James Henry Bancroft

James Henry Bancroft was born at Boston in 1819. He graduated from Amherst College in 1839 and completed his studies at Andover Theological Seminary in 1842. Ill health prevented him from entering the active Congregational ministry, and he died in Boston on August 25, 1844, at the age of twenty-five. Bancroft is remembered for his funeral hymn, "Brother, though from yonder sky," written in January 1842 for the burial of his Andover classmate Dudley Leavitt. The text was published in The Psalmist: a New Collection of Hymns for the Use of Baptist Churches (Boston, 1843) and achieved considerable use in nineteenth-century American collections.