Paul Gerhardt -- P. 202

CHRISTIAN SINGERS
OF
GERMANY
BY
CATHERINE WINKWORTH

MACMILLAN & CO
PUBLISHERS

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PREFACE.

The hymns of Germany are so steadily becoming naturalized in England that English readers may be glad to know something of the men who wrote them, and the times in which they had their origin. Scarcely one of the numerous hymn-books which have been compiled here within the last fifteen years is without its proportion--sometimes a considerable proportion--of German hymns. This is, in fact, one of the many ways in which the literature of each nation now tends to become, through the medium of translations, the common property of both. But hymns form only a part, though an important part, of the religious poetry of Germany, which itself constitutes but one sharply defined branch of the general literature of the country. Yet it is impossible to trace the course historically of even this one channel of national expression, without being brought into contact with those great movements which have stirred the life of the people, and finding the passing fashions of each successive age, in thought or phraseology, reflected from its surface. Such a work as the present cannot attempt more than an outline of a subject which is thus linked on the one side to the general history and iv literature of Germany, while on the other it has a separate history of its own, full of minute and almost technical details. Only the principal schools and authors are described, and specimens are selected from their works; but other writers of secondary rank are mentioned, to enable readers who may be inclined to do so, to fill up the picture of any particular school or period more completely for themselves. The choice of the specimens has been determined partly by their intrinsic merits, partly by their novelty to the English public; hence nearly all the great classical hymns are named as illustrating the spirit of certain times, but they are not given in full, because they have been previously translated, and are in many instances familiar to us already. A very few, which it was impossible to pass over, form the only exceptions to this rule.

In reading the poems scattered through the following pages, it must be remembered that they suffer under the disadvantage of being all translations and from one hand, which inevitably robs them of somewhat of that variety of diction which marks, in the original, the date of the composition or the individuality of the author. Still, as far as possible, their characteristic differences have been carefully imitated, and the general style and metre of the poem retained. Verses have been occasionally omitted for the sake of brevity, and once or twice a Trochaic metre has been altered into an Iambic, where the change did not seriously affect the shape of the poem, whilst it enabled the English version to reproduce certain v striking expressions in the German. Single rhymes have been throughout substituted for double ones, cxcept where the latter constitute an essential element of the metre; this modification necessitates the addition or the omission of a syllable in the line, but makes it possible to give a more faithful and spirited rendering than can be managed within the very limited range of English dissyllabic rhymes. The frequent recurrence of particular phrases and rhymes is not accidental, but is a peculiarity of all German popular poetry from the Niebelungen Lied downwards. Besides the specimens given in this volume, many of which are rather poems than hymns, between three and four hundred German hymns in English dress may now be found in various collections of translations. Of these the chief are "Hymns from the Land of Luther;" "Sacred Hymns from the German" by Miss Cox; the "Spiritual Songs of Luther" and "Lyra Domestica" of Mr. Massie; "Hymns for the Church of England" by Arthur Tozer Russell; the "Lyra Germanica" [and the "Second Series"] and the "Chorale Book for England." Nearly all the German hymns in our ordinary hymnbooks are drawn from some one of these sources or from John Wesley. Where only the first English line is mentioned in this work, the complete hymn may generally be met with in the "Lyra Germanica," or is one of Wesley's well-known versions.¹¹[The electronic edition includes hyperlinks in such cases.]

It seems out of place in a work like this to give a list of authorities, which would necessarily be long. German hymns, like our own, have undergone many revisions, and are to be met with in very varying vi forms; of course these specimens have been taken from what appeared to me the most trustworthy sources at my command. But I may be allowed to express my obligations to the following important works:--Wackernagel's great work, "das Deutsche Kirchenlied," both in the edition of 1842 and the one now in progress; his lives and editions of Heermann and Gerhardt, and his brother's "Altdeutsches Lesebuch;" the "Geschichte des Kirchenliedes und Kirchengesanges," by Dean Koch of Wurtemberg, to which I owe many details of the biographies of the chief hymn writers; the "Geistliche Volkslieder" of Hommel; Von Hagenbach's "Kirchengeschichte," Gervinus' "Geschichte der deutschen Dichtung;" and Gustav Freitag's charming series of sketches of German life, "Bilder aus der deutschen Vergangenheit."

CLIFTON, April 1869.

CHAPTER I.
THE EARLY DAWN OF GERMAN SACRED POETRY AND SONG.
A. D. 800-900

Each Christian people has brought its own characteristic tribute to the vast treasury of devotional thought and literature, which is the common property of the whole Christian Church. The tribute of Germany is pre-eminently that of sacred song, of verse and music in combination and adapted for use in the Church and among the people. Her literature begins with a work of religious poetry, and from that time onwards has been always remarkably rich in productions of this class. The very genius of the people--its inborn love for music, especially for part-singing, its bent towards the expression of feeling in the lyrical form--peculiarly fitted it for this work; and the result has been the creation of a literature of hymns and hymn-tunes, which has had a wide influence not only within but beyond Germany. The hymn-books of Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Iceland, and in part those of Holland, consist, to a large extent (until recently it would have been correct, we believe, to say, almost entirely), of translations and adaptations from the German; which have, however, become so completely 4 naturalized among the people that their alien origin is forgotten, and they have furnished the model on which the hymns of native growth have been composed. In Switzerland, in the Protestant Church of France, and to some extent in Holland, the spread of the German hymns has been checked by the influence of the Calvinistic Churches, which have always feared to give a prominent place to art of any kind in the worship of God--rather indeed have allowed it to creep in on sufferance, than delighted to introduce it as a free-will offering of beauty. Yet here, too, hymns adopted from the German, or of the German type, have gradually made their way. In England the national character of our Reformation has left less scope for the influence of foreign elements. Our Church has distinguished its services more by the beauty of its prayers than its hymns, while our Nonconformist sects have been strongly imbued with those Calvinistic views of worship of whose influence we have just spoken. But a people with so marked a genius for poetry as the English, could not but use their gift in the service of religion as well as in secular ways; though the fact that hymns occupied a less important place in the religious worship of England than Germany, produced a marked difference in form in the compositions of the two countries. Germany's preeminence is in her hymns; but in sacred poetry not of this class, she has had no names of equal rank with those of Milton or Herbert of old, or Keble, Coleridge, and Wordsworth in the present day. In course of time, however, her hymns reached us too. There can be no doubt that the acquaintance of the Wesleys with the stores of her hymnology led them to see both the 5 beauty of this form of poetry and the immense advantages that might be drawn from it, in spreading a knowledge of the truth among the common people, and in increasing the warmth and attractiveness of worship. They not only translated many German hymns, but wrote a large number themselves in the same style; and it is from their time that the impulse dates which has led to the study of hymnology, not only of English or German, but also of Latin and Eastern growth, and to the rise among us of a large number of new and very good hymn-writers and hymn-books.

The story of the hymnology of Germany in the sense we have here given it, begins properly speaking with the Reformation. It was not until the people possessed the word of God and liberty to worship Him in their own language, that such a body of hymns could be created, though vernacular hymns and sacred lyrics had existed in Germany throughout the Middle Ages. But it was then that a great outburst of national poetry and music took place which reflected the spirit of those times; and on a somewhat smaller scale the same thing has happened both before and since that time at every great crisis in the history of the German people. The most marked of these periods are the twelfth and thirteenth centuries--the era of the Crusades abroad and the rise of the great cities at home; the Reformation; the great struggle for religious liberty in the seventeenth century; and the revival of literature towards the close of the eighteenth century, after the exhaustion that followed the Thirty Years' War.

