The literary remains of Anna Letitia Waring are comparatively few for an author whose works were consistently before the reading public for more than sixty years. Her reputation rests largely on a single volume, Hymns and Meditations, first published in 1850 and enlarged several times during her career; she is best known today for the hymn that begins "Father, I know that all my life / Is portioned out for me," a metrical paraphrase of Psalm 31:15. She garnered a large readership in both Britain and the United States, and her verse evoked powerful emotions in its readers and praise from critics. In the introduction to the eighth edition of Hymns and Meditations (1863), the Right Reverend F. D. Huntington, Episcopal bishop of central New York, categorized the work as "a class of devotional writings having a peculiar ministry and a peculiar value," indicating Waring's evangelical working- and lower-middle-class readership. On stylistic...