The word He has spoken will surely prevail.
His life in time past forbids me to think
He’ll leave me at last, in trouble to sink;
Each sweet Ebenezer, I have in review,
Confirms His good pleasure to bring me quite thro’.
Since all that I meet shall work for my good;
The bitter, the sweet; the medicine, food;
Tho’ painful at present ’twill cease before long,
And then, O how pleasant the conqueror’s song!
William Hauser, compiler of the Olive Leaf tells that this “air [was] learned of Reverend Samuel Anthony, of Georgia, in 1841.” The tune of a Virginia version of the ‘Brown Girl’ (Sharp, i., 303) is very close to this in note-trend and character. Also ‘Pretty Saro’, Sharp, ii., 10-12; ‘Cuckoo’, Sharp, ii., 180; ‘Green Bushes’, Sharp, ii., 155; ‘Farewell, Dear Rosanna’, Sharp, ii., 243 and 244, are the same type. Negro adoptions of the tune are Marsh, pp. 144 and 173, and SS, p. 33. A variant in this collection is ‘[Rest in Heaven]’. For its relationship to the ‘[I Will Arise]’ tune family, see the song with that title in this collection. The errors in Hauser’s notation of the tune (second, fourth, sixth measures etc.) have been left uncorrected.