Leav­ing school af­ter eighth grade, Hoppe worked as a sten­o­graph­er in Mil­wau­kee, Wis­con­sin. She be­gan writ­ing pa­tri­o­tic vers­es in ear­ly child­hood; by age 25 she was writ­ing spir­it­u­al po­e­try. Some of her po­ems ap­peared in the Northwestern Lu­ther­an, a per­i­od­i­cal of the Wis­con­sin Evan­gel­ic­al Lu­ther­an Sy­nod, of which she was a mem­ber. These came to the at­ten­tion of Dr. Adolf Hult of Au­gus­ta­na Sem­in­a­ry, Rock Is­land, Il­li­nois, who in­flu­enced her to write her Songs for the Church Year (1928). Sev­er­al hymn­als in­clud­ed her work, which was usu­al­ly set to tra­di­tion­al chor­ale mel­o­dies, al­though she al­so made a num­ber of trans­la­tions. Hoppe said of her work:

Ma­ny of my hymns have been writ­ten on my way to and from church and to and from work. I util­ize my lunch hours for typ­ing the hymns and keep­ing up cor­res­pondence…still I find a min­ute here and there in which to jot down some verse.

Sources

Hymns

1. Desire of Every Nation
2. Jesus, O Precious Name
3. Precious Child, So Sweetly Sleeping
4. Repent, the Kingdom Draweth Nigh
5. Rise, Arise!
6. Thou Virgin-Born Incarnate Word

Translations

1. O Precious Thought!
2. This Night a Wondrous Revela­tion