From the recording Dearest Home
Hymn text by Isaac Watts, set by George F. Root in the Civil War Era. Public Domain, recorded in Christ Evangelical Lutheran Church, Gettysburg, PA, the site of a Union Hospital during and after the Battle of Gettysburg, 1863. In her diary, Martha Ehler, a citizen nurse who served in the hospital there reports that the nurses sang this hymn with the wounded men in their care. Accompanied by reed organ and flugelhorn. Arr. © 2013 Dearest Home
Lyrics
THERE IS A LAND OF PURE DELIGHT
There is a land of pure delight,
where saints immortal reign;
infinite day excludes the night,
and pleasures banish pain.
There everlasting spring abides,
and never-withering flowers;
death, like a narrow sea, divides
that heavenly land from ours.
Sweet fields beyond the swelling flood
stand dressed in living green;
so to the Jews old Canaan stood,
while Jordan rolled between.
But timorous mortals start and shrink
to cross the narrow sea,
and linger shivering on the brink,
and fear to launch away.
O could we make our doubts remove,
those gloomy doubts that rise,
and see the Canaan that we love
with unbeclouded eyes;
Could we but climb where Moses stood,
and view the landscape o'er,
not Jordan's stream, nor death's cold flood,
should fright us from the shore!