nned the following lines
has not merely imagined the nearness of the pit but felt himself standing
on the very brink of it.

Mountains of transgressions press
On my evil burdened shoulders,
Guilt bestrews my path with boulders,
Sin pollutes both soul and flesh,
Law and justice are proclaiming
Judgment on my guilty head,
Hell's eternal fires are flaming,
Filling all my soul with dread.

Of an even darker mood is the great hymn: "Sorrow and Unhappiness", with
the searching verse:

Is there then no one that cares,
Is there no redress for sorrow,
Is there no relief to borrow,
Is there no response to prayers,
Is the fount of mercy closing,
Is the soul to bondage sold,
Is the Lord my plea opposing,
Is His heart to sinners cold?

The poet answers his questions in the following stanzas by assuring
himself that the Sun of God's grace can and will pierce even his "cloud
of despair", and that he must wait therefore in quietness and trust:

O my soul, be quiet then!
Jesus will redress thy sadness,
Jesus will restore thy gladness,
Jesus will thy help remain.
Jesus is thy solace ever
And thy hope in life and death;
Jesus will thee soon deliver;
Thou must cling to that blest faith.

The uncertainty of life and its fortunes furnished a favored theme for
many of his hymns, as for instance in the splendid--

Sorrow and gladness oft journey together,
Trouble and happiness swift company keep;
Luck and misfortune change like the weather;
Sunshine and clouds quickly vary their sweep.

which is, poetically at least, one of his finest compositions. The poet's
own career so far had been one of continuous and rather swift
advancement. But there was, if not in his own outward fortune, then in
the fortunes of other notables of his day, enough to remind him of the
inconstancy of worldly honor and glory. Only a few months before the
publication of his hymns, Leonora Christine Ulfeldt, the once beautiful,
admired and talented daughter of Christian IV, had been released from
twenty-two years of imprisonment in a bare and almost lightless
prison-cell; Peder Griffenfeldt, a man who from humble antecedents
swiftly had risen to become the most powerful man in the kingdom, had
been stript even more swiftly of all his honors and thrown into a dismal
prison on a rocky isle by the coast of Norway; and there were o