ORIGIN OF THE “SWEET BY AND BY.”
In a quiet little town of some eight hundred inhabitants, in Walworth County, Wis., leading the quiet, monotonous life of a country physician, lives one of the post war times poets, Samuel Fillmore Bennett, who served “for three years of the war” as Lieutenant Bennett of the Fortieth Wisconsin Volunteers, whose name has dropped almost into oblivion, tho his song, “The Sweet By and By,” has been sung and heard by nearly every music-loving person in this and foreign lands at some time since it was written by Dr. Bennett twenty-four years ago, when he was not long home from the war. At the time of the inception of the song Dr. Bennett had returned to Ann Arbor, Mich., where he was graduated with highest honors and had become an attaché of the Elkhorn Independent. He and a musical composer, J. P. Webster, long since dead, were friends inseparable. Webster was of a despondent nature, in many ways an extremist, while Bennett was more cheery. Webster appeared before his friend one day, more than ordinarily downcast, when Bennett inquired, “What is the trouble now?” “It is no matter; it will all be right by and by,” he replied. Like an inspiration or a voice from an unseen land came to Bennett the idea of the song, “The Sweet By and By.” Turning to his desk, writing offhand with pencil, in less than thirty minutes he handed Webster the hymn worded as it reads to-day. As Bennett handed the lines to Webster, two friends, S. E. Bright, now a resident of Fort Atkinson, and N. H. Carswell who long since joined the great majority, entered the room and listened to Webster as he improvised the music on his violin, hastily jotting down the notes on a bit of waste paper; in less than ten minutes these four men were singing the hymn, “The Sweet By and By,” to an audience of one, R. R. Crosby, who remarked with tears in his eyes, “Gentlemen, that hymn is immortal.” Within a few days it was sung by school children on the streets; then it was published as a Sunday school hymn, and lastly as sheet music, translated in many languages. Aside from their intrinsic worth and beauty, the words were peculiarly fitted to the spirit of the times in which they were written, when so many hearts were sorrowing because of a “nation’s slain,” watching to grasp any comforting word or melody, with both of which “The Sweet By and By” was replete, a fact that doubtless hastened the popularity of the hymn.—Selected.