This is the first version of a song that Ives included in his self-published collection of 114 Songs. As is often the case when Ives later recycled his music, the musical setting is more apt to the original version than in the version that he chose for publication in 1922.

Unlike subsequent versions of the song, this treatment is strophic, with three verses Ives found in a church hymnal, being a paraphrase by John Mason Neale from De contemptu mundi by St. Bernard of Cluny, a twelfth century French cleric. Ives would later use this source (and adapt the music of this song) for use in his most conservative major work, the cantata The Celestial Country (1902). Ives also reworked this song for Horatio Parker by adapting it to a Heinrich Heine text Parker had assigned him, Du bist wie eine Blume.

© All Music Guide