An extremely rare single volume containing to early Millerite hymnals, each published in 1842, the single most critical year in the movement's trajectory. In the midst of the nineteenth-century religious revival known as the Second Great Awakening, William Miller, a New England farmer, began preaching and writing in the 1830’s based on studies that led him to believe Christ's coming was imminent in 1843–1844. His preaching, coupled with the organizational skills of Joshua V. Himes and other disciples, spurred thousands to study the Bible more closely and look for Christ's return. Crucially, Millerites initially stayed with their original churches and therefore sang from those hymnals — but by the time of the 1842 "Great Tent" meetings, the movement began to publish its own small song books, and the Millennial Harp and Millennial Musings were among the first of these.

The year 1842 saw the first Millerite camp meetings — mass outdoor gatherings that electrified New England religious life. By June 1842, the first Adventist camp meeting was held in East Kingston, New Hampshire, and it is estimated that as many as 10,000 people attended at some point during the week-long session. The meeting was so successful that instead of the three camp meetings scheduled for the summer of 1842, thirty-one were held. These hymnals were the musical fuel for those gatherings.

Hymn singing was of great importance to the early Adventists. James White recalled that at the first official Millerite camp meeting in Exeter, Maine in 1842, "the singing of Second-Advent melodies possessed a power such as I had never before witnessed in sacred songs." The hymnals were not incidental — they were central instruments of revival and doctrinal formation. They encoded the movement's theology and eschatological urgency in memorable, emotionally powerful form. A typical stanza captures the spirit: "How long, O Lord our Saviour, / Wilt Thou remain away? / Our hearts are growing weary / Of Thy so long delay."

The authorship makes these volumes especially significant. Joshua V. Himes and Josiah Litch were Miller's chief lieutenants.

Himes was the movement's master organizer and publicist. He was "the principal promoter, manager, and financier" of the Second Advent or Millerite movement, responsible for its newspapers, its vast tract distribution networks, and its camp meeting infrastructure. In 1842, Millerites printed and distributed 10,000 copies of The Midnight Cry a day in New York City for four weeks — reaching a city whose population was just over 300,000 at the time. The Millennial Harp was part of this same publishing machine, and Himes himself addressed the challenge of musical diversity in the preface, noting that some hymns that might be objected to by "the more grave and intellectual" had nonetheless "been the means of reaching, for good, the hearts of those who, probably, would not otherwise have been affected."

Josiah Litch was equally formidable. A Methodist Episcopal preacher, he was best known for using Bible prophecy to predict a loss of power for the Ottoman Empire — and when on August 11, 1840, the Ottoman Empire accepted guarantees from the Great Powers, it was interpreted as a fulfillment of that prophecy, dramatically boosting the movement's credibility. Litch was appointed the first general agent of the Millerite movement, leaving his pastoral work in the Methodist Episcopal Conference to devote himself solely to promulgating Adventist ideas — thereby becoming the first paid Adventist gospel worker.

As working camp-meeting song books distributed to mass audiences in a period of apocalyptic anticipation, they were used intensively and rarely preserved — the classic pattern of high-use ephemeral religious literature. First editions of both, whether bound together or separately, represent primary documents of one of the most dramatic and consequential American religious movements of the nineteenth century, issued at the very moment when that movement was cresting toward its climactic — and catastrophic — date with the Great Disappointment of October 22, 1844.

[Adventist. Millerite] Himes, Joshua V. Millennial Harp, or, Second Advent Hymns; Designed for Meetings on the Second Coming of Christ. Boston. 1842. First Edition. 72pp

[Bound with]

[Adventist. Millerite] Himes Joshua V, Josiah Litch. Millennial Musings: A Choice Selection of Hymns, Designed for the Use of Second Advent Meetings. Boston. 1842. First Edition. 144pp.

Good - in original cloth, light tears and chipping to front hinge with cloth pressed [probably adhesed] closely to the spine. No ffep, begins with the title and title through p.16 awkwardly bound in and the remainder of the Harp a bit forward in the binding. Generally sound and complete with some minor foxing. Final leaf torn in margin without impacting text. A well worn, but stable and complete example.