Christ My Song - 456
I was in love with hill and vale - The Fountainhead of Beauty
(Horatius Bonar/Johannes Thomas Rüegg)
The Fountainhead of Beauty.
1. I was in love with hill and vale,
the noon's warm flush, the star-light pale,
the murmur of the midnight gale,
the mirth of wayward streams.
I wooed the silence of the night,
the blushes of the bursting light,
the sea's green depths, the heaven's blue height,
and days went by in dreams. PDF - Midi
2. I sought the shadows of the wood,
I woke the glen's low solitude;
I mused above the mountain-flood, –
days of the rock and grove!
The tide's great ebb and flow, to me
was speech, and psalm, and minstrelsy;
O musical and mighty sea!
Young life went by in love.
3. And shall I cease to love you now,
ye hills above, ye rocks below,
because I see your beauty flow
from God the only wise?
Shall I not love you, praise you more?
And fill me with your beauty's store,
the glory of earth's wondrous shore,
and splendour of its skies?
4. When faith has now restored to me
all childhood's dear simplicity,
and, in heaven's own sweet liberty,
made me once more a child;
when, standing by the cross, I read
all nature in the light thence shed,
no darkness and no guilty dread, –
bright with the undefiled!
Horatius Bonar, The Song of the New Creation, 1872, 79-80.