"Away in a Manger"

A couple weeks before Christmas last year, I listened to an album of Christmas songs sung by Bing Crosby, and I noticed something about "Away in a Manger," which - of course - is also in the hymnal.

The third line of the first verse is "The stars in the sky looked down where He lay," sung to this musical phrase (the tune is also called "Away in a Manger"):

The phrase descends (diatonically and spanning a whole octave), as if musically representing the stars' "look[ing] down."

The phrase also portrays looking down in the second verse, where the text here is "I love Thee, Lord Jesus! Look down from the sky," although "Look down from the sky" spans only a fourth (F to C).