THEIR AUTHORS AND ORIGIN. 21
It was used by the Lutherans at funerals on Luther s own sugges tion and with much emotion at his own.
In the year 1530, during the diet of Augsburg, Luther s mental anxiety so overcame his bodily strength that he fainted. On re covering, he said, " Come, let us defy the devil, and praise God by singing the hymn, Out of the depths I cry to Thee. " This hymn has often comforted the sick and dying. It is said to have been the last Protestant hymn sung in Strasburg Cathedral.
��THOMAS STEKNHOLD.
DIED 1549.
THE writings of Sternhold and Hopkins mark an era in the history of our sacred verse. The national muse had become at the Reformation puritanical and pious, but its piety was un attended by the power and genius of true poetiy.
Sternhold was born in Hampshire, and educated at Oxford. He was Groom of the Robes to Henry VIII. and Edward VI. Along with John Hopkins, he produced the first English metrical version of the psalms attached to the " Book of Common Prayer." He completed only the first fifty-one ; Hopkins and others composed the remainder. Thirty-seven of Sternhold s psalms were edited and published immediately after his death by his friend John Hopkins. Sternhold died, August, 1549. The work was entitled, "All such Psalms of David as Thomas Sternholde, late Groome of the King s Majestye s Robes, did in his Lyfe-time drawe into Englyshe Metre." The complete version annexed to the "Book of Common Prayer" did not appear till 3562. Of this version Montgomery says, " The merit of faithful adherence to the original has been claimed for this version, and need not to be denied, but it is the resemblance which the dead bear to the living." Wood, in his "Athenae Oxonienses" (1691), vol. i. p. 62, has the following account of the origin of Sternhold s psalms.
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