As far back, however, as we hear anything of the 6 German race, we hear of their love for song. They sang hymns, we are told, in their heathen worship, and lays in honour of their heroes at their banquets; and their heaven was pictured as echoing with the songs of the brave heroes who had fallen in battle. The first dawn of Christianity came to the Gothic races from Greece, but in Southern Germany it seems to have proceeded from the many missionaries who were sent out by the British and Irish monasteries in the sixth century, who sought no special authorization from Rome, and did not carry with them the Roman liturgy. But the chief instruments in the conversion of the remoter regions were the Anglo-Saxon monk Winifred, better known as St. Boniface, who was martyred in 755, and Charlemagne. Both these great men saw the imperative need of some centre of unity and order to restore society and preserve anything of faith or of letters in those times of utter chaos and discord, and believed that they had found the means to this end in the unity of the Church. That they greatly promoted civilization there is no doubt, but their work, even that of Boniface, had its darker side, where it came in contact with an already existing Christianity, and forcibly repressed what was national and distinctive in its character. For wherever they went they introduced at once not only the Christian religion, but the hierarchy and liturgy of Rome, and with it the Gregorian Church music and the Latin hymns.

Ambrosian Church Music

This style of music owes its origin to Pope Gregory the Great, who ascended the papal chair in 590, and thenceforward devoted his extraordinary abilities and energy to securing the unity and independence of the 7 Church. Here, however, we are only concerned with his influence on Church music. Before his time the Ambrosian style had been widely prevalent through the Western Church. It was founded on the Greek system of music, and was introduced by St. Ambrose, with the assistance of Pope Damasius, into the Great Church of Milan in the year 386. A true instinct taught St. Ambrose to adopt for his hymns the most rhythmical form of Latin verse that was then in use, and for his tunes a popular and congregational style of melody, and thus both spread rapidly through the Western Church, and became a powerful engine for affecting the minds of the people of all classes. In a well-known passage of his "Confessions,"²²Library of the Fathers. St. Augustine's "Confessions," p. 166. St. Augustine tells us (he is addressing our Lord):--"How did I weep, in Thy Hymns and Canticles, touched to the quick by the voices of Thy sweet-attuned Church! The voices flowed into my ears, and the Truth distilled into my heart, whence the affections of my devotion overflowed, and tears ran down, and happy was I therein. Not long had the Church of Milan begun to use this kind of consolation and exhortation, the brethren zealously joining with harmony of voice and hearts. For it was a year, or not much more, that Justina, mother to the Emperor Valentinian, a child, persecuted Thy servant, Ambrose, in favour of her heresy, to which she was seduced by the Arians. The devout people kept watch in the Church, ready to die with their bishop, Thy servant. Then it was first instituted that after the manners of the Eastern Churches, hymns and psalms should be sung, lest the people should wax 8 faint through the tediousness of service; and from that day to this the custom is retained, almost all The congregations throughout other parts of the world following herein."

One tune from the Ambrosian period is still preserved in Germany to the present day, in connexion with Luther's German version of St. Ambrose's great hymn, Veni Redemptor gentium. It is a simple, dignified, somewhat quaint melody.³³It may be found in German tune-books under the name of "Nun kommt der Geidenheiland," and is No. 72 in the Chorale-Book for England.

In course of time, however, there is no doubt that Church music had become deteriorated by the introduction of a more secular style, and that this was one cause of the reaction under Gregory the Great. Yet another may perhaps be found in the fact that the Ambrosian style was an intrinsically congregational method of singing, which enabled all the people to bear a part, and not a small one, in the service; while the Gregorian, which had less melody and rhythm, and was extremely difficult to acquire, was necessarily restricted to the clergy and the trained choir, and therefore harmonized better with the hierarchical principles of Gregory.

Gregorian Church Music

It was natural, therefore, that from this period onwards, as the hierarchical element in the Church gained strength, this system should have rapidly supplanted its rival; nor would it be fair to say that this was altogether without its advantage, for in those distracted times the impulse towards unity in the Church was in many ways a true instinct towards self-preservation, and a common liturgy is one of the strongest bonds of a common 9 religious life. There is, too, undoubtedly much grandeur and beauty in this style, which adapt it for certain forms and occasions of worship; but its stiffness and monotony, and its aptness to degenerate into a nasal unmusical chant in the hands of untrained singers, unfit it for truly popular and common use. It has maintained its place in the Roman Church to the present day, and has exerted a strong influence on the music of the reformed Churches. During the eighteenth century this influence showed itself markedly in Germany in the adoption of a certain slow and uniform style of singing the old chorales, admitting only notes of equal length, and in "common" time. Recently there has again been a reaction towards the freer and more varied rhythm of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the laity delighted to assert their right to a share in the Christian priesthood, by bearing a part in the public service of God.

One thing that helped to make the Gregorian chanting an affair of the learned, was the very complicated method of notation then employed, and it was soon found necessary to establish schools, in which singers went through a training that lasted often for years. Gregory founded a famous school in Rome, with a prior and four masters, and for many generations afterwards the sofa was shown on which he used to recline while himself examining the scholars. They were mostly orphan boys who were entirely maintained here, and afterwards received appointments from the Pope. In the days of King Ethelbert, forty of them came to England, and introduced the Gregorian music into this country.

Charlemagne, like our own Alfred, was an enthusiastic lover of Church music, and especially of this style which he had learnt to know in Rome. In his own chapel he carefully noted the powers of all the priests and singers, and sometimes acted as choir-master himself, in which capacity he proved a very strict, often severe master, He extinguished the last remnants of the Ambrosian style at Milan, and it was with his approval that Pope Leo III. (795-810) imposed a penalty of exile or imprisonment on any singer who might deviate from the orthodox Cantus firmus et choralis. He not only founded schools of music in France, but throughout Germany, at Fulda, Mayence, Treves, Reichenau, and other places. Trained singers from the famous choirs in Rome were sent for to take charge of these institutions, and seem to have been not a little shocked at first by the barbarism of their pupils. One says that their notion of singing in Church was to howl like wild beasts; while another, Johannes Didimus, in his Life of Gregory, affirms that--"These gigantic bodies, whose voices roar like thunder, cannot imitate our sweet tones, for their barbarous and ever-thirsty throats can only produce sounds as harsh as those of a loaded waggon passing over a rough road."

A Benedictine Monastery

The new style of Church music naturally found its most zealous promoters in the cloisters, among whom we may name Rabanus Maurus, a pupil of Alcuin, and abbot of the great convent of Fulda, and Walafrid (nicknamed Strabo), abbot of Reichenau. The Benedictine monasteries which were henceforward founded in increasing numbers north of the 11 Alps, were for the next two or three centuries, the asylums where arts and letters were preserved through the storms of those stormy times. Every convent, in fact, constituted a little town in itself when it had attained its full proportions. It began generally in the humblest manner. The abbot of some considerable monastery would send a small band of missionary monks to some spot, chosen either for its natural advantages, or from the needs, or perhaps the earnestly-expressed wishes, of the surrounding population. First, the monks would fell the trees, and erect temporary huts for themselves; then the chapel was built and service celebrated; then more permanent abodes were constructed, and gardens and fields were brought into cultivation. Then, if possible, the relics of some saint were procured, and deposited within the altar to give a special sanctity to the place, and attract worshippers in the hope of obtaining miraculous cures, and henceforward the number of monks and dependants would rapidly increase. When the institution was completed, we know by plans still preserved in the archives of St. Gall, that it would consist of the church as centre, the monks' dwellings, the cloisters, and the convent school within the inner inclosure; around which clustered handsome buildings for the abbot's and physician's houses; for the secular school, the hospital, the lodgings for travellers, whether monks or laymen; and the smaller abodes and workshops necessary for the various artificers whose crafts here found employment. The whole of this little town, so to speak, was itself inclosed within a ditch, and in later times fortified with walls and towers.

