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Our narrow limits permit us to notice but one of the poets of that pietist school, which in Germany almost immediately succeeded the heroic school of the reformation, and of the thirty years' war. The reaction from the camp to the cloisterfrom an active objective religion to a passive subjective piety, was natural, but it was carried too far. Foremost in this purely meditative and devotional school was Tersteegen, from whom the Wesleys drew so largely in the pietist period of their history, and whose spirit imparted to the earlier hymns of the Methodist poets, so marked a mystical tinge. We must pass Tersteegen, however, to consider that amphibious personage whose identity critics have had so much difficulty in determining. Sidney Smith once said that mankind is of three sexesmen, women, and clergymen. If he meant by this that the clergyman is often bound to lift himself so high above ordinary observation as to lose the individual in the class, this peculiarly applies to the mystics of whom Angelus Silesius was the head. This sweet and popular poet is the Junius of German hymnologists, though his obscurity arose from far different causes from those which shrouded the bitter English satirist in mystery. The one sought secresy to escape fame, the other to avoid the pillory. Of the German pietist, Mr. Vaughan, in his "Hours with the Mystics," thus writes:

"The latest research has succeeded only in deciding who Angelus Silesius was not. Some Roman Catholic priest or monk assuming the name of Angelus, did, in the seventeenth century, send forth sundry hymns and religious poems-among others, one most euphonistically entitled 'The Cherubic Wanderer.' The author of this book has been generally identified, on grounds altogether inadequate, with a con

*The reader will find this noble rendering of perhaps the finest Passion-week hymn in any language, in the collection of the Evangelical Knowledge Society,

p. 22.

VOL. VI.-14

temporary named Johann Scheffler, a renegade from Jacob Behmen to the Pope. Suffice it to say that no two men could be more unlike, than virulent, faggotyminded, pervert Scheffler, and the contemplative, panthetisic Angelus, be he who he may."-Vol. i. p. 322.

With this opinion concurs a late entertaining writer in the Dublin University Magazine; on the ground that we have no right to confound the sad poet of contemplative mysticism with Scheffler, who "was apparently a hard, stern man." This apparently, however, indicates the difficulty. Sometimes the hardest men have been the most tender and sentimental poets. Byron published and pursued his wife with a bitter and relentless hostility, at the time he was delineating the passions both pathetic and heroic with all the power of his fine genius. No man gave utterance to more sublime religious thoughts than Young: no man pursued a more. miserable petty worldly policy.

On the other hand, Miss Winkworth, boldly declares the identity of Angelus with Scheffler. In this she follows the entire current of German authority. Karl Von Raumer, whose admirable edition of the great German hymn-writers is now before us, (Sammlung geistlicher Lieder, Stuttgart, 1846,) tells us, without giving the opposite hypothesis even a reference, that Angelus Silesius was merely a poetic synonym for John Scheffler, who was born in 1624 at Breslau, and who, after having filled several clerical offices in the Lutheran Church, became in 1653 not only a Roman Catholic but a Jesuit. That such was the contemporaneous opinion is shown to us by a remark handed down to us from Neumeister: Papaus hic Angelus, sed bonus. The same view as to the identity of Angelus with Scheffler is taken by the editors of the Conversations Lexikon.

But whoever Angelus was, whether a Romish controversialist, seeking in poetry a repose from and a penance for his polemical excesses, or a Protestant ascetic recluse, his hymns breathe a spirit which, however unsuitable as a frame-work for general Christian devotion, will find with all believers, periods in which they will speak to the soul in a sweet and soothing unison. Take for instance the hymn, "O du Liebe meiner

Liebe," of a part of which we submit the following rather as a paraphrase than a translation:

O Thou Love of my Beloved-
Love beyond all human ken,
Which my blessed Master movéd
To assume the form of men-
Love which with sweet pity blending
Brought Him here to bleed and die-
Him from plains of bliss descending
Brought to dark Gethsemane :

Love which when by men forsaken
Loving ever, loved them yet-
Love which by God's wrath unshaken
Braved the storms of Olivet-
Love which its own will surrendered
To the Father's love supreme-
And its blood's rich treasure tendered
Fallen creatures to redeem :

Love which with a heart unshrinking
Shame and pain bore to the last,
Love which when in weakness sinking,
Unto death continued fast:

Love which ever keeps on loving

While the life-blood's in the heart-
Love which mutely tells its loving
When the soul and body part:

Love which thus did suffer for me,
And upon the accursed tree
Lifted wrath divine from o'er me,
Can I think too much of Thee?

