Andreas Gryphius

Another of these men who were the leaders of the secular literature of their age, and who also ranked themselves among its religious poets, was Andreas Gryphius, a Silesian like Opitz, and like him a member of the Order of the Palm. His great achievement was the revival of the drama, to which his tragedies gave its modern form in Germany, as the poems of Opitz did to lyrical verse. Thus they too mark an epoch in German literature, and they soon found imitators, but they have not kept his name alive among the people as some of his hymns have done. He translated several of the ancient Latin hymns very finely, and wrote many of his own, which were published at first in a small volume, under the title of "Tears for the Passion of Jesus." All his works are pervaded by a deep tone of melancholy; the transitoriness of all things is the thought that meets us again and again, and is rendered endurable only by a firm trust in God. "All flesh is grass . . . . but the Word of the Lord abideth for ever;"--this most ancient antithesis of sorrow and consolation is the text of most 177 of his hymns and odes. His own life had been so darkened by sorrow that it was impossible his writings should not bear the same impress. Before the age of five-and-twenty he had lost his father by poison, his mother, brother, and sister by sickness; he had known poverty and hunger; he had been driven from one university by fire, from another by the plague; he and his brother had both suffered persecution for their religion, and the only gleam of sunshine in his life had been the kindness of the Count Palatine von Schönborn, to whose children he was tutor. Now his patron died, and he himself was brought to the very verge of the grave by a long and dangerous illness, from which indeed he at last recovered, but with broken health and spirits, and he died suddenly at the age of forty-seven, at a meeting of the Estates of the provinces of Glogau. Yet through all this he managed to become not only a distinguished poet and an earnest Christian, but an active man in public business, and a great scholar; he understood eleven languages; he travelled over a great part of Europe, lecturing on the most various scientific subjects, and receiving honours from the universities he visited; and after his return he was for many years the chief syndic of the principality of Glogau, and discharged the onerous duties of his post to the great satisfaction of the people. Of his "Spiritual Odes," the following is one of the most characteristic:--