For the beauty of the earth,
For the glory of the skies,
For the love which from our birth
Over and around us lies.
Lord of all, to Thee we raise
This our hymn of grateful praise.
For the beauty of each hour
Of the day and of the night,
Hill and vale, and tree and flower,
Sun and moon, and stars of light.
For the joy of ear and eye,
For the heart and mind’s delight,
For the mystic harmony
Linking sense to sound and sight.
For the joy of human love,
Brother, sister, parent, child,
Friends on earth, and friends above,
For all gentle thoughts and mild.
Public domain hymn text (published 1864). Words by Folliott S. Pierpoint.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Folliott Sandford Pierpoint was an English classics teacher, still relatively young at only twenty-nine years old, when he wrote this hymn's text in 1864, reportedly composing it after taking a long walk through the countryside near his native city of Bath on a bright, clear spring day, taking in an expansive view of the surrounding rolling hills, green fields, and the river Avon winding below — a landscape Pierpoint had known intimately since childhood, having grown up in Bath and returned there repeatedly throughout his life even during periods when his teaching work took him elsewhere in England.
He originally wrote the hymn specifically as a communion hymn, deliberately intending its recurring refrain of thanksgiving — 'Lord of all, to Thee we raise this our hymn of grateful praise' — to accompany the specific liturgical act of receiving the Eucharist during a worship service, itself traditionally understood within Christian theology as fundamentally an act of thanksgiving in the first place, since the Greek word 'eucharist' underlying the sacrament's name literally translates as thanksgiving or gratitude.
Pierpoint structured the hymn's individual verses around a deliberately expanding range of specific things to be thankful for, moving outward in careful sequence from the beauty of the natural world itself, to the joy of human senses and relationships, to the specific gift of the church and its worship, and finally to Christ Himself as the ultimate object of the hymn's cumulative gratitude — a structured progression that some hymnologists have noted mirrors, in miniature, the broader theological movement from general revelation in creation toward the more specific revelation found in Christ and the church.
Over the decades following its original composition, the hymn's practical liturgical use broadened considerably beyond its initially intended, fairly narrow communion setting, and it gradually became far more widely known and commonly sung simply as a general, all-purpose hymn of gratitude for the beauty of the created world at large — for skies, hills, flowers, and the ordinary daily rhythms of human life — now considered appropriate for a much broader range of worship occasions and contexts than Pierpoint likely first imagined for it back on that particular spring afternoon walk above Bath.
