This Is My Father's World: A Song History
The words of “This Is My Father’s World” come from Maltbie Davenport Babcock (1858–1901), a Presbyterian minister born in Syracuse, New York, who led Brown Memorial Presbyterian Church in Baltimore and later the Brick Presbyterian Church in New York City.[1] Babcock died in Naples, Italy, in May 1901, and that same year selections from his sermons and poems were issued as Thoughts for Every-Day Living, the book in which this poem was published.[1][2] As Babcock wrote it, the poem ran to sixteen short stanzas, far more than any hymnal prints; editors have trimmed and rearranged it in various ways.[2]
John Frederick Kensett, An October Day in the White Mountains, 1854. Cleveland Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).
The familiar tune, TERRA BEATA, is the work of Franklin L. Sheppard (1852–1930), a friend of Babcock, who fitted it to the text for Alleluia, a 1915 Sunday-school hymnal for Presbyterians that he edited himself.[3] Sheppard arranged rather than composed the melody: it rests on a traditional English folk tune, another form of which had already appeared as RUSPER in The English Hymnal of 1906.[3] Hymnary.org lists the text in several hundred hymnals, far more than any other of Babcock’s two dozen or so hymn texts.[1][2]
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