Margaret Elizabeth Munson Sangster

Margaret Elizabeth Munson Sangster was an American poet, author, journalist, editor, and hymn writer. Born in New Rochelle, New York, she began publishing while young. She married George Sangster in 1858 and resumed sustained professional writing after his death in 1871. Her editorial career included work for Hearth and Home, Christian at Work, the Christian Intelligencer, Harper's Young People, and Harper's Bazar. Through religious and general periodicals, books, stories, advice, and verse, she addressed a broad American readership.

Sangster's church life was rooted in the Dutch Reformed tradition, now the Reformed Church in America. Her connection was practical as well as devotional: she edited A Manual of the Missions of the Reformed (Dutch) Church in America for the Woman's Board of Foreign Missions in 1877. Her publications also included Poems of the Household, Easter Bells, The Joyful Life, and the 1909 autobiography From My Youth Up.

From Nazareth was circulating in print by August 1908 and was collected in her A Little Book of Homespun Verse in October 1911. Sangster presented it as a poem, not with a designated tune. Later hymnal and online editors turned the long-meter text into congregational song and paired it with more than one melody.