"Soft refreshing rain” – those words popped into my head when the first thunderstorms of this summer broke. As in the hymn:
We plough the fields, and scatter
The good seed on the land;
But it is fed and watered
By God’s almighty hand:
He sends the snow in winter,
The warmth to swell the grain,
The breezes and the sunshine,
And soft refreshing rain.
Anglicans sing it at harvest festival, that homely tradition invented in Victorian times by the wildly eccentric parson, opium enthusiast and last-minute Catholic convert, Robert Stephen Hawker (1803-75), vicar of Morwenstow, Cornwall.
