Circumstantial evidence suggests that in the first decade of the twentieth century Ives composed three Rudyard Kipling songs, one of which was
Tolerance, a setting from about 1906 of lines from Kipling’s poem
The Fires. But Kipling was notoriously difficult about copyright. Ives had first heard the lines quoted in a lecture by President Hadley at Yale, and he incorporated the song into an ensemble piece called
A Lecture by President Arthur Twining Hadley. When he came to publish
Tolerance in
114 Songs the words were described as a quotation in Hadley’s lecture, without identifying the author.
from notes by Calum MacDonald © 2005
