Charles Ives had the benefit one of the happiest romances in musical history. In 1908 he married Harmony Twichell, the daughter of Rev. Joseph Twichell and Julia Harmony Cushman Twichell. Rev. Twichell was one of Connecticut's most beloved clergymen, known for his sweet and sunny disposition, and was a best friend of Mark Twain, called by Harmony "Uncle Mark."

Not untypically for the time, Ives waited until he was well established in business before he married at the age of 34. Rather more unusually, Harmony had worked for several years as a nurse at several settlement houses in Chicago, New York, and New England, and was 30 at the time. Their courtship was long and genteel—"we were very discreet in those days," Harmony later said.

Harmony was a very expressive letter-writer, and her side of their correspondence (little of his survives) reveals a growing, all-inclusive, and mature love that never seemed to desert the couple over their 44-year life together, surviving the heartbreak of her miscarriage and hysterectomy, her father's sudden decline into senility, Ives' disappointments at not being accepted as a composer, and his prematurely debilitating heart condition, diabetes, and cataracts.

Ives' biographer Jan Swafford (Charles Ives: A Life with Music, 1996) convincingly argues that Ives' love and marriage with Harmony gave him what lifted his music from unfocused experimentation to greatness: a philosophical theme for his music. They were both deeply religious, in a Congregational-Presbyterian orientation highly affected by the Transcendentalist movement of the prior century, and they saw the wonder of their love as a gift from God, as a reflection of God's love itself.

Before they were married Harmony took some lines from one of her love letters to Charles and made them into the exquisite poem, "Autumn," perhaps her best. "Earth rests!" it begins, "Her work is done...[and] She turns her face for the sun to smile upon." The sun does smile "...and brings the Peace of God!"

Responding to these words, Ives wrote this song, which deserves to be ranked among the best part of the great legacy of art songs. Even though he had already experimented with proto-twelve-tone music and wild mixings of keys, here Ives turns with obvious conviction to tonality and writes in the traditionally warmly humanistic key of D flat major. Throughout the song he keeps a rhythmic underpinning displaced from the beat (syncopated) by a half-beat in the left hand, while the lovely right hand part is always a counterpoint to the serene and lovely melody of the song. The word setting is natural and unforced, and the song's emotional high point coincides with the highest note in the voice part, an F over a wide, rolled D flat chord. The ending phrase,"...And brings the Peace of God" is hushed and reverent, and expressive of secure faith in divine love.

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