All things bright and beautiful

All things bright and beautiful. Cecil Frances Alexander* (1818-1895). In Hymns for Little Children (1848), Alexander wrote a series of hymns on articles of the Creed. This one was headed ‘Maker of Heaven and Earth’. It had seven stanzas, beginning ‘All things bright and beauteous’, with line 3 as ‘All things wise and wondrous’. By the time of the 4th edition (1850) this had been changed to the present familiar opening. There is no indication that the first stanza was to be repeated as a refrain, although that is now common practice. The full text is seldom printed, because it contained what Percy Dearmer* (Songs of Praise Discussed, p. 239) called ‘the appalling verse’ (the original stanza...

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