaken theory of Ritter (" Music in America," p. 439), that the melody was taken from Foster's " Ellen Bayne " (misprinted " Boyne ") —a slight and accidental resemblance only. |
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