Ives dates this song to 1892, when he was 17 or 18. However, the words were written much later than that, and it was revised at the time it received its new text.

Ives married Harmony Twichell in 1908. A New Haven Connecticut beauty, a poet and seriously spiritual person who had spent ten years as a nurse, she was 30 to Charles' 34. The couple's joy after she became pregnant a few months after the wedding was dashed when Harmony miscarried and had to undergo an emergency hysterectomy.

In 1916 they took in some foster children, including golden-haired Edith Osborne, a sweet toddler whose health was weak and whose parents were impoverished and unable to care for her. Ultimately, Charles and Harmony Ives were quite unable to give her up, and extended their care of her. Eventually they reached an agreement to adopt her formally. If one wants to be less kind, the transaction could be characterized as purchasing the child. Ives paid a total of $40,000 to the Osbornes in 1917 dollars.

In October of 1918 Ives suffered a serious heart attack. Harmony now had her husband, as well as her declining father, Rev. Joseph Twichell, to tend to, for her father was deeply into what we would now call Alzheimer's. Rev. Twichell died in December 1918. A month later Charles, Harmony, and Edith went to Asheville, NC, the beautiful Smoky Mountain resort town that was a favored destination of fashionable Easterners because of its famous clinics and fine climate.

One day while Edith was happily playing and became flushed in the face, it occurred to Harmony to compare her to a flower. Harmony wrote the gentle poem "To Edith" (So like a flower, thy little four year face) that reflects the joy that Edith brought into their lives.

Charles remembered a song he had written in 1892. He had long ago lost the music for it, but was able to remember it. He set Harmony's words to it, revising, as he noted in 114 Songs, the piano part.

It is a lovely, flowing song and is intriguing as a mixture of Ives' 1892 harmonic sense and aspects of his fully mature keyboard style. The piano part is unconventionally widespread, through the music is securely in E flat. There are, however, a couple of dissonant "passing chords" (D major over a held E flat, moving down into a D flat chord until these chords simply evaporate, leaving a high E flat in the treble.)

Particularly touching is the way Ives uses one of his "transcendental" piano techniques, a halo of high piano sound over a lower chord, to envelop words calling Edith's kisses a "blessing."

A couple of years later Harmony wrote another poem likening Edith (plus her playmate Susannah) to a flower, which Charles set in the exquisite Two Little Flowers, Kz 139.

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