Lyrics
Like a river glorious is God's perfect peace,
Over all victorious, in its bright increase;
Perfect, yet it floweth fuller every day,
Perfect, yet it groweth deeper all the way.
Stayed upon Jehovah, hearts are fully blest —
Finding, as He promised, perfect peace and rest.
Hidden in the hollow of His blessed hand,
Never foe can follow, never traitor stand;
Not a surge of worry, not a shade of care,
Not a blast of hurry touch the spirit there.
Every joy or trial falleth from above,
Traced upon our dial by the Sun of Love;
We may trust Him fully, all for us to do;
They who trust Him wholly find Him wholly true.
Public domain hymn text and tune (published 1876), based on Isaiah 26:3 and Philippians 4:7.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Frances Ridley Havergal wrote "Like a River Glorious" in 1876, first drafting the text while living in Leamington, England, and it was published that same year in the hymnal Hymns of Consecration and Faith under the title "Perfect Peace." James Mountain composed the tune WYE VALLEY specifically for the text, and no other tune has been paired with it since.
The hymn arrived in the middle of a health crisis. While vacationing in south Wales in 1876, Havergal caught a severe cold that developed into inflammation of the lungs, serious enough that her friends feared she might die. When told how gravely ill she was, she reportedly answered that if she really was going, "it is too good to be true" — a response that startled those around her with its peacefulness in the face of possible death. She recovered, and later that year wrote this hymn on the very peace she had just been tested by.
That context gives particular weight to the hymn's central claim: peace not as the absence of trial, but as something that grows fuller and deeper specifically because it has been tested. The refrain's image — being "stayed upon Jehovah" — and the second stanza's picture of being hidden in the hollow of God's hand, safe from every surge of worry, read less like abstract theology and more like a direct description of what Havergal herself had just experienced.
Havergal died only three years later, in 1879, at forty-two. "Like a River Glorious" remains one of her most enduring texts, its confident, untroubled tone carrying the memory of the illness that seems to have prompted it.
