Collaboration between composer and poet provides a practical model to explore the balance of power between music and literature – a relationship that obviously depends upon the personalities involved. One might be forgiven for assuming that the working relationship between Hubert Parry (1848–1918) and Robert Bridges (1844–1930) would be relatively unproblematic, given the similarities between the two men on a superficial level. As well as sharing an Eton and Oxford education, a critical approach to religious dogma and an interest in evolutionary theory, both had a working knowledge of the other's art. An early musical composition by Bridges, ‘O earlier shall the rose buds blow’, a setting from Ionica (1858) by the Eton master William Johnson Craig, was much admired by Gerard Manley Hopkins, and as Catherine Phillips has noted, Hopkins viewed Bridges primarily as a composer until 1874; as well as publishing the Yattendon Hymnal (1895–9), and essays such as ‘A Practical Discourse on Some Principles of Hymn Singing’ (1899), ‘About Hymns’ (1911), ‘English Chanting’ (1911), ‘Chanting’ (1912), and ‘Psalms noted in Speech Rhythm’ (1912), Bridges could also count among his circle of friends such pillars of the British musical establishment as W. S. Rockstro and John Stainer.