Words: , 1858.

Music: Eli­hu S. Rice, 1866.

While sec­re­ta­ry and chor­is­ter of the Bap­tist Sun­day-school at Lo­gans­port, Mr. Rice com­posed the mu­sic of this song and sent it to the Rev. Ro­bert Low­ry, then ed­it­or of the mu­sic­al de­part­ment of the “Young Reap­er,” a Sun­day-school pa­per pub­lished in Phil­a­del­phia. It was ac­cept­ed and first pub­lished in that per­i­od­ic­al. Years passed be­fore the com­pos­er real­ized its pop­u­lar­i­ty.

“The first no­tice I re­ceived,” he says, “of the fa­vor­a­ble re­cep­tion of ‘Shall we meet’ by the mu­sic­al pub­lic was from Mr. Sank­ey, in a ve­ry kind let­ter writ­ten in Au­gust, 1879, thir­teen years af­ter its first pub­li­ca­tion. While mu­sic has been writ­ten for those words by a num­ber of mu­sic­al com­pos­ers, I have the sa­tis­fac­tion of know­ing that my mu­sic has re­ceived the choice and ap­prov­al of Mr. Hast­ings, the au­thor of the words.”