Introduction

Words: Hor­ace L. Hast­ings, 1858.

Music: Eli­hu S. Rice, 1866 (🔊 pdf nwc).

While sec­re­ta­ry and cho­ris­ter of the Bap­tist Sun­day school at Lo­gans­port [Indiana], Mr. Rice com­posed the mu­sic of this song and sent it to the Rev. Ro­bert Low­ry, then ed­it­or of the mu­sic­al de­part­ment of the Young Reap­er, a Sun­day school pa­per pub­lished in [Penn­syl­van­ia].

It was ac­cept­ed and first pub­lished in that pe­ri­od­ic­al. Years passed be­fore the com­pos­er real­ized its po­pu­la­ri­ty.

The first no­tice I re­ceived, he says, of the fav­or­able re­cep­tion of ‘Shall we meet’ by the mu­sic­al pub­lic was from Mr. San­key, in a ve­ry kind let­ter wri­tten in Au­gust, 1879, thir­teen years af­ter its first pub­li­ca­tion.

While mu­sic has been writ­ten for those words by a num­ber of mu­sic­al com­pos­ers, I have the sa­tis­fac­tion of know­ing that my mu­sic has re­ceived the choice and ap­pro­val of Mr. Hast­ings, the au­thor of the words.

Sankey, p. 240