Charles Sprague

Sprague, Charles. (Boston, Massachusetts, October 22, 1791--January 22, 1875, Boston). A Unitarian layman. Although a businessman without an education he wrote much verse which brought him considerable reputation and requests for poems to celebrate special occasions. One of them was read before the Harvard chapter of Phi Beta Kappa in Cambridge in 1829, and was re-published, with minor alterations, a few years later in Calcutta by a British officer, as his own work. A collection of his poems was published in 1841, and an enlarged edition in 1850. A number of his shorter poems are given in Putnam's Singers and Songs of the Liberal Faith, and a hymn attributed to "C. Sprague" is included in Hedge and Huntington's Hymns for the Church of Christ, 1853, beginning "O Thou, at whose dread name we stand."

--Henry Wilder Foote, DNAH Archives