Notker's Sequences

Among the most complete and famous of these monasteries was that of St. Gall. In that lonely but sheltered spot on the lower slopes of the Alps, and not far from Lake Constance, which gave access to Southern Germany, there was cherished for centuries a sacred fire of true enthusiasm for learning, which spread its light by degrees into many a half-barbarous court and distant convent. Here the earliest and most strenuous efforts were made to tame the rough mother-tongue of the Germans, and teach it to express as far as might be the shades of thought and feeling which the languages of Greece and Rome had so marvellously embodied, and all that the Christian faith had to say besides. There exists in its archives a very ancient Latin and German dictionary traditionally ascribed to St. Gall himself (died 638), and many other glossaries, paraphrases, and interlinear translations from the Latin. Among those who thus occupied themselves in the ninth century was a monk named Notker, whom Walafrid, then Dean of St. Gall's, strongly urged to devote himself to sacred poetry. He wrote, however, in Latin, and his hymns therefore concern our subject only because he was the originator of a form of Latin hymnology, which when translated into German gave rise to the earliest German hymns, properly so called, with which we are acquainted. This was the Latin Sequence or Prose. It was customary in all cases where a Hallelujah was introduced to prolong the last syllable, and to sing on the vowel "ah" a series of elaborate passages intended to represent an outburst of jubilant feeling. These were termed Sequences, because they followed the Hallelujah and repeated its notes, 13 and were of course sung without words. What Notker did was to write words for them, and he tells us himself how he came to do it, in a letter addressed to Bishop Luitward, to whom he dedicated a volume of these compositions. "When I was yet young and could not always succeed in retaining in my memory the long-drawn melodies on the last syllable of the Hallelujah, I cast about in my mind for some method of making them easier to remember. Now it happened that a certain priest from Gimedia came to us who had an Antiphonarium, wherein were written some strophes to these melodies, but indeed by no means free from faults. This put it into my mind to compose others for myself after the same manner. I showed them to my teacher, Yso, whom they pleased on the whole, only he remarked, that as many notes as there were in the music, so many words must there be in the text. At this suggestion I went through my work again, and now Yso accepted it with full approbation, and gave the text to the boys to sing." These Sequences spread rapidly, for they supplied the want that was beginning to be felt of melodies in which sometimes the people could join, and words which could be adapted to special occasions beyond the ordinary service of the mass. They increased in number therefore more quickly than the hymns properly so called, and gradually assumed a strictly metrical form, which at first they did not possess. Notker himself composed thirty-five of them; and one which still finds a place in our own Burial Service, the "Media vita in morte," is traditionally ascribed to him, and said to have been written while watching some workmen building 14 the bridge of St. Martin at the peril of their lives. It cannot however be certainly traced beyond the eleventh century, but from that time onwards it was in use in the Latin, and afterwards in a German version as a battle-song, which was supposed to exert magical influences.

The Heliand

It is to this same ninth century, and in one instance, to the teachings of the convent of St. Gall, that we owe the two earliest specimens of German sacred poetry. They are both Harmonies of the Gospels, and it strikingly shows the affinity of the Teutonic mind for the Jewish Scriptures, that the earliest monuments of its written literature are all drawn from this source--the translation of the Bible into Gothic by Ulphilas, the great Bishop of the Goths, who died in 388, and the two books now before us. The earliest of them is called "The Heliand," or the Saviour, and is written in Saxon, therefore in the ancient Low German dialect. It is said to have been suggested by Louis the Pious to teach the newly-converted Saxons something of the faith they had accepted, and to have been carried out by a peasant who heard in his sleep a voice summoning him to the undertaking. About thirty years later, a similar task was achieved by Otfried, a monk probably of Alemannic race, who had been educated at first at Fulda under Rabanus Maurus, then had lived many years in St. Gall, and finally removed to Weissenburg in Alsace, another of the numerous monasteries scattered along the border of Switzerland, where the mountains break down to the lakes and cultivated country of Northern Europe. Though they thus belong to the same period of time, these works were composed under widely different 15 circumstances. In Southern Germany the Romans had founded large cities, and Roman and Celtic elements were mingled with the Teutonic blood. Christianity had early made its way there, and a considerable amount of it existed before the earliest missionaries from Rome came thither. In the seventh century St. Emmeran found a multitude of priests and churches in Bavaria; the land had already gloried in several native saints before the time of Charlemagne; and culture must have made no inconsiderable progress, when we are told that the noble lady Theudelinde was able to maintain a pious and learned correspondence with Pope Gregory the Great. In Northern Germany, on the other hand, little had been done for the introduction of Christianity until Charlemagne converted the people by force, and the country long remained scantily populated and unsettled. Vast tracts of forest or heath were interrupted by solitary farmsteads of immense extent, where cattle and sheep were the chief source of wealth; for, until the close of the tenth century, there was but little agriculture; towns and monasteries existed but in small numbers and at great distances, and it was long before any churches except the convent chapels were built. Slowly the new religion permeated this wild and scattered people; but as it did so, it rooted itself the more deeply in the popular life, and bore less of the impress of the hierarchical and Roman element than the religion of Southern Germany, a distinction which has maintained itself even to the present day.

The form of the two works is contrasted as we might expect from their origin; the Heliand is written 16 in the alliterative measure of the ancient ballads, but without strophes; the work of Otfried is composed in four-lined verses with rhyme. Rhyme is a peculiarly Christian ornament of verse, and the struggle was long between accented and rhymed forms of poetry, and the ancient forms of classical metre. Otfried's is the first rhymed poem we possess, and thus has always marked an important epoch in European literature. The Heliand is not so much a Harmony of the Gospels as a Saxon epic on the life of our Lord, and it seems to have been intended to form part of a larger work embracing the whole course of Scripture History. The style is simple and naïve: the writer nowhere brings forward his own personality, but is evidently inspired by a strong love to his subject. The relation of the disciples, and implicitly the relation of all Christians to their Lord, is conceived after the true Teutonic type as that of followers bound by an oath to their duke or leader; all that expresses personal loyalty and obedience on the one hand, or affectionate condescension on the other, is brought out with quick insight and strong feeling. In general, the writer keeps very close to his authorities, but in some passages, where the heathen lays may have been recalled to his mind, he permits himself a more excursive description, and echoes of the old Scandinavian ballads float through his verse. The Sermon on the Mount specially attracts him, and he gives it with fulness and evident predilection.

Otfried of Weissenburg

Otfried, on the other hand, continually betrays his acquaintance with classical models, and the self-consciousness of the educated barbarian in the presence of a higher culture. He is constantly 17 lamenting his own incompetence and the barbarism of the German tongue; he gives fewer facts and less of the distinctly ethical discourses than his Saxon contemporary; but he much more frequently introduces episodes, sometimes similes or allegories from ecclesiastical works, sometimes mystical and moral reflections of his own. But there are passages where he rises to warmth and true poetry, as where, in describing the journey of the Magi, he speaks of the longing of the soul for its heavenly fatherland; and the very idea of thus endeavouring to make the grounds of their faith intelligible to the common people, marks him out as no common man.

The following is a version of the passage just mentioned. The rhyme and metre of the original are very irregular, and here and there a rhyme is wanting altogether; still, as its structure constitutes a marked difference between this poem and its predecessors, it seemed best to imitate, as far as possible, its rhythm, while keeping close to the meaning; but in such a process somewhat of the poetical element is apt to vanish.

MYSTICE DE REVERSIONE MAGORUM AD PATRIAM.

