This poem was written in 1848 by Oliver Wendell Holmes and published as a Sunday Hymn in the Atlantic Monthly in December, 1859. Homes had founded this magazine in 1857 and  became famous for, among other things, his books entitled Over the Teacups, The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, and The Professor at the Breakfast Table. This hymn occurs at the end of his essays in the latter book, and is preceded by the following introduction: “Thanks to all those friends who from time to time have sent their messages of kindly recognition and fellow-feeling. Peace to all such as may have been vexed in spirit by any utterance the pages have repeated. They will doubtless forget the moment the difference in the lines of truth we look at through our human prisms, and join in singing (inwardly) this hymn to the Source of the light we all need to lead us, and the warmth which can make us all brothers.”

Holmes was born on August 29, 1809, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and graduated from Harvard in 1829. He was a brilliant lecturer, teacher, and writer, becoming a leading literary figure in the United States. Appointed professor of anatomy and physiology at Harvard in 1847, he retained that post for 35 years. He was a Unitarian, though his hymn is acceptable to Trinitarians. He died at Cambridge, Massachusetts, on October 7, 1894.

The tune PARK STREET, which is also used for SDAH 393, “Lord of the Sabbath,” probably obtains its name from the Congregational church in Park Street, Boston, which was an old Puritan meetinghouse and a stronghold of orthodoxy. The music is an arrangement of a composition in 1810 by Frederick Marco Antonio Venua (1788-1872), a member of the Royal Society of Musicians in England. It was introduced into church music in 1820 in a hymnal compiled by the Handel and Haydn Society of Boston, Massachusetts.