Now the day is over,
Night is drawing nigh,
Shadows of the evening
Steal across the sky.
Jesus, give the weary
Calm and sweet repose;
With Thy tenderest blessing
May our eyelids close.
Grant to little children
Visions bright of Thee;
Guard the sailors tossing
On the deep, blue sea.
Public domain hymn text (1865). Words by Sabine Baring-Gould.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Sabine Baring-Gould, already responsible elsewhere in this collection for the considerably more energetic and famously hastily written 'Onward, Christian Soldiers' (hymn 29), wrote this hymn's text in 1865, this time producing a quiet, deliberately gentle evening hymn intended specifically for children's bedtime use rather than for the vigorous congregational marching occasion that had originally prompted his earlier and considerably better-known hymn.
The hymn's simple, short lines and unhurried, calming imagery of gathering evening shadows and settled 'sweet repose' reflect a genre of specifically children's evening hymn that grew increasingly popular within English hymnody during the mid-to-late nineteenth century, part of a broader Victorian cultural emphasis on structured, devotionally framed bedtime routines for children within middle-class Christian households.
Joseph Barnby, a prolific English composer and choir director who set music to a considerable number of hymn texts during this same general period, composed the gentle, lullaby-like tune most commonly associated with the words, well suited to being sung quietly by a parent or teacher to a small child rather than performed with any particular vocal power or projection, unlike the more robust congregational singing style suited to many of Baring-Gould's other, considerably more vigorous hymn texts.
That the same writer responsible for one of English hymnody's most energetic, march-tempo congregational anthems also wrote one of its gentlest, quietest children's bedtime hymns — both, by Baring-Gould's own account, written quickly and without any great personal sense of their eventual lasting importance — reflects the genuinely wide stylistic range Baring-Gould brought to his comparatively minor sideline of hymn writing across an otherwise remarkably varied career as clergyman, novelist, and folklorist.
