As the Dew from Heaven Distilling
149

Text: Thomas Kelly (1769–1854)
Music: Joseph J. Daynes (1851–1920; LDS)
Tune name: BOUNTIFUL

The beautiful strains of this hymn tune are the traditional close of the Tabernacle Choir’s weekly broadcast. Generations of Latter- day Saints as well as untold numbers of radio listeners and television viewers have come to love this peaceful, tender melody by former Tabernacle organist Joseph J. Daynes.

For many decades, Latter- day Saints have taken for granted the attribution of this hymn text to Parley P. Pratt; however, hymn researcher Bruce David Maxwell brought to light some new information about the hymn’s origin. Parley P. Pratt, with his great love for truth and exactness, would no doubt be grateful to see the “clouds of error disappear” (see no. 1).

Parley P. Pratt did not claim authorship of the hymn during his lifetime; his name was wrongly attached to the words after his death. As Bruce David Maxwell pointed out: “This hymn was virtually unknown in the United States outside the LDS tradition. For this reason later editors posthumously misattributed it to Parley Pratt. . . . The discovery of this hymn in a book of Thomas Kelly’s hymnody published one year before Parley Pratt’s birth merely corrects a long- standing error and in no way diminishes the LDS poet’s accomplishment” (“Source Book for Hymns [1950],” 84).

The hymn text is found in Hymns on Various Passages of Scripture (Dublin, 1806), a collection of texts by Thomas Kelly, who also wrote “Zion Stands with Hills Surrounded” (no. 43). The first Latter- day Saint source to print “As the Dew” was the 1840 Collection of Sacred Hymns, edited by Parley P. Pratt, Brigham Young, and John Taylor. The only words changed in our present hymnal from Thomas Kelly’s original text are the words “Thy sweet Spirit shed around” in the fourth verse. Thomas Kelly wrote, “Sweetest influence shed around.”

The metaphor in verses one and two— of doctrinal truths “descending from above” like “the dews from heaven”—is from an Old Testament verse:

“My doctrine shall drop as the rain, my speech shall distil as the dew, as the small rain upon the tender herb, and as the showers upon the grass” (Deuteronomy 32:2).

It is not surprising that this hymn text would be loved by Latter- day Saints, who believe in continuing modern revelation.

We can be grateful that the record has at last been set straight, and that the Church has preserved this fine text as one of its most significant hymns. In the words of George D. Pyper, “When it is sung with the proper emotional feeling, a reverential seal is put upon the spoken word, through the power of music; and the congregation is guided into a spirit of adoration and confession and drawn one step nearer to the Infinite” (Stories of Latter-day Saint Hymns, 178).

The tune, BOUNTIFUL, was first published in the 1889 Latter- day Saints’ Psalmody, with the Thomas Kelly text.