Spiritus aethereis veniet tibi sedibus hospes,
Haec ubi saepe canes Carmina Sacra Deo.”[8]
It is not known what became of his son, and nothing is known of his posterity.
The editor of the Selection of Gerhardt's Songs—Bremen, 1817—states in his preface: “There is at present living in Bremen a great-granddaughter of Gerhardt's, eighty-one years of age, a simple Christian soul. Her father was, as she says, an advocate in Oldenburg; of her ancestor the poet she has neither written nor oral information.”
There are three of Gerhardt's sermons extant in the library of the gymnasium of the Grey Cloister in Berlin; and the titles and texts of three more are known. They are all funeral sermons. We would close this notice of the life of Gerhardt with a few extracts from Wackernagel's preface to his edition of Gerhardt's Spiritual Songs.
“Paul Gerhardt,” he says, “may be viewed in a one-sided manner, from two quite opposite points of view, in relation to the spiritual contents of his songs. His poems appear to mirror the transition character of his age, when the personal life of the feelings, the subjective tendency, began to assert itself beside the Christian consciousness of the congregation. He may therefore be regarded as the last and the most perfect of those poets who were grounded in the ecclesiastico-confessional faith, and with him the line of the strict ecclesiastical poets closes. He may also be regarded as beginning the line of those in whose songs, praise and adoration of the revealed God recede before the expression of the feelings that master the soul in contemplating its relation to God revealing Himself to it as its salvation. The true view is, that Gerhardt stood in the fore front of his age and united in himself in the most lively manner both tendencies. Though he did not write so expressly for the congregation, so immediately in the interest of the church, as Luther, but from personal necessity, in personal temptations, yet the pulsation of his inner life was the common ecclesiastical confession; and his experiences, however personal they might be, were only waves of the flood of baptism and life which every other member of the church breathed and shared. His sorrow, and God's love, the soul's questions, and God's answers in him and in his songs, become one—so one as can only be when the experience is not only true for the individual, but also for the people and the church.
“For this reason Paul Gerhardt's are people's songs. They remind us sometimes of Friedrich Spee; above all, the glorious song,
‘[Go forth, my heart, and seek delight.]'
But how much richer and more many-sided is the Evangelical than the Catholic poet, and at the same time better known and more familiar to the people! The Catholic congregations know nothing now of Friedrich Spee; but where is the Evangelical congregation that does not know Paul Gerhardt; in what churches are not his holy songs heard? What the pious Catherine Zell of Strasburg says of beautiful spiritual songs in her hymn-book is true of him:—‘The journeyman mechanic at his work, the servant-maid washing her dishes, the ploughman and vine-dresser in the fields, the mother by her weeping infant in the cradle, sing them.' High and low, poor and rich alike, find them equally consoling, equally edifying; in all stations, among young and old, there are examples to be found where some song of Gerhardt at particular periods in the history of the inner life was engraven for ever on the soul, and subsequently became the centre point of the dearest reminiscences. Winckleman's favourite song, even in Italy, after he had passed over to the Catholic Church, was,