Caroline Maria Noel
10 April 1817—7 December 1877
CAROLINE MARIA NOEL, youngest daughter of the Rev. the Hon. Gerard T. Noel, was born in London, April 10, 1817. Her first hymns, “Draw nigh unto my soul,” and “Saviour, beneath thy yoke,” were written at the age of 17. The last twenty-five years of her life were spent in increasing illness—her verses written during this time, together with a few earlier hymns, were published in the hope that they might be helpful to other invalids, and entitled The Name of Jesus and Other Verses for the Sick and Lonely, 1861. She died in London, Dec. 7, 1877, and was buried outside the Abbey Church of Romsey, by the side of her father, formerly vicar of Romsey.
A sickness prolonged for more than twenty years, with seasons of extreme suffering and weakness, so extreme at times, that the end seemed imminent; a peculiar sensitiveness of nerve and brain, which could seldom bear the presence of earthly friends; long nights and days of throbbing sleeplessness—such was the school in which were taught and learned those lessons of “submission,” of willing acceptance of “the yoke,” of “patient hope,” of trust and of glorying in “the Name of Jesus” and “the Cross of Jesus,” and in which were won the peculiar depth and power of sympathy which breathe throughout these pages.
These were doubtless the advanced and ripened fruits; but they were developed from a natural character of more than ordinary breadth and beauty. All who knew the Author in outwardly brighter days were conscious of rich and varied powers of mind, of a delicate refinement, of a singular playfulness of thought, and a love of all that is beautiful in nature and in art, together with an ever-deepening humility, which were among her early as well as her latest characteristics.
There are few who will not allow how natural it is, in prolonged sickness, to make its very loneliness into a home from which the sighs and sorrows of the outer world are gradually excluded; but here it will be observed, that in all the later poems the sympathies take an even wider range, and are specially with the bereaved. Is a mother mourning for a little child called away on the voyage homeward from a distant land? Are the family joys of Christmas mellowed by an unlooked-for loss? Does the Church mourn the sudden removal of a Chief Pastor, whose ministrations the Author herself had known and prized in her father’s house? To these and all such mourners her loving and earnest sympathies were extended; while every record of a “course fulfilled,” of a “heart that throbbed with suffering,” now “bathed in endless calm,” was hailed with deepest thankfulness.
Amid the many lights that were graciously permitted to fall across this shadowed life, and that gave so cheering and joyous a brightness to this sick room, must be mentioned the pleasure derived from the “unusual acceptance” given to this volume. Often was her heart gladdened by the testimonies received, from varied and quite unexpected quarters, to the encouragement, consolation, or help, which its perusal had afforded; while the knowledge that some of its verses were to be heard in the Church’s public services, from which their Author had been so long withheld, waa an additional source of gladness. … A few days of acute suffering were followed by some hours of unconsciousness; and then, without a sigh, she passed into the Sunshine of His Blessed Presence.
by R.G.M.
The Name of Jesus (1878)
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The Name of Jesus
1st ed. (1861): Archive.org
2nd ed. (1862): WorldCat
3rd ed. (1863): WorldCat
4th ed. (1866): WorldCat
New ed. (1868): WorldCat
Enl. ed. (1870): WorldCat
New ed. (1876): Archive.org
with memorial and appendix (1878): PDF
Related Resources:
John Julian, “Caroline Maria Noel,” A Dictionary of Hymnology with Suppl. (London: J. Murray, 1907), p. 1582: HathiTrust
“Caroline Maria Noel,” Hymns Ancient & Modern, Historical Edition (London: William Clowes & Sons, 1909), p. 824: HathiTrust