One sweetly solemn thought

One sweetly solemn thought. Phoebe Cary* (1824-1871). Written in 1852, on a Sunday morning after returning from church. It became very popular when it was set to music by the Canadian composer Robert Steele Ambrose (1824-1908) and used in the evangelistic campaigns of Dwight L. Moody* and Ira D. Sankey*. There are many versions and variants of the text, which is usually printed as a six-stanza hymn, although editions of Sankey’s Sacred Songs and Solos, and other books, abbreviate to four stanzas. In The Poetical Works of Alice and Phoebe Cary (1882) it was the first hymn in the ‘Religious Poems and Hymns’ section:   One sweetly solemn thought  Comes to me o’er and o’er;I am nearer home...