CHAPTER II.
A LONG TWILIGHT.
A.D. 900-1100.

Barbarian Incursions

The two centuries we have now reached are a very barren period for literature. Charlemagne had given an impulse to arts and letters of which the effects are traceable as long as there were any pupils left of the circle of learned men whom he gathered round his court. But these gradually died out, and his vast empire fell to pieces. Then came a time when men had something else to do than to read or write; had too often to fight or flee for their lives to have much leisure or thought for more peaceful tasks. The frontiers of Germany had to be secured, its lands brought under cultivation, its towns built, its social polity developed. It was not until the great defeat of the Normans in 891 by Arnulf, at Loven on the Dyle, that Germany was delivered from their attacks, and its eastern portion was kept in constant alarm by the incursions of the Hungarian and Slavonic tribes, until nearly the close of the eleventh century. Thus on one occasion, early in this century, the whole of Germany between the Elbe and the Oder was ravaged; the most horrible cruelties were practised, especially against monks and priests, and all the churches were burnt down. The 22 cause of offence was that the chief had asked in marriage the daughter of the Duke of Saxony, and had received the scornful reply that it was not meet to give a Duke's daughter to a dog,--a play on the words Hun and Hund, or hound.

A vivid description of one of these incursions is left us by Eckhard IV., a monk and chronicler of St. Gall. In the year 924, an invasion of the Hungarians took place, which lasted for two years. The wild hordes first burst into Bavaria, swept over all the south of Germany, and then vanish from our story as they pass down the Rhine. They carried with them cattle and carts containing their plunder. At night they placed their carts in a circle, lit watch-fires, and stationed watchmen outside the barrier, while within it they encamped on the ground. By day they ravaged the country, plundering and burning on all sides; so that their approach was heralded by the red glare of burning villages on the horizon. When the abbot of St. Gall heard of them, he assembled the brethren and all the dependants, and commanded that they should at once begin to make spears, and shields, and other weapons, and also prepare a fortified asylum in case of attack. He himself and the other monks put on their coats of steel, and drew over them the monk's cloak and cowl, and laid their own hands to the work of fortifying the point he had chosen, a spot at the junction of three streams, which could only be approached by a narrow way. The monks and servants would not believe in the coming danger, and so it was but just in time that they transported their valuables to this retreat. The very next day the Huns appeared. Only two persons had 23 been left in the convent, a holy woman who had made a vow of seclusion and refused to leave her cell, and a half-witted monk who could not be induced to accompany his brethren into their fortress. The former was murdered, the latter was treated with a rough good-nature, and given as much wine and meat as he could take,--"though of a truth the discourteous people, when I had drunk enough, forced me to drink more with blows," he said afterwards. The Hungarians took all they could find, and observing that the highest point of the building, the vane, was crowned by a shining cock, they concluded this to be the god of the place, and supposed his image would be of gold. Two men therefore tried to ascend the tower and bring down the weathercock, but both fell and were killed. Their companions, enraged, next endeavoured to burn down the church, but its thick walls defied their efforts, on which they withdrew to the gardens, saying that the god was too strong for them. They then sent spies to examine the abbot's place of refuge, but these reported that its natural strength and the determination of its defenders seemed so great, that it would be best to leave it alone; and so, after a long and wild banquet in the convent gardens, the barbarians gradually drew off, and fell upon the neighbouring villages. For some weeks, however, the abbot could not venture to leave his fort, fearing their return, but every day he and some of the bolder monks stole down to the abbey, and said mass at its altar. At last he heard that the enemy was really gone. One of the suburbs of Constance had been burnt down, but the town itself and the abbey of Reichenau, 24 which had been next attacked, had been successfully defended, and the barbarians were on their way to the Rhine.

By very slow degrees these wild people were either subdued and converted to Christianity, or pressed back into the vast plains and thick forests and morasses of Central Europe, and the frontiers of Germany became at peace. But within them was constant fighting still. All the great nobles claimed the right of private war; there was no regular administration of justice; trial by ordeal was practised; and a revolt against the Emperor himself appeared to his powerful vassals the most natural thing to be undertaken when they had any grievance to avenge, or when his absence in Italy offered a fair opportunity. These early Othos and Henrys of the Saxon and Salic lines, were indeed, for the most part, men of ability and energy, who strove hard to establish order and promote civilization; but their power in the State depended almost entirely on their personal character and the wealth and consequence of their families, and was weakened by their frequent absences in Italy.

The Truce of God

In Germany itself, the clergy, on the whole, frequently sided with the Emperor as against the nobles, and to some extent thus constituted themselves protectors of the common people. They treated their dependants more mildly than other lords did, and their methods of agriculture were superior to any other; they gave employment, too, to many handicrafts, and thus it was not unnatural that towns gradually grew up or rapidly increased round the great abbeys and bishops' sees. It was to 25 two assemblies of bishops, moreover, that the distracted world owed that Truce of God, proclaimed in the year 1032, which gave breathing-time to the poor down-trodden peasant or townsman, and was the beginning of a more settled state of society. It was an agreement that no violence or weapons of any kind should be used from sunset on Wednesday to sunrise on Monday, nor on any high festival of the Church, and whosoever violated this peace was to pay his fine or wehrgeld, or suffer excommunication. Many of the nobles at first refused to submit to this, and declared their intention of adhering to the good old customs of their forefathers, and fighting on every day in the week: but a succession of bad harvests and a great dearth which occurred about this time was pointed out to them by the bishops as a sign of God's anger with their conduct; and even the turbulent Normans of France yielded to this argument. Nor indeed was it untrue, for it is evident that the local scarcities of food, which were of terribly frequent occurrence at this period, were in great measure due to the evil passions and ignorance of men. From this time onwards, however, we can trace an increase in the extent of land brought under cultivation; mining was introduced in the Harz district, and the towns steadily grew in wealth and importance. But how much of heathen superstition still lingered in the most Christian and civilized places, is curiously shown by a Mirror of Confession written by a Bishop Burchardt of Worms, early in the eleventh century. There we find penances assigned for worshipping the sun, the moon, the starry heavens, the new moon, or an eclipse, and for trying to restore the moon's light 26 when eclipsed, by wild outcries, "as though the elements could help thee, or thou couldst help them." So, too, offering prayers and sacrifices by a well, at a cross-road, or to stones is forbidden, and so is the old wives' custom at the birth of a child, of placing food and drink and three knives on the table to propitiate the Parcae or Three Sisters. The good old bishop believes in trial by ordeal, but we cannot but feel a great respect for him when we find the belief in the possibility of witchcraft and in divination classed among utterly vain and empty superstitions; and when we observe the heavy penalties affixed to slaying a bondsman even at the command or by the hand of his lord, unless he were a thief and a murderer; and to selling or entrapping any human being into slavery. To the former of these offences it seems no secular penalty was then attached, the lord possessing the power of life and death over his bondsman. Yet side by side with these superstitions there was a great deal of genuine Christian faith, among the laity as well as the clergy. The separation between these two classes was not indeed so marked as it afterwards became. Many of the secular clergy were married--Bishop Burchardt imposes a penance on any one who should despise or refuse the ministrations of a married priest,--and the monks often vied with the knights in field sports, as they did with the farmer in agriculture. When the need arose of defending land or faith by arms, the abbot raised his troops like the lord of any other fief, and could even on occasion, as we have seen at St. Gall, put on his own coat of mail and become general himself. On the other hand, many knights rivalled the monks in pious exercises, 27 and the cloister was their natural refuge when pressed by conscience or the troubles of a restless life. It was in the secular school of the convent that their children were educated, and it was among the higher clergy that the princes sought for State-advisers and secretaries.

