This is a brief song that Ives wrote during his sophomore year, or else the year he graduated from Yale University. To today's listeners it is a relatively tame piece of music, yet it contains elements that would surely have irritated Ives' composition professor, Horatio Parker.

The confusion over the dating of the song stems from the version of it Ives published in his large collection of 114 Songs (1922). There he slightly changed the song, and transposed it down a half step, substituting Thomas Moore's "A Night Thought." Ives' editor John Kirkpatrick speculates that this change was made in 1903. The problem is that Ives put the date 1895 on it in 114 Songs.

This date is quite unlikely. In fact, it is impossible if one accepts the conclusion that he got his text from the published edition of the setting of the song by fellow American composer George Chadwick, which appeared in 1897. Ives also sometimes referred to the song as "I looked into the midnight deep" (the song's incipit) but he put on it the title state above, which is also what Chadwick called it, a fact that strengthens the likelihood that Ives' used the poem as he found it in Chadwick's published song.

It is a song about the constancy of love, to lines from the poet W.M. Chauvenet. In this song Ives is beginning to cultivate the habit of making the vocal line diatonic virtually throughout, but using rather quickly-changing chromatic harmonies in the piano part. Even so, the song is far from approaching Ives' later radical language, remaining late-Romantic in its harmonic style.

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