Meeting of the Waters, The

There is not in the wide world a valley so sweet
As that vale in whose bosom the bright waters meet;
Oh! the last rays of feeling and life must depart,
Ere the bloom of that valley shall fade from my heart.

Yet it was not that nature had shed o’er the scene
Her purest of crystal and brightest of green;
‘Twas not her soft magic of streamlet or hill,
Oh! no, — it was something more exquisite still.

‘Twas that friends, the beloved of my bosom, were near,
Who made every dear scene of enchantment more dear,
And who felt how the best charms of nature improve,
When we see them reflected from looks that we love.

Sweet vale of Ovoca! how calm could I rest
In thy bosom of shade, with the friends I love best,
Where the storms that we feel in this cold world should cease,
And our hearts, like thy waters, be mingled in peace.

This is not specifically a music hall song, and falls in to the category of songs sung in the Halls that were written much earlier . It was a very popular song in Victorian times, sung in Music Halls, minstrel shows and respectable ballad concerts. It was also sung in the parlours of the respectable middle classes, it appears in Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies described by Turner and Miall as “a foundation stone of 19th-century parlour balladry”. Moore set his poem to the traditional Irish air The Old Head of Dennis.

We have evidence from the diaries of Charles Rice that it was being sung in London’s tavern singing rooms in 1840, these were venues that in many cases evolved into Music Halls proper . Searches in London-based trade newspaper of the Halls, The Era, seem to indicate it was widely sung in the Halls, but not associated with any one particular singer.

It was widely printed in songbooks and broadsides on both sides of the Atlantic.