“In 1926, D. H. Lawrence, one of the least qualified defenders of the seemingly failed hymn, wrote an autobiographical essay in which he acknowledged his deep debt to the hymns he had heard as a boy in the chapel, “tall and full of light, but silent”. He said he was “almost ashamed to confess” how dear these poems still were to him. But he was moved by the evidence that he found in them “wonder”, “the most precious element of life”. He said that the hymns “live and shine in unclouded wonder in[man's]consciousness.”
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