Another year hath fled, renew

Composed on November 20, 1850, according to authorial manuscripts, this New Year hymn by Arthur Tozer Russell was first published in his Psalms and Hymns, Partly Original and Partly Translated (1851, Number 63). Written in three stanzas of eight lines, the text was specifically metered to accommodate its musical setting, which required the vocal repetition of each stanza's final line. In 1863, Benjamin Hall Kennedy incorporated a slightly altered version into his Hymnologia Christiana. However, when Godfrey Thring selected the hymn for his Church of England Hymn-Book in 1882, he restored Russell's original text, with only minor modernizations such as changing "hath" to "has" in the opening line. Opening as "Another year has fled, renew," the hymn achieved wide usage across Canada and other English-speaking nations.