This appears to have been a song written by Charles Ives for Horatio Parker, his musical composition professor at Yale University.

Twenty-five years later, having suffered a heart attack and diagnosed with diabetes, Ives was working on a project to publish the most readily performable of his music. This took the form of two volumes: Piano Sonata no. 2 ("Concord") could, of course, be played by one person. As the score to the first sonata was missing, it was the only full-scale finished work that could represent Ives. The other finished large-scale works of chamber music (the four violin sonatas and the two string quartets) had been proclaimed unplayable by leading musicians of the day.

So the only remaining way for Ives to present his music in form that he knew could be performed was in a volume of songs. Eventually, he decided to include just all of his songs in it, leaving out only early versions of some of them and those that could not be printed for copyright reasons.

When he came across the manuscript for this song, he found he had not credited the author of the words, and could not remember who it was, so he simply wrote "Author unknown to composer." In reality, the poem is by Carl Parmo Ploug, a Danish poet, as rendered into English by Kappey.

Ives grouped this song with seven others designated "Eight Sentimental Ballads." He made the presence of this and similar groupings of songs quite clear in the Table of Contents of the volume, perhaps hoping that those who might be interested in finding a song to sing would look here for conventional, comparatively easy (on the musicians and the audiences) compositions.

The song, however, is one of the weakest in the book. A conventional bass chordal pattern supports cloying parallel thirds in the right hand, while the text is so clichéd that it is merciful of Ives to have made the song so short.



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