For the beauty of the earth 

Folliott Sandford Pierpoint (1835-1917), the author of this hymn, was born in Bath.  Educated at Bath Grammar School, he went up to Cambridge in 1853 or 1854 and graduated from Queen’s College in 1857.  Pierpoint occasionally taught classics at Somersetshire College, a prestigious school then located in No. 11 The Circus, Bath, but, having a small inheritance, he mostly lived quietly and wrote. He lived for some time at Babbacombe near Torquay and died at Newport, Gwent, in his 83rd year.  Pierpoint published three volumes of poems in the 1850s; he contributed “For the beauty of the earth” to the second edition of Lyra Eucharistica (1864), edited by Ormby Shipley, an Anglo-Catholic priest who became a Roman Catholic in 1878.  

The hymn as originally published had eight stanzas; it was entitled “The Sacrifice of Praise,” a clear allusion to the post- communion prayer of the Book of Common Prayer: “we thy humble servants entirely desire thy fatherly goodness mercifully to accept this our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving.”  Five verses were printed in the Presbyterian Psalms and Hymns for Divine Worship in 1867, omitting Pierpoint’s last three stanzas.  Later hymnals follow that pattern or reduce the hymn to three or four stanzas.  The first line of the refrain as Pierpont wrote it was “Christ our God, to thee we raise” but that is usually altered in later hymnals to “Lord of all to thee we raise.”

 

The tune “Dix” is so called because it was paired in the first edition of Hymns Ancient and Modern with the epiphany hymn “As with gladness men of old,” written by William Chatterton Dix.  It was an adaptation by William Monk of a tune written in the early 19th century by the German composer Conrad Kocher (1786-1872) and published in the collection Stimmen aus den Reiche Gottes of 1838, paired with “Treuer Heiland, wir sind hir” (Faithful Savior, We are Here).  Monk shortened Kocher’s tune by cutting out one line.  Dix the author did not like the tune, nor was he pleased at having his name attached to it.  It was first paired with the tune in Shipley’s volume and later with some alteration of Pierpoint’s words in Hymns of Praise with Tunes, published in New York in 1884, where it is attributed to Kocher.  The words and tune appeared together in the 1906 English Hymnal.