Words: , 1818:

Mrs. Brown was liv­ing at Ell­ing­ton with “four lit­tle child­ren, in a small un­fin­ished house, a sick sis­ter in the on­ly fin­ish­ed room, and not a place above or be­low where I could re­tire for de­vo­tion.” Not far off stood the fin­est house in the neigh­borh­ood, with a large gar­den. To­wards this the poor wo­man used to bend her steps at dusk, lov­ing, as she writes, “to smell the fra­grance of fruits and flow­ers, though I could not see them,” and com­mune with Na­ture and God. This she did, ne­ver dream­ing that she was in­trud­ing, till one day the la­dy of the man­sion turned rude­ly up­on her with “Mrs. Brown, why do you come up at ev­en­ing so near our house, and then go back with­out com­ing in? If you want an­y­thing, why don’t you come in and ask for it?” Mrs. B. adds, “There was some­thing in her man­ner more than her words, that grieved me. Af­ter my child­ren were all in bed, ex­cept my baby, I sat down in the kitch­en with my child in my arms, when the grief of my heart burst forth in a flood of tears. I took pen and pa­per, and gave vent to my op­pressed heart.”

The poem then writ­ten is head­ed “An Apol­o­gy for My Twi­light Ram­bles, Ad­dressed to a Lady, Aug. 1818.” The orig­in­al has nine stan­zas, the se­cond be­gin­ning, “I love to steal awhile away.” Years af­ter, when Net­tle­ton was seek­ing orig­in­al mat­ter for his Vill­age Hymns (1824), this piece was abridged and a­ltered into the pre­sent fa­mil­iar form, ei­ther by Mrs. Brown her­self, her pas­tor (Mr. Hyde), or Net­tle­ton. Its pop­u­lar­i­ty was great from the first. In 1853 it was in­clud­ed in the Leeds H. Bk., and thus be­came known to Eng­lish col­lect­ions. It is found in Ly­ra Sac. Amer., p. 29.

Quoted in the

Music: Wood­stock (Dut­ton), , in Amer­i­can Psalm­o­dy, by De­o­da­tus Dut­ton and Elam Ives, Jr., 1829.