Edward Caswall

Edward Caswall was an English priest, poet, and translator whose work carried Latin and continental European hymns into singable English. Born at Yateley, Hampshire, on July 15, 1814, he studied at Brasenose College, Oxford, receiving his BA in 1836 and MA in 1838. He was ordained deacon in the Church of England in 1838 and priest in 1839, then served at Stratford-sub-Castle near Salisbury. Caswall and his wife, Louisa, entered the Roman Catholic Church in 1847. After her death in 1849, he joined John Henry Newman’s Birmingham Oratory in 1850 and was ordained a Roman Catholic priest in 1852.

Caswall became one of the nineteenth century’s most productive English hymn translators. His collections include Lyra Catholica (1849), The Masque of Mary and Other Poems (1858), and Hymns and Poems (1873). Other enduring texts associated with him include Jesus, the Very Thought of Thee, Glory Be to Jesus, and See, amid the Winter’s Snow.

His first printed English version of this German hymn appeared in Henry Formby’s Catholic Hymns in 1854 with six stanzas. He expanded it in The Masque of Mary in 1858 and revised it again for Hymns and Poems in 1873. Later editors selected, rearranged, and altered portions, so no single modern four- or five-stanza form represents all of Caswall’s published material.