Carl Heinrich von Bogatsky

Bogatzky belonged to a worldly and ambitious family; he began life as a page at court, and his father was bent on his entering the army. He himself was even then more inclined to study; and a certain friend of his family, an old Count Reuss, a religious and clever man, induced his father to let him go to Halle and see Franke. The result was his determination to study theology, and to cast in his lot with the Pietists. His delicate health prevented him from ever taking the regular charge of a church, and he devoted himself through life to authorship, assistance in charitable undertakings, and speaking in private assemblies. His noble birth procured him admittance to the higher circles of society, and he counted many converts among the nobility of Silesia, Bohemia, and Saxony. Freylinghausen, and afterwards Franke's son Gottlieb Franke, were his most intimate friends; and the latter invited him, after his wife's death, to occupy apartments in the Orphan-house, where the last twenty-eight years of his life were spent, until his death in 1774, at the age of eighty-four. He lived long enough to see the tide of feeling in Halle turned against the Pietists who had so long swayed it, and in favour of the scepticism which was then spreading from France into Germany; and this experience darkened his later years, for in place of the veneration with which he had been once regarded, he was frequently the subject of ridicule and of attacks from the younger students. Bogatzky, with the other writers just named, were the chief authors of a certain collection of hymns, called from its place of publication the "Cöthen Hymns." Both 274 in character, and in the position it occupied in the religious history of the time, this book strongly resembled the "Olney Hymns" of Newton and Cowper; but comparatively few of its original productions are now ranked among the classical hymns of Germany. Those of Bogatzky are among the best; he composed about four hundred hymns in all for this and other collections, some of which have great thoughtfulness and dignity, but not the simplicity or melody which would adapt them for congregational use. The following was composed after witnessing a storm among the mountains of the Riesengebirge:--