"O Little Town of Bethlehem"

Shortly after I recorded "St. Louis" on recorders earlier this year, I was thinking about "O Little Town of Bethlehem," the text that's sung to it.  The first verse ends with the lines "The hopes and fears of all the years / Are met in thee tonight," sung to these phrases:

The pitches to which the phrase "all the years" is sung span nearly an octave (C Bb D).  Because of this breadth and because these are three different pitches, there's a sense of the entirety of that "all."

On a smaller scale, this feature is also present with the phrase "all the earth" (A G F) at the end of the second verse:  "And praises sing to God the king / And peace to all the earth!"