The Better Land
Music: Frederic Hymen Cowen (1852–1935) · Words: Felicia Dorothea Hemans (1793–1835)
I hear thee speak of the Better Land,
Thou call’st its children a happy band,
One press of Sing plays this song on this device (3:39) and stops after the last: the piano and the words come from the score, so a key change or a slower tempo changes no sound file.
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The words
I hear thee speak of the Better Land,
Thou call’st its children a happy band,
Mother, where is that radiant shore?
Shall we not seek it, Shall we not seek it,
and weep no more? Is it where the flow’r of the
orange blows, And the fireflies dance thro’
the myrtle boughs?
Not there, not there, my child.
Is it far away, in some region old,
Where the rivers wander o’er sands of gold,
Where the burning rays of the ruby shine,
And the diamond lights up, the diamond lights
up the secret mine, And the pearl gleams forth
from the coral strand Is it there,
sweet mother, that Better Land?
Is it there, sweet mother, that Better Land?
Not there, not there, my child.
Eye hath not seen it, my gentle boy,
Ear hath not heard its deep songs of joy;
Dreams cannot picture a world so fair.
Sorrow and death, sorrow and death may not
enter there; Time doth not breathe on its
fadeless bloom, on its fadeless bloom,
Far beyond, beyond the clouds, Far beyond,
beyond the tomb, Far beyond the clouds,
and beyond the tomb, It is there,
it is there, my child! it is there,
’tis there!
About this song
- Music
- Frederic Hymen Cowen (1852–1935) (dates as OpenScore states them)
- Words
- Felicia Dorothea Hemans (1793–1835) (dates as LiederNet Archive states them)
- Language
- English, as its source states it
- First published
- in or before 1878, as IMSLP states it
- Length
- 3:39
- The score
- OpenScore Lieder Corpus; CC0 1.0, as its source states it. OpenScore Lieder Corpus (CC0)
- Offered in
- the United States, the European Union, Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway, Spain, the United Kingdom, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Canada, Australia, Jamaica, Colombia, India, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, the Philippines, Indonesia, Viet Nam, Thailand, Malaysia, Russia, Ukraine, Türkiye, Israel, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, Brazil, Peru, Switzerland, New Zealand, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Myanmar, Morocco, Iraq, Sudan, Yemen and Syria, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Uganda, Malawi and Zambia, Ghana, Mozambique, Angola, Madagascar, Venezuela
- Not offered in
- France, Mexico, Egypt, Argentina, Chile, Bangladesh, Algeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the member states of the Bangui Agreement (OAPI), Iran, Afghanistan and North Korea, and wherever the site has not read the law
Songs to sing here are made from public-domain scores: the OpenScore Lieder Corpus (CC0), the Mutopia Project (each score's licence as Mutopia states it) and the scores in Japanese Wikipedia's articles (CC BY-SA 4.0, by each article's contributors); dates and first publications as IMSLP, the LiederNet Archive, Mutopia and Wikidata state them. Karaoke videos play in YouTube's player; live channels from the iptv-org database on their own pages; stations from Radio Browser. The piano is the Salamander Grand Piano by Alexander Holm (CC BY 3.0). “K-pop” and “anime songs” are said only where a source says so. Where songs from scores are offered.