As pants the hart for cooling streams

This celebrated version of Psalm 42 was written by Nahum Tate and Nicholas Brady, appearing in their influential New Version of the Psalms in 1696. The original rendering was structured in six double stanzas of four lines each. Over the centuries, it became one of the most widely adapted metrical psalm paraphrases in the English language, spawning numerous abbreviated forms ranging from three to six stanzas. These arrangements frequently added Tate and Brady's Common Meter doxology, as seen in collections like Hymns Ancient and Modern.

Several altered variations of the text also achieved prominence. The Reverend Henry Francis Lyte published a revised four-stanza version in his Spirit of the Psalms (1834), rewriting the third stanza; this variation was adopted in both British and American hymnals, such as the New Congregational Hymn Book (No. 57) and Clement Snepp's Songs of Grace and Glory (No. 513). Another distinct revision appeared in William John Hall's Mitre collection (1836), where the text alterations were executed by Edward Osler, who assisted Hall in preparing the hymnal.