Amanda Tinker

Source: Author’s Collection

Amanda daugh
ter of Elihu &
Allethina Tinker,
died June 20, 1811
aged 5 years & 10
months.

 So fades the lovely
blooming flower;
Sweet smiling solace
of an hour.

It is a nice, gently consoling verse, don’t you think? The hymnodist Anne Steele (1717-1778) is one of the writers I discovered for the first time in these graveyards. I have found her work chosen for epitaphs in Williamstown, Lenox, and now Worthington. She was born at Broughton, Hampshire. Her father was a timber merchant and a Baptist lay pastor. She had a sad childhood: Her mother died when she was three, as a teenager she became an invalid after injuring her hip, and reportedly at twenty-one her fiancé drowned on the day of their wedding. For most of her life, she exhibited symptoms of malaria, but despite her sufferings, her religious faith enabled her to maintain a cheerful attitude. She published a book of Poems on subjects chiefly devotional in 1760 under the pseudonym “Theodosia.” Her remaining works were published after her death, including some 144 hymns and 34 metrical psalms. This hymn is still popular today, some 260 years after it was first published:

So fades the lovely blooming flow’r, 
Frail, smiling solace of an hour; 
So soon our transient comforts fly, 
And pleasure only blooms to die. 

Is there no kind, no healing art, 
To soothe the anguish of the heart? 
Spirit of grace, be ever nigh; 
Thy comforts are not made to die. 

Let gentle patience smile on pain,
Till dying hope revives again,
Hope wipes the tear from sorrow’s eye,
And faith points upward to the sky.