Once in Royal David's City

Cecil Frances Alexander wrote the text of this carol for her godchildren in 1848. A year later, Henry Gauntlett set it to music; it appears in the first edition of Hymns Ancient and Modern published in 1861. Since 1919, the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols at the King's College Chapel, Cambridge, has begun its Christmas Eve service, with "Once in Royal David's City" as the Processional hymn; the first verse is sung by a boy chorister of the college's choir as a solo.
The lyrics:
1 Once in royal David's city
Stood a lowly cattle shed,
Where a mother laid her baby
In a manger for his bed:
Mary was that Mother mild,
Jesus Christ her little Child.
2 He came down to earth from heaven
Who is God and Lord of all,
And his shelter was a stable,
And his cradle was a stall:
With the poor and mean and lowly,
Lived on earth our Saviour holy.
3 And through all His wondrous childhood
He would honor and obey,
Love and watch the lowly maiden,
In whose gentle arms He lay:
Christian children all must be
Mild, obedient, good as He.
4 For he is our childhood's pattern;
Day by day like us he grew,
He was little, weak, and helpless,
Tears and smiles like us he knew:
And he feeleth for our sadness,
And he shareth in our gladness.
5 And our eyes at last shall see him
Through his own redeeming love,
For that Child so dear and gentle,
Is our Lord in heaven above:
And he leads his children on
To the place where he is gone.
6 Not in that poor lowly stable,
With the oxen standing by,
We shall see him: but in heaven,
Set at God's right hand on high,
Where like stars his children crowned,
All in white shall wait around.