Angelus Silesius was born in Breslau, Poland in 1624. He was received into the Catholic Church in 1653, taking at confirmation the name of Angelus, to which he added the surname Silesius (Silesian), by which name he is known in the history of literature. He published, in 1657, the two poetical works on which his fame rests; The Soul's Spiritual Delight and The Cherubic Wanderer. The Soul's Spiritual Delight is a collection of more than two hundred religious songs, many of them of great beauty, which have found their way into both Catholic and Protestant hymn books. The Cherubic Wanderer is a collection of over sixteen hundred rhymed couplets, full of deep religious thought expressed in epigrammatic form. In 1661, he was ordained a priest and retired to the monastery of the Knights of the Cross in Breslau, where he died.

Messenger of the Heart is Frederick Franck’s translation of The Cherubic Wanderer.