Description
Listen to the beginner piano arrangement of More Love To Thee.
Elizabeth Payson Prentiss (26 October 1818 – 13 August 1878) was an author, well known for her hymn More Love to Thee, O Christ. She was born and raised in Portland, Maine, United States, the fifth of eight children (only six survived) of the eminent Congregationalist pastor Edward Payson.
In 1845, she married George Lewis Prentiss, a brother of her dear friend Anna Prentiss Stearns, to whom are addressed some of her warmest and most intimate letters. The Prentisses settled in New Bedford, MA, where George became pastor of South Trinitarian Church. After a happy time of transitioning into the duties of a pastor’s wife and a housewife, within a period of three months she lost her second and third children – one as a newborn, one at age four. She wrote this poem in that year, 1852, on the occasion of the baby’s death:
I thought that prattling boys and girls
Would fill this empty room;
That my rich heart would gather flowers
From childhood’s opening bloom.
One child and two green graves are mine,
This is God’s gift to me;
A bleeding, fainting, broken heart-
This is my gift to Thee.
Though she continually struggled with poor health, Mrs. Prentiss went on to have three more healthy children. After Rev. Prentiss resigned his charge in New York, the family went abroad to Europe for a couple of years, returned to New York (where Rev. Prentiss pastored the Church of the Covenant), and eventually settled in Dorset, VT, where Mrs. Prentiss would die in 1878 at the age of 60.
