We strangers celebrated the close of the session by a merry expedition to the top of Pike’s Peak, making the ascent by the only method then available for people not vigorous enough to achieve the climb on foot nor adventurous enough for burro-riding. Prairie wagons, their tail-boards emblazoned with the traditional slogan, “Pike’s Peak or Bust,” were pulled by horses up to the half-way house, where the horses were relieved by mules. We were hoping for half an hour on the summit, but two of our party became so faint in the rarified air that we were bundled into the wagons again and started on our downward plunge so speedily that our sojourn on the peak remains in memory hardly more than one ecstatic gaze. It was then and there, as I was looking out over the sea-like expanse of fertile country spreading away so far under those ample skies, that the opening lines of the hymn floated into my mind. When we left Colorado Springs the four stanzas were pencilled in my note-book, together with other memoranda, in verse and prose, of the trip. The Wellesley work soon absorbed time and attention again, the note-book was laid aside, and I do not remember paying heed to these verses until the second summer following, when I copied them out and sent them to _The Congregationalist_, where they first appeared in print July 4, 1895. The hymn attracted an unexpected amount of attention. It was almost at once set to music by that eminent composer, Silas G. Pratt, and re-published with his setting, in _Famous Songs_, issued in 1895 by the Baker and Taylor Company. Other tunes were written for the words and so many requests came to me, with still increasing frequency, to permit its use in various publications and for special services that, in 1904, I re-wrote it, trying to make the phraseology more simple and direct. The new form first appeared in the _Evening Transcript_ of Boston, November 19, 1904. After the lapse of a few years, during which the hymn had run the gauntlet of criticism, I changed the wording of the opening quatrain of the third stanza. The hymn as printed above is the final version, of which I retain the copyright, not as a matter of money-making, for I have given hundreds, perhaps thousands, of free permissions for its use, but in order to protect it from misprints and conscious alterations.