Ives is so well-known as a musical radical that it is a surprise to find pretty, affecting, melodic pieces among his output. He is also so well-known as a figure who affected to be indifferent to the indifference he suffered throughout his career, so associated with the image of being a visionary, that it is a surprise to find considerable evidence in his work that he might have been read to accept the life of a conventional composer of the time.

The key to this opinion is his large-scale choral work The Celestial Country. Although by that time he had often written strange, wild, unprecedented music, he had also learned the skill to submerge this side of his art in order to write music designed to avoid controversy and win acceptance. At the start, this would be the acceptance of Horatio Parker, his highly conservative composition teacher at Yale, whose courses he completed without any major arguments that we know of.

Although Celestial Country was written and premiered four years after the end of Ives' graduation from Yale, it is strongly patterned on Parker's Hora novissima, an oratorio then enjoying great success in the United States and England. Both works are on the subject of eternal life in heaven, and both find some inspiration in the New England Transcendentalist movement of the mid-nineteenth century.

Also written during the period Ives was working on his cantata are several songs that are not only mainly conventional, but seem designed to be commercial. Ives was then working as organist at Manhattan's Central Presbyterian Church, a part-time job in addition to his "day job" as clerk in an insurance agency. As such, he again wrote to keep acceptance with his listeners, persons who came to church service to worship, not to listen to Ives experimental sounds.

It was known that soon Parker would be appointing a new assistant music faculty member, and Ives seems to have been trying for that job. He quit his post at Central Church just two weeks after its forces performed The Celestial City, and probably as soon as he was informed that he would not be Parker's choice. It was his last paying musical job; thenceforth he would turn entirely to his radical music.

If Ives was seeking acceptance by an average audience, The Children's Hour could not be calculated better to achieve it. Longfellow's famous poem seems treacly now, after its most famous reading in the mass media by Bullwinkle the Moose, but then its sentimentality was in strong vogue.

For the first several measures the only unusual aspect of it is a syncopation in the left-hand pattern, but that is explained when it turns into the rhythm of the "patter of little feet" heard by the poet when the children are let into the study for the children's hour. During the appearance of the children the harmonies turn into the melting chromatic harmonies that accompany a lot of sentimental Victoriana.

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