Authored by George Gregory, this metrical version of Psalm 42 was first published in 1787 within his English translation of Bishop Robert Lowth's Praelectiones Sacrae. Gregory's text was itself a translation of the Latin metrical version of the psalm composed by Bishop Lowth. In 1819, the hymn was introduced into congregational usage in an altered form within Thomas Cotterill's Selection of Psalms and Hymns (p. 25), where it was arranged in nine stanzas of four lines.
James Montgomery subsequently featured Cotterill's altered text in The Christian Psalmist (1825, p. 58), attributing the composition in the index directly to "Bp. Lowth." In this revised and typically abbreviated form, the hymn entered Common Use across both Great Britain and North America. It achieved early adoption in the United States, appearing in the American Protestant Episcopal Prayer Book collection as early as 1826.
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