O little town of Bethlehem

O little town of Bethlehem. Phillips Brooks* (1835-1893). Written in 1868 for the Sunday School of Brooks’s church in Philadelphia. It was the product of what Wordsworth called ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’, for it depended on a visit that Brooks had made to Bethlehem at Christmas 1865. He described it in a letter to his father, reprinted in Letters of Travel (1893): Before dark, we rode out of town to the field where they say the shepherds saw the star… as we passed, the shepherds were still ‘keeping watch over their flocks’, or leading them home to fold… (letter of 30 December 1865, pp. 69-70) Brooks then went to the convent church in Bethlehem, where he did not like the service...