I come to the garden alone,
While the dew is still on the roses;
And the voice I hear, falling on my ear,
The Son of God discloses.
And He walks with me, and He talks with me,
And He tells me I am His own,
And the joy we share as we tarry there,
None other has ever known.
He speaks, and the sound of His voice
Is so sweet the birds hush their singing,
And the melody that He gave to me
Within my heart is ringing.
I’d stay in the garden with Him
Though the night around me be falling,
But He bids me go; through the voice of woe
His voice to me is calling.
Public domain hymn text (published 1912). Words by C. Austin Miles.
The Story Behind the Hymn
C. Austin Miles originally trained and then worked for a number of years as a professional pharmacist before eventually giving up that entirely separate medical career altogether in order to work full time instead for a hymn publishing company, a fairly significant later-life career change from pharmaceutical chemistry into full-time religious music publishing. He personally wrote both the complete words and the accompanying music of this hymn in 1912, composing it inside a windowless darkroom he regularly used at home for his own separate hobby of amateur photography, where he had gone that particular day specifically to read and meditate quietly on John 20, the Gospel account describing Mary Magdalene's personal encounter with the newly risen Christ near His now-empty tomb, situated within a garden, early on the first Easter morning.
Miles later described experiencing the biblical scene almost as a vivid, fully formed mental picture unfolding directly in his mind's eye while he sat reading the passage in the darkened room, and he stated that he wrote both the hymn's complete words and its accompanying music together, in a single uninterrupted creative sitting, immediately afterward — a genuinely unusual case within this entire hymnal collection of one single person composing both the full text and the complete matching tune simultaneously at the very same sitting, rather than words and music being separately composed and only later paired together by a publisher after the fact, which was by far the more common working practice throughout most of this same general historical era of American gospel hymn writing.
The hymn's deliberately intimate, first-person poetic picture of quiet, entirely personal fellowship shared directly with Christ 'in the garden' made it one of the single most popular hymns specifically associated with private individual devotional singing throughout twentieth-century American Protestantism more broadly, reportedly sung by individual believers in personal quiet-time settings just as often as, if not considerably more often than, it was ever actually sung together as part of full congregational worship services.
