Author: Lyte, Henry Francis
Biography:
LYTE, Henry Francis (1793-1847: ODNB)
The author of at least two great Anglican hymns, “Abide with me” and “Praise, my soul, the king of heaven,” he was born on 1 June 1793 and baptised on 13 June at Ednam, Roxburghshire, Scotland, the second of three sons of a soldier, Captain Thomas Lyte (1766-1850), and Anna Maria Oliver, who is identified as his wife in the baptismal record but was not in fact married to him. They separated in 1801 and Lyte married another woman. They had moved to Ireland in 1797. Henry Francis Lyte was educated at the Royal School, Portora, Co. Fermanagh; entered Trinity College Dublin as a Scholar in 1813 (BA 1814, MA 1830); and took orders in the Church of Ireland in 1815. His health seems always to have been of some concern. After a curacy in Ireland, he went to France to recover from illness, and after that left Ireland for England, where he held curacies in Cornwall before settling at Brixham, Devon, in 1823, where he served various churches and took pupils at his home. On 21 Jan. 1818 he married Anne Maxwell at St. Mary’s, Walcot, Somerset; they went on to have five children, one of whom died in infancy. Poems, Chiefly Religious (1833) and The Spirit of the Psalms (1834) contain many successful hymns. Besides the works listed here, he published some sermons and edited the poems of the seventeenth-century divine Henry Vaughan with a memoir (Silex Scintillans, 1846). With a view probably to preferment, Lyte was admitted “ad eundem [gradum—at the same degree]” at Oxford in 1834, meaning that his TCD credentials were considered equivalent to Oxford’s. Increasing ill health obliged him, however, to spend time away from his parishes and his family. He died on his way to Italy, at his hotel at Nice, France, on 20 Nov. 1847, possibly of tuberculosis, and was buried in the grounds of the Anglican chapel there. His daughter edited his Remains with a memoir in 1850; that collection combined with a new edition of Poems, Chiefly Religious, made up his Miscellaneous Poems in 1868. (ODNB 9 Feb. 2024; DIB 9 Feb. 2024; ancestry.com 9 Feb. 2024; findmypast.com 9 Feb. 2024; CCEd 9 Feb. 2024; Julian, 796-7; Alumni Oxonienses)
Other Names:
- H. F. Lyte