In eight lines Goethe draws the fall of evening: over every summit there is peace, in the treetops scarcely a breath is felt, the little birds fall silent in the wood. A stillness that comes down from the mountains to the forest and, in the last line, to the reader.
«Only wait — soon you too will rest.» That close turns the landscape into a promise — of rest, perhaps of death — spoken with an undramatic sweetness. Goethe wrote it in pencil on the wall of a hunting hut in 1780; it is among the most perfect poems in the German language.
The verse is kept in German. Translating it in passing would replace the work with a paraphrase of it.