Empty'd of earth I fain would be. A. M. Toplady. [Holiness desired.] First published in his Poems on Sacred Subjects, 1759, as No. 25 of the "Petitionary Hymns," and headed, "The Believer's Wish." In April, 1771, he included it in a revised form, in 10 stanzas of 4 lines, in the Gospel Magazine. This revised text is repeated in Sedgwick's reprint of Toplady's Hymns, 1860, p. 30, and is that in use in Great Britain and America. The cento from this hymn, "At anchor laid remote from home" (stanzas ix. and viii.), appeared in Rippon's Selection, 1787, and is still in common use. [William T. Brooke]
--John Julian, Dictionary of Hymnology (1907)