hymn summary

William Cowper was one of the most widely read English poets of his day, whose most characteristic work, as in The Task or the melodious short lyric “The Poplar Trees,” brought a new directness to 18th-century nature poetry. Cowper wrote of the joys and sorrows of everyday life and was content to

Spiritual, in North American white and black folk music, an English-language folk hymn. White spirituals include both revival and camp-meeting songs and a smaller number of other hymns. They derived variously, notably from the “lining out” of psalms, dating from at least the mid-17th century. Where

St. Ambrose ; feast day December 7) was the bishop of Milan, a biblical critic, and the initiator of ideas that provided a model for medieval conceptions of church–state relations. His literary works have been acclaimed as masterpieces of Latin eloquence, and his musical accomplishments are

Isaac ben Solomon Luria was the eponymous founder of the Lurianic school of Kabbala (Jewish esoteric mysticism). Luria’s youth was spent in Egypt, where he became versed in rabbinic studies, engaged in commerce, and eventually concentrated on study of the Zohar, the central work of Kabbala. In 1570