Sweet hymns of joy
On Christmas Day in 1863, poet and Harvard professor Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote the words for “Christmas Bells.” The poem reflected the despair he felt at the grinding Civil War, but by the work’s end it hoped for “peace on earth” and “good-will to men.” By 1872 the poem had been set to music and became one of the holiday season’s most enduring carols, “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day.” It has been a standard since then — “wild and sweet / The words repeat” — sung by an eclectic mix of artists, from Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash to Bing Crosby and Pedro the Lion. The carol is one example of the hand of Harvard personalities in many holiday standards. For instance, in 1849 Edmund Hamilton Sears, an 1837 graduate of Harvard Divinity School, wrote the lyrics to “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear.” In 1855, Unitarian minister John Sullivan...