5. Or: 'Or ye,' Return

6. Or: 'Take heart, for comfort, love, and hope' Return

7. Or: 'Comes round the age of gold.' Return

8. Or: And the whole world send back the song, Return

9. Or: And the whole world sent ... Return

10. Or 'That prophets knew' of old. Or: 'By prophet bards' of old. Return

11. Or: And with the ever-circling years, | Comes round the day foretold Return

Sheet Music by J. R. Higinbotham from Rev. Charles Lewis Hutchins, Carols Old and Carols New (Boston: Parish Choir, 1916), Carol #195
MIDI / Noteworthy Composer / PDF / XML

Sheet Music by  Richard S. Willis from Charles L. Hutchins, Carols Old and Carols New (Boston: Parish Choir, 1916), Carol #607
MIDI / Noteworthy Composer / PDF / XML
Melody only; for SATB, see above.

Sheet Music by Mr. S. Smith from Rev. Richard R. Chope, Carols For Use In Church (London: William Clowes & Sons, 1894), Carol #34
MIDI / Noteworthy Composer / PDF / XML

Note that this arrangement repeats the last two lines of the verse.

Sheet Music "Carol" by R. S. Willis from O. Hardwig, ed., The Wartburg Hymnal (Chicago: Wartburg Publishing House, 1918), #107

Sheet Music "Carol" by R. Storrs Willis, 1849, from Henry Sloane Coffin and Ambrose White Vernon, eds., Hymns of the Kingdom of God. New York: The A. S. Barnes Company, 1910, #45, p. 81.

"Noel", a traditional air ("Eardisley") rearranged by Sir Arthur Sullivan
MIDI / Noteworthy Composer / PDF / XML

Public Domain Recordings:

• LibriVox Christmas Carol Collection 2006 (Recording by Kristin Hughes)

• A Garritan Community Christmas for an MP3: It Came Upon A Midnight Clear, Robert Myers

See Also the Gilbert and Sullivan Archive: A Sullivan Christmas - Christmas Music by Sir Arthur Sullivan for Noel (with a MIDI file and a printable score) and the second setting for this carol by Sullivan, including both a MIDI file and a printable score (information kindly submitted by Paul Hawarth)

Notes

No movie scenarist could have devised a more romantic setting for the position of a Christmas poem. Reportedly, it was a cold winter day in December 1849. Outside, a snowfall was in progress and inside, the fireplace in the study was erupting with warmth and light. No doubt this picturesque New England scene and the holiday season inspired the frail minister, and his pen scratched out several stanzas of verse about the birth of Jesus

The poem was not the first Christmas poetry by the Reverend Edmund Hamilton Sears (1810-1876). He had written other Nativity lyrics and several books on religious topics. In addition, he was the editor for the Boston-based Monthly Religious Magazine from 1859 to 1871.

The poem was published on December 29, 1849 in the Christian Register. A year later, in 1850, a tune by Richard Storrs Willis (1819-1900), set to the hymn "See Israel's Gentle Shepherd Stand," was published under the title "Study No. 23" in his Church Chorales and Choir Studies. Soon after, possibly that same year, the tune was rearranged to fit Sears' poetry — probably by Willis himself, although some sources state that Uzziah Christopher Burnap (1834-1900) was responsible. The tune was adapted by Willis not later than 1860 to accommodate the lyrics of "While Shepherds Watch Their Flock" as well as Sears' other carol, "Calm on the Listening Ear of Night."

This carol was apparently the forerunner of or the inspiration for an unusually productive generation of carol creation in the United States:

• 1857: "We Three Kings of Orient Are", "Jingle Bells"
• 1860s: "Up on the Housetop" [and "Jolly Old St. Nicholas"?]
• 1863: "I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day"
• 1868: "O Little Town of Bethlehem"

Robert Joseph, The Christmas Book

This American carol deals with more than the pleasant atmosphere of Christmas. It directly acknowledges that mankind to this day is suffering, and that the message of Christ still offers hope. The inspiring and forthright words were written one cold snowy day in December, 1849, by a Unitarian minister from New England, Rev. Edmund Sears. Only a few years before, it would have been unlikely to find a carol being written, let alone performed, in New England. From 1659 to 1681, Christmas celebrations in this "Puritan" region were forbidden by law. A child missing school on Christmas Day in Boston public schools as recently as 1870 would be punished and possibly dismissed. Workmen missing work would also be penalized.

The writing of this carol represented the emerging acceptance of Christmas in New England as a "Holiday."

Dr. Sears asked his friend in Boston, Richard Willis, to compose a melody for it. Willis was a friend of Felix Mendelssohn, whose music graces "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing." Though author and composer didn’t have much contact or a continuing close working relationship, it seems they each independently were inspired and linked together in the song by one common Christian threat.

