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. The tune to which this hymn is sung is as famous as the hymn itself. It is ascribed to Heinrich Isaak, one of the first of the great German church musicians. It is believed to have been composed by him in 1490, when he was leaving his native town, Innsbruck, to establish himself at the court of Emperor Maximilian I. It was set to the plaintive words, "Innsbruck, ich muss dich lassen." According to tradition, Isaak first heard the beautiful melody sung by a wandering minstrel. Bach and Mozart regarded it as one of the sublimest of all chorales, and each is said to have declared that he would rather have been the composer of this tune than any of his great masterpieces.