For the strength of the hills we bless Thee

For the strength of the hills we bless Thee. Felicia Hemans* (1793-1835). This poem was entitled ‘Hymn of the Vaudois Mountaineers in Times of Persecution’. It was published in Hemans’ Scenes and Hymns of  Life (1834), a volume dedicated to William Wordsworth*, and in her Poems (1872), available in Project Gutenberg (1875 printing): (https://www.gutenberg.org/files/66785/66785-h/66785-h.htm)  The ‘Vaudois Mountaineers’ were the Waldensians, a sect in the mountains and valleys of upper Piedmont that survived persecution by the Catholic church during the Counter-Reformation, including a terrible massacre of 1655 (see Waldensian hymnody*). Hemans’ poem had six stanzas, of which four have...