Ezzo of Babingberg

Throughout this period the literature of Germany remained exclusively in the hands of the clergy, and was written in Latin, the then universal medium of communication for the learned class. Even so truly popular a subject as the story of "Renard the Fox" was treated in Latin, for the earliest existing MS. of it is a Latin version, which it is, however, supposed was based on a Flemish original now lost.⁴⁴The earliest German version dates from 1170. This was indeed a sort of flowering time of mediaeval Latin poetry, while native German poetry was almost extinct. Only a very few German poems remain from these centuries, and these are not remarkable except for their date. The principal are two long poems, by Ezzo, a learned canon of Babingberg, on the miracles of Christ, and on the mysteries of redemption and creation.

Early Hymns

In the public services of the Church the people's share was confined to uttering the response, "Kyrie Eleison, Christe Eleison," at certain intervals during the singing of the Latin hymns and psalms. These words were frequently repeated, sometimes two or three hundred times in one service, and were apt to degenerate into a kind of scarcely articulate shout, as is proved by the early appearance, even in writing, of such forms as "Kyrieles." But soon after Notker had created the Latin Sequence, the priests began to 28 imitate it in German, in order to furnish the people with some intelligible words in place of the mere outcry to which they had become accustomed. They wrote irregular verses, every strophe of which ended with the words, "Kyrie Eleison," from the last syllables of which these earliest German hymns were called Leisen. They were, however, never used in the service of the mass, but only on popular festivals, on pilgrimages, and such occasions. The most ancient that has been handed down to us is one on St. Peter, dating from the beginning of the tenth century, of which we give an imitation, as well as we can manage it, in English; and also of a prayer from the tenth century, which is found at the close of a copy of Otfried's work, inscribed, "The Bishop Waldo caused this Evangelium to be made, and Sigibart, an unworthy priest, wrote it." The language of both differs so widely from modern German, as to be unintelligible without a glossary; but both are written in irregular metre, and in rhyme, though the rhymes are very imperfect.

ST. PETER.

PRAYER.

ANOTHER PRAYER (Ninth Century).

CHAPTER III.
THE MORNING.
A.D. 1100-1250

A wonderful change came over Germany during the next two centuries. There was a great change in the mere external aspect of the country. The peasant who looked out from the door of his farmstead saw a very different landscape from that which greeted his forefather's eyes. The forest indeed still skirted the horizon, but the cleared spaces were wider, and the monotonous green of the broad stretches of pasture land was broken up by the more varied colouring of arable crops. The villages were far more thickly studded over the land, and nearly every one had its wooden church with its one tinkling bell; while farther off, by the river-side, stood some great abbey with its stone buildings, round which a busy town was rapidly growing up, where the village found a market for its produce and employment for its superfluous population. But one new feature would not please the peasant quite so well: on any neighbouring height which commanded the fertile meadows beneath, there was almost sure to be perched a new stone dwelling, inhabited by some armed follower of the prince or great lord of the country, and from these 31 strongholds a lawless crew often issued to carry off the fruits of peaceful industry. During the next two hundred years, indeed, the most marked changes in the social aspect of the age were the growth of the great towns in size, wealth, political power, and all the arts of life; and the rise of a large class of armed and mounted followers of the great lords of the empire, whom the institution of chivalry placed, in a certain sense, on a level with their chiefs, while it constituted a barrier between them and the unknightly classes--an order which in after-times developed into the lesser nobility of the empire.

Frederick Barbarossa

But it was altogether an era of rapid growth, one of those times when men's minds are awake and alive, and full of energy to attempt new enterprises in any field. Germany was ruled by the Hohenstauffens, a vigorous, ambitious, warlike race, whose dream it was to prove themselves true heirs of Charlemagne by re-establishing the Empire of the West, and who fell at last in that struggle with the popes of which the real basis was the question whether the headship of Western Christendom was to belong to the State or the Church. The noblest of them, Frederick Barbarossa (1152-1189), had all the qualities that made him the darting hero of the people: brave, handsome, able in war and in council--a liberal patron of the singers and builders, whose arts were beginning everywhere to flourish on the German soil--the champion of his country against the Papal chair--the conqueror of the warlike Normans of Southern Italy,--he stirred the hearts of the people with an enthusiasm that was in itself an education. The very manner of his death threw a legendary halo round his memory. That 32 their monarch should at last have taken the Cross in his old age, and far away in the Eastern land, when a river had to be crossed, should have plunged in on horseback before his whole army, to show the way, and perished in the attempt, seemed a fitting end for so brave a life; yet the mass of the people would not believe he was dead: in the popular imagination he became confounded with his great predecessor Charlemagne, and the legend was transferred to him, of the sleeping monarch in a hidden cave who was to start to life again in his country's utmost need.

The Crusades

But not only did the frequent expeditions of the Hohenstauffens into Italy bring the Germans into contact with the more refined culture of the Lombard cities and the southern Normans, yet wider fields were opened to them by the Crusades. It was at this period that one mighty impulse thrilled through Western Christendom, and drew men, women, and children even, nobles and peasants alike, to the service of the Cross. It was no wonder that men's hearts were attracted to a service which in this new form touched the springs of loyal allegiance to the invisible Lord, and of reverent compassion for His earthly sufferings, and also of worldly ambition and love of adventure, and opened to the soldier a means of securing as high a place in the heavenly kingdom by his own craft of fighting, as the monk could gain by prayer and mortification. And so for the next two hundred years there was a constant stream of Crusaders going to and returning from the East, and rendering the intercourse between the East and West almost as close as that between Europe and America in our own day. If these expeditions wrought much harm and misery by their 33 terrible drain on the strongest part of the population, by the wild habits and unknown forms of disease (such as the Oriental leprosy and plague) which were brought home by returning bands of pilgrims, they also wrought much good. Many joined them from a true impulse of devotion, and came back trained and tempered knights and warriors who had learned letters and refinement from the Normans and Provençals; the priest and scholar brought back new ideas and new manuscripts from Greece; the merchant discovered new channels for commerce, and carried home new fruits and luxuries to his native fields and city. Germany, however, was less affected by the universal enthusiasm than the other European nations: it was longer before the fire was kindled in the slow hearts of the people: the struggles with the popes made enterprises patronised by them less popular; and there were never wanting men who looked on them with a disenchanted eye. "If it were of a truth so grievous to our Lord Christ," says one of the Minne-singers, "that the Saracens should rule over the spot of His entombment, could not He alone humble the power of the heathen nation, and would He need our hands to help Him?" An old monkish chronicle of Wurzburg begins its narration of the second crusade under the Emperor Conrad III., by declaring that in the year 1147, "there came into the country false prophets, sons of Belial, sworn servants of Antichrist, who by their empty words seduced Christians, and by their vain preaching impelled all kinds of men to go forth to deliver Jerusalem from the Saracens." It goes on to describe the mixed multitude that was 34 gathered together for this purpose, and the very mixed motives that actuated them. "The one had this, the other that object. For many were curious after new things, and went forth to behold a strange land; others were constrained by poverty and the meanness of their circumstances at home, and these were ready to fight not only with the foes of the Cross of Christ, but with any good friends to Christendom, if thereby they might but get rid of this their poverty. Others again were burdened with debt, or hoped secretly to escape from the services they owed to their lord, or they feared the merited punishment of their misdeeds; all these simulated great zeal for God, but they were zealous only to throw down the heavy load of their own troubles. Scarce a few could be found who had not bowed the knee to Baal; who were guided by a pious and meritorious intention, and were so inflamed by the love of the Divine Majesty, that they were ready to shed their blood for the Most Holy Place. But we will leave this matter to Him who can read all hearts, only adding, that God best knoweth who are His." Similar judgments are expressed by many other writers throughout the twelfth century; and even where the poet or chronicler is filled with enthusiasm for the great idea embodied in these enterprises, we find a curiously frank and shrewd exposure of the defects in their execution. This mood of mind, a sort of slow practical good sense and perception of actual facts, may explain the circumstance noticed by many of their contemporaries, that the Germans were the last to join and the first to discontinue the Crusades. Still there is also a great capacity for enthusiasm in 35 the German people, and they by no means stood apart altogether from what constituted the great life of Europe in those days. Four of their emperors took the Cross, and were followed to the East by immense armies, and many knights joined in other expeditions.

