Written by the Reverend Samuel Gilman of the class of 1811 for the university's 200th anniversary in 1836, it bids the school an affectionate farewell.
The tune is occasionally wrongly credited to Sir William Davenant, whose library may have been a source of the music for later publishers.
As a side effect of the change, the word throng, a verb in the original lyrics, became a noun.
In 2017 Harvard announced it was running a contest to replace the last line of the song "Till the stock of the Puritans die".
[4][5] The final replacement line was chosen as "Till the stars in the firmament die.