Never be my love diminished,
Ever be Thy sufferings blest,
Till at last, the struggle finished,
Sink I to my Saviour's rest!

So much for German hymnology, taking the word in its proper sense. It is a topic of great interest, as is evidenced by the immense popularity of the "Lyra Germanica," and the "Hymns from the Land of Luther." It is a topic which we must take a future occasion to so far examine as to enable us to follow German religious poetry down to its present period of

full lyrical power. One branch of it, however a branch which the translators before us have passed over-we can not but pause for a moment to notice. It is that of the descriptive lyrical, a form which in our own language is rare, unless it be among writers of the pantheistic or merely humanitarian schools. (The chief exception we know of is Montgomery's "A poor way-faring Man of Grief.") As an illus tration of this we have translated the following from Schubart:

THE BEGGAR'S DEATH.

The beggar on his lonely bed
In wetchedness is dying,
And yet, effulgent on his head
A crown divine is lying;
Come, quiet earth and silent grave,
His limbs forsaken cover;
He lays on you his wanderer's staff,
His pilgrimage is over.

On riches, honor, pleasures, strife,
No trust of his is centered;
He hastens naked from this life,
As naked it he entered:

A Christian man he dies in bliss,
When kings may die forsaken;
A treasure beyond price is his,
A faith in Christ unshaken.

Rough is the bier on which he lies,
On pauper help depending;
No funeral pomps for him arise,
No purchased tears descending;
Into the common earth his frame
In careless haste is hurried,
And in his grave obscure, his name
Is now forever buried.

Yet God for His great day of grace
Is that poor name retaining,
The mute entreaties of that face
Not, like mankind, disdaining;
Him whom the princes of the land
On earth were coldly spurning,
Will soon be at his God's right hand
In seraph glory burning.

My God! if 'tis Thy wise decree
That here in want I languish,
May I, like Lazarus, in Thee

Find comfort in my anguish ;
May angels bear my soul like his,
From this poor world of sorrow,
To endless plains of heavenly bliss,
To an eternal morrow.*

We can not pass from this topic without giving, from an unknown translator, the following exquisite rendering of a poem

* Observe the humanitarian paraphrase of the above, in the Pauper's Drive, by Thomas Noel.

"There's a grim one-horse hearse, in a jolly round trot;

To the churchyard a pauper is going, I wot;

The road it is rough, and the hearse has no springs,
And hark to the dirge that the sad driver sings:
'Rattle his bones over the stones,

He's only a pauper whom nobody owns.'

"Oh! where are the mourners? alas! there are none;
He has left not a gap in the world now he's gone;
Not a tear in the eye of child, woman, or man-
To the grave with his carcass, as fast as you can!
'Rattle his bones over the stones,

He's only a pauper whom nobody owns.'

“What a jolting, and creaking, and splashing, and din!.
The whip, how it cracks, and the wheels, how they spin!
How the dirt, right and left, o'er the hedges is hurled-
The pauper, at length, makes a noise in the world!
'Rattle his bones over the stones,

He's only a pauper whom nobody owns.'

"Poor pauper defunct! he has made some approach
To gentility, now that he's stretched in a coach;
He's taking a drive in his carriage, at last,
But it will not be long, if he goes on so fast.
'Rattle his bones over the stones,

He's only a pauper whom nobody owns.'

"But a truce to this strain, for my soul it is sad,
To think that a heart in humanity clad,
Should make, like the brutes, such a desolate end,
And depart from the light without leaving a friend.
Bear softly his bones over the stones,

Though a pauper, he's one whom his Maker yet owns."

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