Mark the soft-falling snow. P. Doddridge. [Natural things emblematical of things Spiritual.] First pub.lished in J. Orton's posthumous ed. of Doddridge's Hymns, 1755, No. Ill, in 4 stanzas of 8 lines, and headed "Fruitful Showers, Emblems of the salutary Effects of the Gospel." In that and subsequent editions to 1839, the opening lines read:—
"Mark the soft-falling Snow,
And the diffusive Rain;
To Heav'n, from whence it fell,
It turns not back again."
In 1839 J. D. Humphreys, in reprinting the Hymns from the original manuscript corrected from the MS. of this hymn the grammatical error of “it” for "they" in these lines, and drew special attention thereto in the Preface to the Hymns, as evidence of his charge against Job Orton as a careless editor. Amongst modern collections the text of 1755 is retained in the Scottish Evangelical Union Hymnal, 1878, and that of the original MS. in Martineau's Hymns, 1840.
--John Julian, Dictionary of Hymnology (1907)