It is most likely that Horatio Parker, the Yale University music professor whose classes Charles Ives were then auditing, assigned him to write this song to the German poetry of Heinrich Heine.

Parker made such assignments because it was accepted pedagogical practice at the time. The Austrian and German composers of the early Romantic era—Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, and their contemporaries—were the model of classical song writing. It was common for music professors in Europe (and Parker had received a European education) to assign poems that had been set by composers of this era. Once the music student had written his version, they could profitably compare his solutions to those of the earlier composer.

Moreover, German was a required subject for all freshmen at Yale, so Parker could be assured that his students would have the requisite understanding of the assigned texts. In this case the Heine poem (first printed in 1831) had been set by one of the lesser early Romantic composers, Robert Franz. It appears as the first number in Franz's collection Die blauen Frühlingsaugen (The Blue Eyes of Spring), Op. 20.

Since Ives' text reflects a change in the poem that Heine made when it was reprinted in Neue Gedichte in 1844, it is likely that Ives did not see Franz's setting. The title, which means "Spring Song," seems to have been Ives' invention, for it is neither Franz's nor Heine's. Rather, Franz's title for the collection as well as the song is also the opening of the poem.

The poem is a typical Romantic-era expression of delight in a natural setting, a grassy field, at springtime. Ives' tempo is Allegretto. The vocal line is very diatonic, and has a charming tune. Some of the harmonies reflect the chromaticism is the middle-Romantic period, except for an episode about halfway through when the key, which has been firmly anchored to C major by constant repetition of C (with a few G's and F's) in the bass, slips down suddenly to E flat major. It quickly slips down again to D major, then returns the way it came to end up again in a definite C major.

With minor musical revision, Ives replaced the German text in 1901 with an English-language text from Wordsworth, "I traveled among unknown Men," Kz 40b, in Kirkpatrick's interim catalog. In 1921 Ives chose the latter version to publish as Song No. 75 in his collection of 114 Songs.

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