"For the Beauty of the Earth"

Thanksgiving is never complete without my hearing the old hymn that begins with ”for the beauty of the earth.” I’ll play it on my tin whistle if I don’t hear it anywhere else.

For the beauty of the earth,

For the beauty of the skies,

For the love which from our birth

Over and around us lies.

While our Civil War was at its height of desolation and carnage in 1863, a young Englishman named Folliott Sandford Pierpoint walked to the top of a hill above his village and saw leaves turning color and wildflowers dotting the meadow between him and the town’s old buildings. In that idyllic setting he wr...