The immediate fruit of this participation in the common life of Christendom was the rapid development of the institution of chivalry, and of a national literature--the first great outburst of German poetry and song. It came almost suddenly. We seem to pass at a bound from an age when literature was almost exclusively Latin and in the hands of the clergy, to one when it is German and chiefly in the hands of the knightly order. A few compositions indeed remain from the early part of the twelfth century which mark the period of transition; for though in language and subject they approach the new school, they are still the work of the clerical class. Such in religious poetry are the "Life of Jesus," by a nun who died in 1127, the version of the Pentateuch, and in secular poetry the Lays of Roland and of Alexander, &c., written by priests. But very soon a whole large⁵⁵More than two hundred are known to us still by name. class of lyrical poets sprang up who are known to us as the Minne-singers; their works are in German, and show a wonderful mastery over the language. Instead of the imperfect rhymes and halting metre of the previous age, we have long poems in intricate metre and crowded with rhymes, which occur often in the middle as well as at the end of each line. It became the fashion to compose if possible, at least to learn and sing these poems. They flew over the country on the wings of the tunes attached to them; 36 wandering knights and grooms taught them to each other; they were sung at village-wakes, and at courts and tournaments; and ladies had collections of them written on slips of parchment and tied together with bright-coloured ribbons. The subjects of this new poetry were, except in some rare cases, limited in range. It concerned itself almost entirely with ladies' love, with feats of arms, and with that contrast between the bright and dark side of human life which was so strongly felt throughout the mediaeval times, and never more so than at this period. It was, unlike that which had preceded it, an age when there was great enjoyment of life,--delight in adventure, in social intercourse, and knightly pastimes; delight in natural beauty, such as the glow of summer and the song of birds, in the beauty of women, of costume, of verse, of stately buildings. There is a strain of almost childlike gaiety to be heard in most of these old poets. But it was also a time when life was peculiarly uncertain; when long partings from home and friends, strange vicissitudes of fortune, or death, might overtake at any moment those in highest place; while the Christian faith had awakened in the thoughtful Teutonic race that sense of the incompleteness and inadequacy of all finite beauty, of remorse for sin, of mysterious awe in face of the eternal destinies of man, which once roused could never be wholly laid to sleep again. The very changes of the seasons came with a sharper contrast to those men in their rude uncomfortable abodes than we in our ceiled and glazed houses can well imagine. Winter was a time of darkness, discomfort, and isolation; spring brought life and hope, and was welcomed all over 37 the country by symbolic festivals at which the prince and princess of May and their followers encountered and overcame the representative of savage Winter. Summer brought the happy out-of-doors toil to the husbandman; the tournament, or the real combat, or the wandering life to lady, and knight, and squire. No wonder then, that in the poetry of these days, the alternation of joy and sorrow, "Freud und Leid," meets us in every form; in the happiness of greeting and the pain of parting; in the gloom of winter and the joyousness of the May-time; in the praise of pleasure, and in meditations on penitence and death.

German Sequences

In the Church, too, the voice of native song now made itself heard. The German Sequences, "Leisen," or "Leiche,"⁶⁶The origin of this term is uncertain, but it is thought to have denoted at first a certain dance measure. It is often applied to very long poems of somewhat irregular structure. as they were also called, became much more common, and at the highest festivals were sung even at the service of the mass itself. One for Easter, which we meet with in many various forms, and another for Whitsuntide, were thus used, and have descended to the present day as the first verses of two of Luther's best-known hymns:--

Or in other forms--

Or,

And for Whitsuntide, "here singeth the whole Church," as an old manuscript says,--

These are attributed to Spervogel, a writer of the twelfth century, of whom we only know that he was a priest, of a burgher family, and a favourite sacred poet of that time. He composed many short didactic poems, almost epigrammatic in brevity and condensed thought, which were the beginning of a class of religious poetry that was much loved and practised in the next two or three centuries.

Another "Leich" or "Sequence" of his, which became extremely popular, is

Another of his poems is called

The Minne-Singers

Several of the great Latin hymns were also translated into German at this time; and that these hymns and sequences were used in church is proved by a passage in a Life of St. Bernard by a contemporary and disciple, in which it is expressly mentioned that in the cathedral at Cologne the people broke out into hymns of praise in the German tongue at every miracle wrought by the saint; and the writer regrets that when they left the German soil this custom ceased, as the nations who spoke the Romanic languages did not possess native hymns after the manner of the others. Still undoubtedly their use in church was very restricted, and was always regarded with suspicion by the more papal of the clergy; but there were many other occasions in life on which they were employed: they seem to have been commonly sung at the saints' festivals and special services which were frequently held outside the church, and on pilgrimages. So St. Francis, in an address to his monks in the year 1221, says: "There is a certain country called Germany, wherein dwell Christians, and of a truth very pious ones, who as you know often come as pilgrims into our land, with their long staves and great boots; and amid the most sultry heat and bathed in sweat, yet visit all the thresholds of the holy shrines, and sing hymns of praise to God and all His saints." 41

It may give us some idea of the quantity of poetry written from this time onwards, that the great collection by M. Wackernagel of religious poetry prior to the Reformation, contains nearly 1500 pieces, and the names of 85 different poets, while many of the poems are anonymous, and much no doubt has perished. Among the names still left a large number are secular, others are those of monks and priests, and the vanity of the world forms not unnaturally their frequent theme. Here is a graceful little poem of this kind by a monk of the thirteenth century, entitled

But in the list we also find the greatest of the knightly Minne-singers, Hartmann von der Aue, Reinmar von Hagenau, Gottfried von Strasburg, Wolfram von Eschenbach, and the noble singer Walther von der Vogelweide.

Hartmann "of the Meadow," as he calls himself 42 has left us several crusaders' songs, and among them the following:--

Another crusading song, which was very widely used on pilgrimages in these days, was sung to a melody which has been preserved to the present 43 time, by its connexion with one of Luther's hymns;⁷⁷That on the Ten Commandments. it is this:--

Another crusader and Minne-singer of those days, Sir Reinmar of Hagenau, gives us a glimpse of the struggle that must have gone on in many minds between the love of pleasure and the self-control that befitted a soldier of the Cross, a struggle of which we 44 may still use his own words, "full many another feels it too:--"

A little anonymous poem of the same date, the last verse of which appears, from the metre, to be incomplete, surprises us by what seems to us the modern tone of its tender and passionate

Walter von der Vogelweide

But among all these singers, Walter von der Vogelweide (of the Birds' nests or the aviary) may be singled out as their highest type. He was the darling of his own times, and is constantly referred to by other poets as "their master in the lovely art of words and tones," "the sweetest of all nightingales," &c. It is not known what part of Germany was his birthplace, but he travelled all over it in the course of his life; he was a welcome guest at its courts, especially those of Thuringia and Austria, and he was a crusader. His poems give us the picture of a life such as we can well understand in these days, however different the circumstances may be,--a life full of travel, and of interest in questions of politics and religion, and even of literature. For the frequent reference to each other's works by these Minne-singers, with criticism or with praise, shows that those days too had their literary world. A large number of his poems are like those of the other Minne-singers, filled with praises of his lady, and of the May-time,--graceful, tender, often quaint and naive lyrics. So one begins:--

And again--

But others treat of higher and more serious themes, and show us a man deeply engaged in the political and religious life of his day. He was a warm lover of his country, but he does not hesitate to rebuke and satirize his countrymen, whether clergy or laity, for their faults and shortcomings. In the great struggle between the Pope and the Emperor, he is heart and soul on the national side, and writes such stern reproofs and bitter epigrams on the Head of the Church, as startle us from one of its sons. But he is an earnest Christian, sometimes lamenting his own sins with simple penitence, sometimes expressing a strong and manly faith. He preaches the Crusade, and so heartily that he refuses the meed of a poet's praises to the archangels themselves, if they come not to the succour of Christendom.

