The hymn text

The hymn Where cross the crowded ways of life was written at the turn of the 20th century by poet Frank Mason North (1850-1935). Active in urban ministry, North's hymn is a reverse analogy to William Blake's And did those feet in ancient time; whereas Blake saw the coal-scarred landscape of England replaced at Christ's coming by a green and pleasant land, North appeals to the 'Master, from the mountainside' to transfigure the chaos, din, and desperation of the city into a new Jerusalem, sent from above. While waiting in expectation, however, the church begins the transformation with quiet, persistent individual acts of Christ-like selflessness. North understood well the difficulty of changing the tenacious dynamics of "race and clan" with transformative one-to-one acts of grace, such as "the cup of water given for Thee." Final transformation descends as the heavenly city; for now, the Church must be the next best thing. First published in a missionary journal, The Christian City in 1903, it appeared two years later in the Methodist Hymnal; wide acceptance followed.

The tune

By profession an industrialist from the English midlands, William Gardiner passionately pursued an avocation in music which resulted in his 1815 opus, Sacred Melodies, a collection of arrangements derived from works of Beethoven, Mozart and Haydn. He originally attributed this tune to a theme by Beethoven, but as Gardiner himself noted in his memoir Music and Friends (1838), the melody "is somewhere in the works of Beethoven, but I cannot now parcel it out" (vol. 2, p. 843). Of the setting's distinctive bass, he wrote, "the bass, though learned, is smooth and easy" ( op. cit., emphasis added). This work, then, is Gardiner's own, and over time hymnals have come to acknowledge this. The tune is known by several names: the frequently-cited GERMANY, as well as WALTON, MELCHISIDEC, and the eponymous GARDINER. The original was scored for strings and solo voice with a Romantic-period paraphrase of the 23rd Psalm, and was marked Pastorale. The pairing with the urbane Where cross the crowded ways of life appeared in the 1905 Methodist Hymnal, besting (by one year) the English Hymnal, a book otherwise notable for such timeless pairings .

Sources

• The United Methodist Church Discipleship Ministries
• hymnstudiesblog
• The Hymnary
• Sacred Melodies, Vol. II (scan of original, Google Books)
• Music and Friends, Vol. II (Google Books, cf. p842-843)