Keyte and Parrott, eds., The Shorter New Oxford Book of Carols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993)

Sears was a Unitarian clergyman, typical in his social concern, untypical in his belief of the divinity of Christ. Tune I was arranged by Burnap from Willis’s Organ Study No. 23. Tune II, which is reminiscent of the Sussex Mummers’s Carol (see The Oxford Book of Carols, 1928, no. 45), is Sullivan’s adaptation of an eight-bar melody that was sent to him by a friend.

Elizabeth Poston, The Penguin Book of Christmas Carols (London: Penguin, 1965)

The traditional tune in Sir Arthur Sullivan’s arrangement is related to Eardisley English Hymnal, (601), noted in Herefordshire in 1905 (see O.A.C., App. 5). The Rev. Edmund Hamilton Sears, 1810-76, Unitarian minister in Massachusettes, lived at a time when it was possible to write in more sanguine terms of the approach of the age of gold. His confident assertion (original verse 5, line 4, English Hymnal, 1906, 26) does not ring true nowadays. Accordingly the general modern practice has been followed here of the modification of the last verse, so as to avoid a reference inappropriate to our time and thought, without loss of the moving sincerity of the hymn as a whole.

William L. Simon, ed., The Reader's Digest Merry Christmas Songbook (Pleasantville, NY: Readers Digest Association, revised 2003)

Oliver Wendell Holmes once declared this hymn by Edmund Hamilton Sears to be "one of the finest and most beautiful ever written." Sears, a retiring young Unitarian minister in Massachusetts, was dismayed by such public praise, saying he preferred to lead a quiet life in some half-forgotten parish, Fame dogged him, however, as well it might when "It Came Upon the Midnight Clear" was one of his early efforts. The poem was first published in 1849 in a church magazine and was adapted the following year to a tune composed by Richard Storrs Willis. Willis, by that time an eminent editor and critic for the New York Tribune, had studied music in Europe as a young man, with, among others, Felix Mendelssohn, who so much admired Willis’s work that he rearranged some of it for orchestra.

(Author and URL  of the following information was lost)

This song is based on Luke 2 verses 8-9.
"And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified."

"It Came upon a Midnight Clear" was written by Edmund Hamilton Sears. The tune was composed by Richard Storrs Wills. Sears went to school at Union College in Schenectady, New York, and later Harvard Divinity School. He was a Unitarian, or a member of a religious denomination stressing freedom of belief, at churches in Wayland, Lancaster, and Weston, Massachusetts. He also helped edit a magazine called The Monthly Religious Magazine. He also wrote the song "Calm on the Listening Ear of Night." Wills worked as an editor of the New York Times and composed music. Other songs of his include "Carol" and "Crusader's Hymn."

Notes from the Hymnuts

Edmund Sears wrote this Christmas hymn, printed first in the Christian Register for December 29, 1849, while he was minister to the Unitarian congregation in Wayland, Massachusetts. The hymn reflects the emphasis of the Unitarianism of the times on the social implications of the gospel.

Larry Marietta's Music Notes, Sunday Morning Services at FCCB (First Congregational Church of Berkeley),  December 14, 1997

First published in The Christian Register, 1849, "It Came Upon the Midnight Clear" was written by Edmund Hamilton Sears (1810-1876), pastor of the First Unitarian Church in Wayland, Massachusetts. Of this text, noted hymnologist William Reynolds says that it is the first of "carol-like hymns from the pens of American poets. Hymns stressing the social message of Christmas--'peace on earth, good will'--are distinctly American." (Songs of Glory, p. 142) CAROL was composed by Bostonian Richard Storrs Willis (1819-1900) as the setting for "See Israel's Gentle Shepherd Stand" in Church Chorals and Choir Studies, 1850. Willis studied at Yale and then in Germany with Felix Mendelssohn, returning to New York City, where he became music critic for The Albion, the New York Tribune and The Musical Times.

William C. Egan, The History of Carols

The Reverend Edmund H. Sears wrote this carol in 1849 when he was pastor of a Unitarian Church in Massachusetts. It was published in 1850 with music adapted from a piece by composer Richard Willis. Best recording: Eileen Farrell.

Earthly Delights: Xmas Carols

This hymn was penned in the late 1840s by Edmund Hamilton Sears, a Unitarian minister in Massachusetts, reportedly at the request of his friend, W. P. Lunt, a minister in Quincy, Massachusetts. It was first sung at the 1849 Sunday School Christmas celebration and was published in Boston's Christian Register in 1850. It first appeared in Britain in 1870 when Edward Bickersteth included it in his Hymnal Companion to the Book of Common Prayer, rewording the 5th verse to remove the 'unbiblical' 'humanist' reference to a coming 'age of gold'. In Britain the carol is often sung to the tune 'Noel', an 1871 reworking by Arthur Sullivan of a traditional air. In the U.S. it is more commonly sung to a tune written for the organ in 1850 by Richard Storrs Willis, then rearranged as a hymn by Uzziah Christopher Burnap.