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“In 1926, D.H. Lawrence — surely one of the least likely of champions of their seemingly lost cause [hymns] — wrote an autobiographical essay. In it he admitted his own deep indebtedness to the hymns he’d heard sung in chapel when he was a boy — a chapel ‘which was tall and full light, yet still.’ It was, he said, ‘almost shameful to confess’ how much these poems still meant to him. But he remained moved by the evidence he found in them of ‘wonder,’ ‘the most precious element in life.’ Hymns, he stated, ‘lived and glisten in an a [person’s] consciousness in undimmed wonder.’”