We give first one of his famous patriotic songs, then three of his religious poems, and then a crusader's hymn.

The Minne-songs, which form a purely lyrical poetry, were soon followed by poems of the narrative and didactic class. Early in this same thirteenth century the Nibelungen-Lied received its present 54 shape; and the old legends, some like this taken from the heathen times, others of purely Christian origin, became the favourite subjects of the poets. The stories of Tristram, Percival, and the quest of the Holy Grail--knightly romances and histories of saints that were half mystical and symbolical, half legendary--must have filled the imaginations of youths and ladies in those days as novels do in ours. Most of these stories were connected with that circle of legends of which King Arthur and his Round Table form the centre, and were thus derived from a foreign, generally from a French or Provençal source, but their treatment was entirely German. It soon betrays two opposite tendencies, one of which takes up the external side of these romances, that of love of adventure and worldly success; while the other brings into relief their religious element and the development of character, and anticipates in the latter respect somewhat of the characteristics of the modern novel. Of these schools the representative types are Gottfried von Strasburg and Wolfram von Eschenbach. The former chose for the subject of his longest poem the story of Tristram and Iseult, and makes it the vehicle of depicting the knightly life of his own times on its most stirring and fascinating side. The latter selects the quest of the Holy Grail by Sir Percival, and embodies in his poem those grave and high conceptions of knightly duty and religious faith, which characterise the more serious thought of his day. Wolfram von Eschenbach was a Bavarian by birth, of ancient and noble family, but being a younger son, he possessed but little worldly wealth, and seems to have led a wandering life, 55 welcome as knight and poet alike at the German courts and castles. From the frequent allusions in his principal poem to the court of Thuringia, he no doubt formed one of the band of knights, poets, and adventurers, who gathered round the Landgrave Hermann of Thuringia, and made that little court at once brilliant and disturbed. Wolfram's lifetime coincided with the brightest period of the German Empire under the Hohenstauffens, for he was born under Frederick Barbarossa, and died under Frederick II. German chivalry was then at its highest point, and religious fervour was kindled to enthusiasm by the Crusades; thus it is but natural that these should form the moving springs of his romance.

CHAPTER IV.
DARK TIMES AND BRIGHT TIMES.
A.D.1253-1500

But as dark days came over Germany, after the fall of the Hohenstauffens, the bloom of her knightly poetry faded, and another style, chiefly didactic or mystical, but of much lower poetic merit, took its place.

Perplexed and troubled indeed must have been many hearts in the trials that now fell on Germany. Frederick II., the last of the Hohenstauffens, a wise and brave prince, a patron of the large cities and of learning, and a successful crusader, died in 1250; and for twenty-three years Germany was without a settled head, until the choice of the princes devolved on Rudolph of Hapsburg. To a great extent every man did that which was right in his own eyes; and as there existed a numerous class of returned crusaders and unemployed soldiers, the smaller castles all over the country were soon transformed into robber-strongholds, whose inhabitants lived by levying a sort of black-mail on the merchants and peasants whom they despised. The great cities alone were able to protect themselves; they purchased or assumed their freedom from the lords who still asserted manorial rights over them, and leagued together to defend it, forming the Swabian league in the South and the Hanseatic in the North; and from this time onwards we find them sending deputies to the diet, and recognised as an independent portion of the empire. Rudolph of Hapsburg did his best to restore order, and destroyed, 70 it is said, in Thuringia alone seventy of the robber-castles, whose ruins still add to the picturesqueness of that region of wooded hills and romantic glens. But the twenty years of his reign were but an interval of peace amid a succession of storms. During the first half of the fourteenth century the distractions of Germany reached their height. There were rival emperors at home, rival popes abroad, and bitter conflicts between the civil and ecclesiastical powers. On the 25th November, 1314, two emperors, Frederick of Austria and Louis of Bavaria, were crowned at once; and for eight years, until the battle of Mühldorff in 1322, a desolating warfare between their respective partisans was carried on all over the country. While the struggle lasted the Pope declined to pronounce decisively in favour of either candidate, but was supposed to lean to the side of Louis of Bavaria. When, however, Louis was left master of the field, the Pope refused to acknowledge him, unless he consented in the fullest terms, to hold the empire as a fief of the Holy See. To this Louis would not accede, and he was supported by the diet, who gave him their undivided vote, and at last declared that the unanimous choice of the country was the true source of the imperial dignity, and sufficed to bestow it without any consent of the Pope. The Pope now laid Germany under an interdict, which was not removed from some districts for twenty-six years. During an interdict all the ordinary ministrations of religion were suspended; no church was open, no bell was heard, no sacrament but those of baptism and extreme unction was administered.

The Flagellants

To these social and spiritual calamities were added, as is often the case in times of 71 political convulsion, natural ones. Germany was visited with earthquakes, plagues of grasshoppers or locusts, and bad harvests, in the train of which came that fearful pestilence known as the Black Death, which swept over Europe in the middle of this century, and the full extent of which we are only now beginning to appreciate. It passed over Germany in 1348, bringing the usual accompaniments of such terrible visitations, in lawlessness, outbursts of despair, and some scattered examples of heroic devotion. It was no wonder that men's minds grew unsettled. Some believed that the last times had come, and that the end of the world was at hand. Some looked for a Messiah in the person of the "Priest-hater," Frederick II., who was to rise from the dead, do justice, humble the clergy, and lay down his crown on the Mount of Olives. Some thought only of averting the wrath of God in the present, and so that strange epidemic of religious frenzy sprang up, which brought into all the highroads and market-places of Europe the ghastly processions of the Flagellants and the White Hoods. Hundreds of either sex wandered in bands from town to town, half-naked, or clothed in white shirts spotted with blood. On reaching a town they proceeded to the church, and after a service, if they could have one, formed into a circle, in which they paced round in pairs singing their wild chant:

They then adjured the crowd of spectators to imitate 72 their penance, and finally, casting themselves on the ground, scourged each other till they were weary. On their way from town to town they sang hymns and sequences in German, exhorting the people to repentance; and it is certainly a fact that the use of hymns in the vernacular becomes much more common from this time onwards, no doubt partly from their being thus introduced into many parts hitherto unacquainted with them. The mode of life of these Flagellants, however, led in some cases to acts of license, which by degrees turned the popular feeling strongly against them, and so they vanish from our sight.

The Mystics

In such times as these it must have been difficult for men not to be either fanatics, like these poor Flagellants, or altogether indifferent to the religion which presented itself in such a shape as it wore then, when rival Popes disputed the Headship of Christendom, and the Papacy appeared as the enemy of civil authority and political liberty; while the bishops and most of the richer monastic clergy lived lives of self-indulgence and worldly ambition. But, like the remnant in old days that had not bowed the knee to Baal, so now there grew up in various parts of the country a set of men who formed themselves into no sect, but who kept alive the flame of love and faith and hope in many hearts where it had else died out. The names best known to us (though many others are still preserved) are those of Eckhardt and Tauler, especially the latter, and in the next century the same tone of thought and piety meets us again in the works attributed to the more famous Thomas à Kempis.

