Another installment in my Christmas music hymn stories;

       Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was a great American poet.  His life had been touched  by tragedy and then, he was tested by the Civil War.  Longfellow hated the Civil War. It tore at the very fiber of his being to see the United States of America—a nation his family had fought to create and help build—divided by the greed and sinful nature of man. An ardent believer in the power of God to move on earth, the poet all but pleaded with his Lord to end the madness of the war. When his oldest son, nineteen-year-old Charles, was wounded in battle and sent home to recover, the poet’s prayers turned to rage. As Henry tended his son’s injuries, saw other wounded soldiers on Cambridge’s streets, and visited with families who had lost sons in battle,he asked his friends and his God, “Where is the peace?” 

Then, picking up his pen and paper, he tried to answer that haunting question. It was the ringing of Christmas bells that probably inspired the cadence found in his writing on December 25, 1863. That day Longfellow hung his whole message on the tolling of the church bells. Yet while most Christmas verse is light and uplifting, America’s greatest poet set his lyrical ode in tones that were largely dark and solemn. In the original seven stanzas of “I Heard the Bells On Christmas Day."