Zitternd freu' ich mich

Trembling I rejoice

Nor should dare to believe,

Were not the Promiser

God the Eternal!

For I know it, I feel it,

I am a sinner!

I must know it, and feel it,

E'en had not light from God

Streamed on my conscience, and shown

My soul to herself,

Clearly unveiling

Her form that sin hath wounded and defaced.

With low-bended knee,

With deep adoring amazement,

I rejoice:

I shall behold Him!

Soul, ever drawing nearer the body's grave,

Thyself immortal,

Pursue this all-divinest thought

Which thy thought can conceive.

Not that thou darest

To enter yet into the holiest place!

Within that sanctuary dwell

Joys unconceived, unpraised, unsung as yet.

Only from far I hail one mild and softened beam,

Softened to let me live;

One gleam that earthly darkness tempers here,

Of glory I may see.

How great the Prophet was who dared implore,

"If I have found grace in Thy sight, now let me

Behold Thy glory!"

So to the Infinite might pray, and find a hearing!

To the land of Golgotha came he not,

An earlier death avenged the fault

That once, but once, his God he trusted not;

How great the Prophet shows this very doom!

Him the Father concealed in a deep gloom of the mountain,

When before a mortal passed the Glory of the Son;

When the trumpet was silent on Sinai

And the voice of the thunder, as God spake of God.

No longer wrapt in night,

But in a daylight's splendour

That needs no shadows to enhance its brightness,

He now beholds, so we believe, for ages already

Far o'er the limits of Time,

Unconscious of moments that ever

Are followed by moments, -- he gazes

On Thee, O Holy, Holy, Holy Lord!

Most nameless delight of my soul,

Thought of the Vision to come,

Thou art my mighty Reliance,

Thou art the Rock, whereon I stand and gaze up to heaven,

When the terrors of Sin

And the terrors of Death

Fearfully threaten

To whelm me below!

Upon this Rock, O Thou

Whom now the dead in God behold,

Let me stand when the power

Of Death irresistibly hems me around!

Arise, O my soul, above this mortality,

Look up and gaze, and thou wilt behold

The Father's Brightness

Beam from the Face of Jesus Christ.

Hosanna! Hosanna! the fulness of the Godhead

Dwells in the Man Jesus Christ!

Scarce ringeth the Cherubims' harp here, it quivers,

Scarce sound on their voices, they tremble, they tremble!

Hosanna! Hosanna!

The Godhead in fulness

Dwells in the Man

Jesus Christ.

Even then, when one of the beams from God to our world

Illumined more clearly the prophecy, when 'twas fulfilled,

When He was despised and afflicted

As no son of man had been despised and afflicted before,

E'en then, mortals could not discern,

But the Cherubim saw

The Father's Brightness

In the countenance of the Son.

I see, I see him, that witness,

Seven long appalling midnights

Hath he doubted, and painfully wrestled

With the saddest of sorrows.

I see him!

To him appeareth the Risen One,

He layeth his hands in the print of the wounds,

Heaven and earth are vanishing round him:

He beholds the Father's Brightness in the Face of the Son,

I hear, I hear him! he cries --

Heaven and earth are vanishing round him -- he cries:

My Lord and my God!