I travel all the irksome night

Author: James Montgomery

Montgomery, James, son of John Montgomery, a Moravian minister, was born at Irvine, Ayrshire, Nov. 4, 1771. In 1776 he removed with his parents to the Moravian Settlement at Gracehill, near Ballymena, county of Antrim. Two years after he was sent to the Fulneck Seminary, Yorkshire. He left Fulneck in 1787, and entered a retail shop at Mirfield, near Wakefield. Soon tiring of that he entered upon a similar situation at Wath, near Rotherham, only to find it quite as unsuitable to his taste as the former. A journey to London, with the hope of finding a publisher for his youthful poems ended in failure; and in 1792 he was glad to leave Wath for Shefield to join Mr. Gales, an auctioneer, bookseller, and printer of the Sheffield Register newspap… Go to person page >

I travel all the irksome night. J. Montgomery. [Journey of Life.] In Montgomery's Greenland, and other Poems, 1819, this poem of 21 stanzas of 4 lines is given as:—

"A night in a stagecoach: being a Meditation on the way between London and Bristol, Sept. 23, 1815."

It was repeated in his Poetical Works, 1828, vol. iii. p. 189, and again in later editions. In the Plymouth Collection, N. Y., 1855, stanzas i., xix.-xxi. are given as No. 1116. In the Boston Unitarian Hymns of the Spirit, 1864, the arrangement is, stanza i. from this poem, and stanzas ii. and iii. from another source.

--John Julian, Dictionary of Hymnology (1907)