Rensselaer Republican, Volume 21, Number 9, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 November 1888 — Greenland’s Icy Mountains. [ARTICLE]

Greenland’s Icy Mountains.

Cincinnati Star. “I heard an odd story the other day about Bishop Heber’s beautiful hymn, ‘From Greenland’s Icy Mountains,” said a well-known Cincinnatian. “What is it?” “It relates to the music for the hymn. You remeniber that Bishop Heber wrote it while in Ceylon in 1824. About a year later it reached America and a lady in Charleston, 8. C., was struck with its beauty. .“She could find..however, no tune that seemed to suit it She remembered a young bank clerk, Lowell Mason, afterwards so celebrated, who was just a few steps down the street,- and who had a reputation as a musical genius. So she sent her son to ask him to write a tune that would go with the hymn. In just half an hour the boy came back with the music, and the melody ’ dashed off in such haste is to this day sung with that song.” The report that an Irish brass band was hissed in London the other day at an exhibition because it would not play “God Save the Queen,” calls to the mind of a Boston correspondent a little story. Some years ago a German musician of Boston returned to that city in a very battered condition, his horn quite as much banged as himself. He said that he had been playing with an American circus band in the British provinces, and in one town there, when “Yankee Doodle” was played, the audience Objected, and broke the barn and its instruments all up. “But,” sak the German, ‘vot der teufql could ve do? Der horses vould not go rount der ring to any udder tune!”