173. Praise, My Soul, the King of Heaven

The Story Behind the Hymn

Henry Francis Lyte, already discussed elsewhere in this collection as the dying vicar who wrote 'Abide with Me' (hymn 25) in the final weeks of his life, wrote this considerably more vigorous and celebratory hymn in 1834, more than a decade before his own final illness, at a point in his ministry when his health, while never robust, had not yet entered the severe decline that would eventually end his life in Nice, France.

The hymn is a paraphrase of Psalm 103, one of the most sustained songs of praise found anywhere in the Hebrew Bible, and Lyte's version preserves the psalm's own recurring pattern of calling the singer's own soul to actively praise God for specific, named benefits — forgiveness, healing, restoration — rather than offering only generalized, undirected praise.

John Goss, organist of St. Paul's Cathedral in London, composed the tune most commonly associated with the hymn considerably later, in 1869, roughly two decades after Lyte's own death, meaning Lyte himself never heard his words set to the specific melody that would eventually carry them into such wide and lasting congregational use.

The contrast between this hymn's confident, energetic tone and the quieter, more resigned tone of Lyte's later, better-known 'Abide with Me,' written by the same author only a little over a decade apart, offers a useful reminder that a single hymn writer's body of work can span a considerable emotional range across a working lifetime, shaped as much by the specific season of life in which each individual hymn was written as by any single fixed temperament or outlook.