Lyrics
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.
Comfort every sufferer
Watching late in pain;
Those who plan some evil
From their sin restrain.
Through the long night watches
May Thine angels spread
Their bright wings above me,
Watching round my bed.
When the morning wakens,
Then may I arise
Pure and fresh and sinless
In Thy holy eyes.
Public domain hymn text (1865). Words by Sabine Baring-Gould.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Sabine Baring-Gould is already discussed elsewhere in this collection as the author of the considerably more energetic and famously hastily written ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’. He wrote this hymn’s text in 1865.
This time, he produced 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 genre grew increasingly popular within English hymnody during the mid-to-late nineteenth century.
It was 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.
It was 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.
The same writer was responsible for one of English hymnody’s most energetic, march-tempo congregational anthems, and also for one of its gentlest, quietest children’s bedtime hymns. Both, by Baring-Gould’s own account, were written quickly and without any great personal sense of their eventual lasting importance.
That range 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.
