Frederick William Faber

Frederick William Faber (1814–1863) was born at Calverley in Yorkshire and educated at Shrewsbury, Harrow and Balliol College, Oxford, later becoming a fellow of University College. He knew the Lake District well, and its lakes, rivers and fells fill his early verse; the Wordsworth circle at Ambleside and the Oxford Movement both shaped him. He published The Cherwell Water-Lily and other poems in 1840 and a larger collection of Poems in 1856.

Ordained in the Church of England, Faber was received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1845 and joined the Oratory of St Philip Neri, becoming head of its London house. His devotional prose and above all his hymns — among them ‘Faith of Our Fathers’ and ‘Hark! Hark! My Soul’ — made him one of the best-known Catholic writers of the Victorian age. The poems here come from the 1889 Baltimore printing of his Poems (a selection first published in 1856) and from a 1894 selection of his hymns.