Safe into the haven guide,
O receive my soul at last!
Wesley is believed to have written it when a young man, and story and legend have been busy with the circumstances of its birth. The most poetical account alleges that a dove chased by a 412 / 360 hawk dashed through his open window into his bosom, and the inspiration to write the line—
Let me to Thy bosom fly,
—was the genesis of the poem. Another report has it that one day Mr. Wesley, being pursued by infuriated persecutors at Killalee, County Down, Ireland, took refuge in a milk-house on the homestead of the Island Band Farm. When the mob came up the farmer's wife, Mrs. Jane Lowrie Moore, offered them refreshments and secretly let out the fugitive through a window to the back garden, where he concealed himself under a hedge till his enemies went away. When they had gone he had the hymn in his mind and partly jotted down. This tale is circumstantial, and came through Mrs. Mary E. Hoover, Jane Moore's granddaughter, who told it many years ago to her pastor, Dr. William Laurie of Bellefonte, Pa. So careful a narrative deserves all the respect due to a family tradition. Whether this or still another theory of the incidental cause of the wonderful hymn shall have the last word may never be decided nor is it important.
There is “antecedent probability,” at least, in the statement that Wesley wrote the first two stanzas soon after his perilous experience in a storm at sea during his return voyage from America to England in 1736. In a letter dated Oct. 28 of that year, he describes the storm that washed away a large part of the ship's cargo, strained her seams 413 / 361 so that the hardest pumping could not keep pace with the inrushing water, and finally forced the captain to cut the mizzen-mast away. Young Wesley was ill and sorely alarmed, but knew, he says, that he “abode under the shadow of the Almighty,” and finally, “in this dreadful moment,” he was able to encourage his fellow-passengers who were “in an agony of fear,” and to pray with and for them.
It was his awful hazard and bare escape in that tempest that prompted the following stanzas—
O Thou who didst prepare
The ocean's caverned cell,
And teach the gathering waters there