When Ives compiled his volume of 114 Songs in 1921, he included songs from his entire career. Various styles were represented, from highly conservative to the most radical music then in existence. He supplied dates for their composition from memory. This song was dated 1900, which is demonstrably inaccurate. John Griggs, the music director of the church in New Haven where Ives worked as organist during his student years at Yale, sang it in recital in 1897. The text of the song is a German poem published in 1860 by Herman Allmers (1821 - 1902), widely known in its setting by Brahms (Op. 86, No. 2). It was also submitted as an assignment from Ives' teacher Horatio Parker, who liked to have pupils write songs on such well-known texts and then study the famous versions.

The subject matter of the song is one that had immediate appeal for Ives, who would be receptive all his life to the notion of getting in touch with the Infinite—which might be the Universe of God Himself—through communion with Nature. That is what the song is about: lying in the grass, near enough to a woodland to hear the voices of the birds and animals from it, and gazing into "the wondrous blue of Heav'n" (to quote form the English translation by Chapman that Ives printed with the German original), feeling a connection to its "realms of bliss unending."

The song is in the warm key of D flat major. The vocal line is a lovely, smooth legato, beginning in Allegretto tempo and slowing a bit before the end. The accompaniment is beautifully consistent, with rippling arpeggios continuing through. Only at the emotional high point of the song, after the music has modulated quite freely for several measures, does Ives thicken the piano texture with the addition of additional notes. Ives usually avoided submitting music to Parker that would offend his conservative sensibilities, but the free modulation here sounds inevitable. Besides, with Griggs ready to perform it, Ives must have wanted to present his boss at the church (who was much more sympathetic to Ives' individuality) with the best possible version of the song.

The song is exceptionally lovely, and is the finest of Ives' several songs on non-English texts. The song was a success in Griggs' recital. As for Parker's class, it happens that this song, along with another Ives setting (Ich grolle nicht, with a text famously used by Robert Schumann), was played at a class at which Parker's own teacher, George Chadwick (president of the New England Conservatory of Music) sat in. Parker began to critique the two songs, saying he preferred Ich grolle nicht, and that Feldeinsamkeit modulated too much.

Chadwick delighted Ives by disagreeing with Parker, according to a memo Ives wrote, and preferring Feldeinsamkeit. "In a way almost as good a Brahms," Chadwick said, and added with a wink at Parker, "That's as good a song as you could write."

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