No Night on That Golden Shore

On page 486 of The Sacred Harp, Revised Cooper Edition, 2012 is a song titled No Night on That Golden Shore by A. S. (Aldine Silliman) Kieffer. Kieffer first published this in his book The Starry Crown in 1874.* He used slightly altered words from Charles Wesley's hymn "The City of God," and added a refrain to it. It appears in the "Cooper Book" this way:

1. O when shall we sweetly remove,
O when shall we enter our rest,
Return to the Zion above,
The mother of spirits distressed?
That City of God, the great King,
Where sorrow and death are no more,
Where saints our Immanuel sing,
And cherub and seraph adore.

2. But angels themselves cannot tell
The joy of that holiest place,
Where Jesus is pleased to reveal
The light of His heavenly face;
When caught in the rapturous flame,
The sight beatific they prove;
And walk in the light of the Lamb,
Enjoying the beams of His love.

Refrain:
There is no night on that golden shore;
There we shall suffer and sigh no more;
There shall the weary be ever blest,
Singing glad songs in the land of rest (the beautiful land of rest).

Below is the Wesley text, as it appears in Sacred Poetry: Selected from the works of the Rev. Charles Wesley, New York, NY: W. H. Kelley and Brother, 1864, p. 342

The City of God. Hebrews 12:22 Rev. 7:16,17. 8s.

1. O When shall we sweetly remove,
O when shall we enter our rest,
Return to the Sion above,
The mother of spirits distrest!
That city of God, the great King,
Where sorrow and death are no more;
But saints our Immanuel sing,
And cherub and seraph adore.

2. Not all the archangels can tell
The joys of that holiest place,
Where Jesus is pleased to reveal
The light of his heavenly face;
When caught in the rapturous flame,
The sight beatific they prove,
And walk in the light of the Lamb,
Enjoying the beams of his love.

3. Thou know'st, in the spirit of prayer,
We long thy appearing to see,
Resigned to the burden we bear,
But longing to triumph with thee:
'Tis good at thy word to be here,
'Tis better in thee to be gone,
And see thee in glory appear,
And rise to a share in thy throne.

4. To mourn for thy coming is sweet,
To weep at thy longer delay;
But thou, whom we hasten to meet,
Shalt chase all our sorrows away.
The tears shall be wiped from our eyes,
When thee we behold in the cloud,
And echo the joys of the skies,
And shout to the trumpet of God.

* Several other songs from The Starry Crown are found in the W. M. Cooper edition of The Sacred Harp: That Beautiful Land, The City of Light, The Sweet By and By, Unity, We Will Sing (A Place for Children). It also includes a tune, What Shall I Do, by Sacred Harp composer M. M. Wynne, and Lowell Mason's tune Shawmut, which is in the Denson edition of The Sacred Harp. [Thanks to Gaylon Powell for discovering the origin of these words with Charles Wesley.]