Nicolas Hermann
The portrait of
Nicolas Hermann
in the library at Nuremberg shows a handsome, genial, yet shrewd-looking
old man, and such he seems to have been--a
man who threw himself wholly into the life
of the people around him, and found interest and
happiness in it. Few of his hymns and poems are
intended or adapted for the Church; they are meant
for his school children; for the girls and young men
to sing, instead of profane songs; for the occasions
of domestic and daily life; or for the perils and
varying fortunes of a miner's hazardous calling. But
he had a fatal facility of versification, and many
of his poems are spoilt by their length, while others
are but rhymed versions of some of
Matthesius's
sermons; yet his best show that he had in good
measure the real gift of song, and mark a new style
in German hymnology, not the grave and lofty tone
that had been caught from the Psalms of David, but
the simple, earnest, picturesque manner of the popular
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songs. He was a passionate lover of music, and
when old and infirm could picture heaven to himself
no otherwise than as a place of delicious and joyful
harmony. He writes once: "Every organist or
lutanist in that life too will take some holy text,
and strike upon his organ or his lute; and every one
will be able to sing at sight and by himself four or
five different parts. There will be no more confusion
and mistakes, which now often put many a good
musician quite out of heart, especially when he has
to begin again several times over." He died in 1561.
The hymns of these authors most frequently to be
met with, are of course those adapted to Church use.
A morning hymn by Matthesius--
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"My inmost heart now raises,
In this fair morning hour,
A hymn of thankful praises
To God's almighty power"--
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was the favourite morning hymn of Gustavus Adolphus.
Many of Nicolas Hermann's
hymns
are to be found in all German hymn-books.
One of these is the following
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