I've reached the land of corn and wine,
And all its riches freely mine;
Here shines undimmed one blissful day,
For all my night has passed away.
O Beulah Land, sweet Beulah Land,
As on thy highest mount I stand,
I look away across the sea,
Where mansions are prepared for me.
My Savior comes and walks with me,
And sweet communion here have we;
He gently leads me by His hand,
For this is heaven's border land.
I’m drinking at the fountain head,
I’m eating angels’ living bread;
My Savior kept me by His care,
I meet Him in the way of prayer.
There all my ransomed powers unite,
His praise to speak in worlds of light;
A joy that knows no bounds or end,
Eternal life with Christ, my friend.
Note: the later verse(s) below have been reconstructed from historical memory and may not be word-for-word identical to the original published text.
Public domain hymn text (published 1876). Words by Edgar Page Stites.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Edgar Page Stites was a Methodist minister who also worked for many years, alongside his pastoral duties, as a licensed professional riverboat pilot navigating the Delaware River, an unusual and demanding dual vocation that gave him extensive firsthand, practical experience with both the physically exacting, technically skilled world of commercial river navigation and the separate, quite different pastoral and spiritual concerns of active parish ministry, two working lives he apparently managed to sustain simultaneously for a significant portion of his career rather than treating one as merely incidental to the other.
He based this hymn's distinctive title image directly on Isaiah 62:4, a prophetic passage in which the prophet Isaiah describes a future, fully renewed and restored Jerusalem being formally renamed 'Beulah,' a Hebrew word literally meaning 'married,' deliberately picturing the covenant relationship between God and His people using the intimate, deeply personal language of marriage and betrothal rather than more distant, formal, or purely legal religious terminology more commonly found elsewhere in prophetic literature.
Within the hymn itself, the phrase 'Beulah Land' functions carefully and specifically not as a direct symbol for heaven itself, as some later, less careful readers have sometimes assumed, but rather as a symbol for the settled, thoroughly peaceful spiritual state available even now, in the present life, to a believer who has moved decisively beyond ongoing internal spiritual struggle and doubt into a condition of full, stable, wholehearted surrender to God — drawing directly on a specific theological concept sometimes closely associated with the broader holiness movement of Stites's own era, which spoke of a distinct, genuinely attainable 'second' spiritual experience or blessing available to believers beyond the initial experience of conversion itself.
Stites wrote the hymn's original verses as a personal expression of exactly this kind of settled spiritual peace he believed he had himself finally attained, and the hymn's steady, unhurried, deliberately untroubled tone throughout — describing 'Beulah Land' as a place where 'I've reached the land of corn and wine' — reflects that specific holiness-movement theology of a stable, restful 'second blessing' rather than any expectation of ongoing spiritual struggle continuing indefinitely throughout a believer's earthly life, a theological emphasis Stites would have encountered regularly within the particular Methodist holiness circles he moved in during his ministry.
