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transcendent hope and joy in the final stanza:

My heart for gladness springs;
It cannot more be sad;
For very joy it smiles and sings--
Sees naught but sunshine glad.
The Sun that lights mine eyes
Is Christ, the Lord I love;
I sing for joy of that which lies
Stored up for me above.

Because of his own warm, confiding, childlike faith in God, Gerhardt's
hymns have become a source of special comfort to sorrowing and
heavy-laden souls. They not only breathe a spirit of tender consolation
but of a "joy unspeakable and full of glory." We have a beautiful example
of this in his Advent hymn, "O how shall I receive Thee":

Rejoice then, ye sad-hearted,
Who sit in deepest gloom,
Who mourn o'er joys departed,
And tremble at your doom;
He who alone can cheer you
Is standing at the door;
He brings His pity near you,
And bids you weep no more.

In Gerhardt's hymns we find a transition to the modern subjective note in
hymnody. Sixteen of his hymns begin with the pronoun, "I." They are not
characterized, however, by the weak sentimentality so often found in the
hymns of our own day, for Gerhardt never lost sight of the greatest
objective truth revealed to men--justification by faith alone.
Nevertheless, because of his constant emphasis on the love of God and
because his hymns are truly "songs of the heart," they possess a degree
of emotional warmth that is lacking in the earlier Lutheran hymns.

His hymns on the glories of nature have never been surpassed. In
contemplating the beauty of created things he is ever praising the
Creator. His famous evening hymn, "Nun ruhen alle Waelder," has been
likened to the beauty and splendor of the evening star. In a marvelous
manner the temporal and the eternal, the terrestrial and the celestial
are contrasted in every stanza. It was a favorite hymn of the great
German poet, Friedrich von Schiller, who first heard it sung by his
mother as a cradle song. Probably no hymn is so generally used by the
children of Germany as an evening prayer as this one. The most familiar
English translation begins with the line, "Now rest beneath night's
shadow." A more recent translation of rare beauty runs:

The restless day now closeth,
Each flower and tree reposeth,
Shade creeps o'er wild and wood:
Let us, as night is falling,
On God our Maker calling,
Give thanks to Him, the Giver good.