These were the original words sung to the tune we now call “Adeste fidelis”:

 

Lord, ‘tis a pleasant
          thing to stand
in gardens planted
          by thine hand;
Let me within thy
          courts be seen,
like a young cedar,
like a young cedar,
like a young cedar,
          fresh and green.

 

(Photo of young cedar of Lebanon by “javarman3”, uploaded to iStockphoto February 17, 2006.)

 

This hymn, and the melody it was sung to, were originally published in England in 1782, and first appeared in an American text in 1801.

Joel Cohen, whose Boston Camerata recorded the hymn on the CD An American Christmas in 1993, writes that the melody’s “association with the English-language text we all know (‘O come, all ye faithful’) seems to date from the mid-nineteenth century.”