Far away in the depths of my spirit tonight
Rolls a melody sweeter than psalm;
In celestial-like strains it unceasingly falls
O'er my soul like an infinite calm.
Peace, peace, wonderful peace,
Coming down from the Father above;
Sweep over my spirit forever, I pray,
In fathomless billows of love.
What a treasure I have in this wonderful peace,
Buried deep in the heart of my soul,
So secure that no power can mine it away,
While the years of eternity roll.
Ere I knew the sweet rest of this peace of God,
I was fretting from day unto day,
Trying so hard to be treading the road
That would lead me to Christ and the way.
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 1889). Words by W. D. Cornell.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Warren D. Cornell wrote this hymn's text, and George D. Moore separately composed its accompanying tune, sometime in the later nineteenth century, during a general period when American gospel songwriting was increasingly favoring simple, direct, emotionally immediate language over the considerably more formal, doctrinally dense theological vocabulary characteristic of earlier generations of English and American Protestant hymnody, a broader stylistic shift this hymn exemplifies clearly in both its language and its structure.
The hymn draws its central governing phrase directly from John 14:27, in which Jesus tells His assembled disciples on the very night before His arrest and crucifixion, 'Peace I leave with you, My peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you' — a statement in which Jesus Himself explicitly and deliberately distinguishes the specific peace He offers His followers from ordinary, circumstantial peace of the kind that depends entirely on favorable external conditions remaining stable and undisturbed.
The hymn's repeated, extended description of this particular kind of peace as flowing continuously and steadily 'like a river' additionally echoes the closely related imagery found in Isaiah 66:12, where God similarly promises to extend peace toward His people 'like a river' rather than as a single static gift given once and never renewed, reinforcing throughout the hymn's verses this same sustained metaphor of ongoing, continuously flowing divine peace rather than a one-time static blessing.
The hymn's overall combination of a gentle, deliberately flowing melodic line together with lyrics specifically describing an inward peace understood as genuinely unaffected by outward storms and disturbances made it a particularly popular and frequently requested choice specifically for worship services focused on comfort during serious illness, personal bereavement, or other acute forms of individual hardship throughout the decades immediately following its original nineteenth-century publication, its central promise of storm-proof inward peace offering direct, practical comfort to worshippers facing circumstances the hymn's own gentle tune deliberately refused to musically dramatize or intensify.
