She was born Feb. 22d, 1805; married William Bridges Adams, engineer, in 1834; and died of decline in August, 1848. Her life, so far as known to the world, is summed up in the authorship of her drama “Vivia Perpetua” (1841) and her connection with the congregation of Finsbury Unitarian Chapel, under the pastorate of William Johnson Fox. The musical service was organised, and a large proportion of the hymns set to music, by Mrs. Adams’s sister; while she herself enriched the collection with many original and translated pieces. Among them was “Nearer, my God, to Thee,” which divides with Cardinal Newman’s “Lead, kindly Light,” the distinction of being at once the most popular and the most poetical modern hymn. One is reminded of Dryden’s famous lines; but the feats of the male and the female minstrel were in this instance reversed; for it is Mrs. Adams who “raises the mortal to the skies,” and Cardinal Newman who “draws the angel down.”
Personal
There were women too: among them, Mrs. Adams, author of remembered hymns, and of that forgotten drama of “Vivia Perpetua,”—a creature whose beauty and enthusiasm drew around her the flower of the liberal party; the friend of Hunt and Carlyle and W. J. Fox, and of Browning in his eager youth. Of many such as these, in whom the lyrical aspiration was checked by too profuse admixture with a passion for affairs, for active life, for arts of design, or for some ardent cause to which they became devoted, or who failed, through extreme sensibility, to be calm among the turbid elements about them,—of such it may be asked, where are they and their productions, except in the tender memory and honor of their early comrades and friends?
The sisters were two of the most beautiful women of their day, daughters of Benjamin Flower, editor of the Cambridge Intelligencer, the earliest of our liberal newspapers. They had been friends of Browning in his young manhood,—the first to recognize and call attention to his genius. To me their friendship, a love as of two elder sisters, too soon to be interrupted by their death (that of Eliza Flower in December, 1846, and of Mrs. Adams in 1848, a year and a half later), was indeed a liberal education. With their love and feeling for music and pictorial art, and their high poetic thought, they were such women in their purity, intelligence, and high-souled enthusiasm, as Shelley might have sung as fitted to redeem a world by their very presence.
General
Her celebrated hymn, “Nearer, my God, to Thee;” founded on Jacob’s dream, recorded in Genesis, was contributed in 1841 to a Unitarian collection of “Hymns and Anthems,” edited by William J. Fox, preacher and member of Parliament. Few hymns have been so widely popular. It has been adopted by all Christian sects, and translated into various languages, adapted to the tune of “Bethany.” Professor Hitchcock relates that as he and his travelling companions rounded their way down the foot-hills of Mount Lebanon in 1870, they came in sight of a group of fifty Syrian students, who were singing in Arabic this beautiful hymn to this familiar tune.
All she wrote displays a very feeling heart, some overstrained enthusiasm, and a taste which would have been much improved by a more extended degree of cultivation; but she was too much surrounded by members of a school which, while it fairly brought out the mental power of all who belonged to it, required, it may be said, great native force of character to prevent its on the whole exerting a narrowing influence, moral or mental, over those who belonged to it. To some degree, it enchained those whom it had before set free. Whether Mrs. Adams would have asserted a higher power than any displayed during her lifetime had that life been spared, we do not know; but there was so much of pure and beautiful feeling whenever she escaped from mannerism, that we are permitted to believe it most firmly.
Her dramatic attempt is essentially lyrical. “Vivia Perpetua” is unsatisfactory as a play, but has deep human interest as an idealised representation of the authoress’s mind and heart. In the character of Vivia she has shadowed forth her own moral affections and intellectual convictions, and the intensity of her feelings frequently exalts her diction, else artless and slightly conventional, into genuine eloquence. The moral charm, however, takes precedence of the artistic, as is to be expected in the work of a true woman. Lyrical enthusiasm atones in no small measure for the lack of the constructive faculty, and “Vivia Perpetua” fulfils better than many more ambitious works Milton’s demand that poetry should be “simple, sensuous, and passionate.” The authoress would probably have left a higher reputation if she had given freer scope to her natural instinct for lyrical poetry, instead of devoting the most strenuous endeavor to the difficult undertaking of reviving the poetical drama.
Dear Mr. Stead,—The Prince of Wales desires me to thank you for your letter, and to say that he fully appreciates the compliment you pay him when you ask him to assist you in your proposed work. His Royal Highness would have gladly lent his aid if it had been in his power, but he fears that an opportunity for doing so will hardly be given him. He directs me to mention that among serious hymns he thinks there is none more touching nor one that goes more truly to the heart than No. 7 on your list: “Nearer, my God, to Thee.”
“Nearer, my God, to Thee” was written by a woman, that woman a Unitarian, and that Unitarian the daughter of a couple who first met in Newgate Gaol, where her father had been sent to lie for six months as atonement for the heinous crime of defending the French Revolution and criticising the political conduct of a certain Bishop Watson, now fortunately forgotten. Perhaps the sole permanent result and chief end of this Bishop Watson’s life was to contribute remotely and unintentionally to the production of this hymn. He was a not unimportant link in the chain of circumstances of which this hymn, with its far-reaching influence, is but the latest outcome.
Sarah Flower Adams is sure of at least a small niche in the temple of the English poets were it but the beautiful hymn, “Nearer, my God, to Thee.” Her “Vivia Perpetua” is an ill-constructed drama, partly redeemed by fine passages.
