ALMOST the first decided taste in my life was the love of hymns.
Committing them to memory was as natural to me as breathing. I followed
my mother about with the hymn-book ("Watts' and Select"), reading or
repeating them to her, while she was busy with her baking or ironing,
and she was always a willing listener. She was fond of devotional
reading, but had little time for it, and it pleased her to know that so
small a child as I really cared for the hymns she loved.
I learned most of them at meeting. I was told to listen to the
minister; but as I did not understand a word he was saying, I gave it
up, and took refuge in the hymn-book, with the conscientious purpose of
trying to sit still. I turned the leaves over as noiselessly as
possible, to avoid the dreaded reproof of my mother's keen blue eyes;
and sometimes I learned two or three hymns in a forenoon or an
afternoon. Finding it so easy, I thought I would begin at the
beginning, and learn the whole. There were about a thousand of them
included in the Psalms, the First, Second, and Third Books, and the
Select Hymns. But I had learned to read before I had any knowledge of
counting up numbers, and so was blissfully ignorant of the magnitude of
my undertaking. I did not, I think, change my resolution because there
were so many, but because, little as I was, I discovered that there
were hymns and hymns. Some of them were so prosy that the words would
not stay in my memory at all, so I concluded that I would learn only
those I liked.
I had various reasons for my preferences. With some, I was caught by a
melodious echo, or a sonorous ring; with others by the hint of a
picture, or a story, or by some sacred suggestion that attracted me, I
knew not why. Of some I was fond just because I misunderstood them; and
of these I made a free version in my mind, as I murmured them over. One
of my first favorites was certainly rather a singular choice for a
child of three or four years. I had no idea of its meaning, but made up
a little story out of it, with myself as the heroine. It began with the
words--
"Come, humble sinner, in whose breast
A thousand thoughts revolve."