James Waddell Alexander

James Waddell Alexander was an American Presbyterian minister, scholar, and author born at Hopewell, Louisa County, Virginia, on March 13, 1804. The son of Princeton Theological Seminary professor Archibald Alexander, he graduated from Princeton in 1820 and held several prominent academic and pastoral positions. He served as Professor of Rhetoric at Princeton (1833), pastor of the Duane Street Presbyterian Church in New York (1844), Professor of Church History at Princeton (1849), and pastor of the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York from 1851 until his death at Sweetsprings, Virginia, on July 31, 1859.

Alongside his original pastoral books and edited correspondence, Dr. Alexander made lasting contributions to church music through his skilled poetic translations of Latin and German devotional works, posthumously compiled in The Breaking Crucible and other Translations (1861). His most famous rendering is "O Sacred Head, now wounded," translated from Paul Gerhardt's German version of the medieval Latin passion hymn Salve Caput. He also provided enduring translations of the Stabat Mater ("Near the cross was Mary weeping") and Saint Bernard's Jesu dulcis memoria ("Jesus, how sweet Thy memory is").