Democratic Sentinel, Volume 15, Number 16, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 May 1891 — Why She Wrote It. [ARTICLE]

Why She Wrote It.

Some of the most stimulating hymns have been “songs of the night. * The whispered slanders of gossips begot the hymn, “I love to steal awhile away," which has been the consoler of thousands of tried men and women. Phebe Brown, its author, a wife and mother living in poverty, used to stroll away at dusk to a neighboring grove, where she could meditate and pray. The village gossips put their own coarse construction upon these evening walks. One of them, whose house adjoined the grove, said to her, with a tone and manner more irritating than tho words: “Mrs. Brown, why do you come up at evening so near to our house, and then go back without coming in?” That evening Mrs. Brown, grieved in spirit, sat in the kitchen, rocking her babe and weeping. Then she laid the infant in its cradle, and gave expression to her feelings in nine stanzas of verse, which she entitled, “My Apology for My Twilight Rambles, Addressed to a Lady.” Several years afterward she prepared It as a hymn, suppressing four stanzas and altering a few expressions.— Youth's Companion.