Tauler

Tauler was a Dominican monk of Strasburg, a man of the deepest piety, and of great courage and ability, 73 whose sermons were the delight of Luther, and are full of instruction to us now. The Dominicans and Franciscans had for some time availed themselves of the privilege early granted to their order of celebrating mass during a time of interdict, and had thus earned themselves a high place in the popular favour; but after the open breach between the Emperor and the Pope in 1338, they too, in many instances, refused to say mass. Tauler was one of the few who steadily adhered to the national side; and, believing that the Pope himself had no right to deny the guidance and consolations of religion to the people, considered it his duty to disregard the interdict. Throughout this period, therefore, and especially when the Black Death was raging, he laboured assiduously, not only in Strasburg, but in all the great cities along the Rhine to Cologne; and being a mighty preacher, he was followed by grateful crowds, his sermons were taken down by listening friends, and with his letters widely circulated over Germany.

Tauler and those who thought like him were called Mystics, because they spoke often of a mystical or hidden life of God in the soul, and the worthlessness of the creature and outward things. But though there is much in their phraseology and turn of thought which belongs to their age, and seems at first alien to us now, the real core of their faith, which made them of such help and use in their day and the beginners of a work that has lasted to our own, was their strong grasp of the truths, that an immediate and personal relation may and ought to exist between each individual soul and the living God; and that since God is absolute goodness, the highest welfare and 74 happiness of His creatures must lie in the voluntary blending of their will with His. Outward helps had indeed failed these men utterly, and so they fell back on that which no outward privation could take away, the presence of God himself in the heart as the ground of all belief, and held this faith with an intense realization proportioned to the difficulties and discouragements around them. What seems to us morbid and exaggerated in their depreciation of all outward things, and sometimes even of the affections of ordinary life, was but the result, partly of their being thus thrown in so absolutely on their own consciousness, partly of their circumstances; and when all this is eliminated, there remain in their writing some of the truest piety, and of the deepest and wisest thoughts on the relation of God and Christ to the human soul, on the nature of sin and of salvation, that we can meet with anywhere.⁸⁸The "Theologia Germania" was long attributed to Tauler, but was probably written by his friend and teacher, Nicholas of Basle.

This school encouraged the study of the Scriptures, and the first complete German version of the Bible was made by Matthias of Beheim, as early as the fourteenth century. They also promoted both preaching and singing in German, and a large number of mystical and didactic poems were written by them. Tauler himself wrote several, which were widely known, and we give two of them:--

The Master-Singers

During the remainder of this century and the next, the political and social conditions of Germany became more tranquil as the constitution of the empire became more fixed. In the cities especially life grew settled and sheltered; it crystallized indeed into very rigid forms, in their internal polities and in the guilds which governed that large part of life occupied by industrial interests; even the domain of private life was invaded by the sumptuary laws which 77 regulated the dress and the table of each class, but were probably never very strictly obeyed. But the sense of being a member of an important and politically free community made up for the loss of much of that personal liberty of action which the Teutonic race had so highly valued; and the activity of mind produced by constant association with their fellow-men, rendered the citizens now the great patrons of art and letters. Town schools became usual, and before the end of the fifteenth century as many as eight great universities had been founded. And so, too, poetry now passed into their hands from those of the knightly order. It did not at first profit by the change. It was enrolled among the crafts of which the guilds had the control, schools for verse and song-making were set up, and the Minnesingers were succeeded by the Master-singers. For the most part it was but poor mechanical work that they turned out, generally moral and didactic, often directly religious in tone, but very prosaic in quality. Yet there must have been a great deal of reading and reciting of this poetry such as it was, for the Master-singers are counted by hundreds, and their verses by thousands. By far the best of them are the first and last (of any note) in their ranks,--Heinrich Frauenlob and Hans Sachs. The latter belongs to the period of the Reformation, and marks the transition to modern thought; the former (1250-1318) belongs to the close of the crusading age, and marks the transition of poetry from the knightly to the burgher order. In spirit and form he belongs to the Minne-singers, and is frequently counted among them; he is reckoned 78 among the Master-singers because he was the first to found a sort of guild of poets. He was a very voluminous writer, greatly admired in his own day, and from his constant praise of women won for himself the title of Frauenlob (Praise-the-ladies), and the honour of being borne to his grave by them. A very large proportion of his poems are love-songs, but there are many more serious; many prayers and pious reflections, many lamentations over the degeneracy of the times, and praises of Brother Berthold, a famous Franciscan preacher, who travelled about the country, heard gladly by the common people, and was a sort of forerunner of Tauler. From his religious poems we choose two, one evidently written when he was fighting with the fear of death; the other expressing the confidence that helped him through it. In style Frauenlob is graceful and fluent, but often too prolix and elaborate. The mode in which the following is rhymed is an instance of his love of an intricate arrangement of rhymes.

The Drama

It was at this time that dramatic poetry made its appearance in Germany; and just as lyrical and narrative poetry had first been awakened to life by the religious sentiment which thus made for itself a voice, so our earliest examples of this style also are religious--the mystery and morality plays. It is curious that the first beginning of the drama should 81 be in a convent, and the work of a nun, a certain Hrosvitha, who lived in the Abbey of Gandersheim, about 980. Her works, however, hardly concern our subject, as they were written in Latin, though one of them was afterwards translated into German for performance; and we do not encounter any further dramatic attempts till we reach the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when we meet with mysteries on the life of our Lord. No doubt these took their rise in the wish to set vividly before the people the chief incidents of Scripture history, and the mode of doing so is by some thought to have been derived from the symbolical games which ushered in the spring, or from the processions of returning crusaders, who often re-entered their homes in quaint and symbolical array. The Passion and Resurrection and the Lamentation of the Virgin form the subjects of the earliest mysteries, and to these ere long were added similar representations of scenes from the infancy of the Saviour, which were performed about Twelfth Night. At first they were written partly in Latin and partly in German, and a considerable portion consisted of action unaccompanied by words, while other parts were sung, not recited, but gradually the German element preponderates and the Latin disappears. Scenes from the Old Testament or the Apocrypha, which were held to typify events in our Lord's life, were introduced between the acts of the principal drama, and from the necessity of compression were generally given in a more vigorous and dramatic form than the original piece itself, which is often extremely prolix. The stories of Joseph and Samson, of David and Goliath, of Esther, of Susannah 82 and the Elders, were the favourite subjects of these entr'actes. Next the comic element found its way into these pieces, especially into those which were performed about Twelfth Night, a time of merry-making and often of licence. The first example of it, however, that is now extant, is in an Easter mystery of the fifteenth century, where the merchant who sells precious ointment, first to Mary Magdalene, and afterwards to the three Maries on their way to the grave, quarrels with his servant and his wife, and ends with striking the latter, who repays him by a sound rating. This element of grotesque fun afterwards became much more developed, but it never in Germany attained anything like the proportions that it assumed in France and Italy. On the whole the representation of these dramas was a serious, and in its way a religious, act. A city or a village, or perhaps some great guild, or the students of a university, undertook to give one of these mysteries. The performance, in the summer, frequently took place out of doors, in the winter, in the church or the guild-hall; it often lasted for more than one day, and people came to see it from far and near. The performers who personated such characters as those of our Lord, His mother, or His disciples, were expected to prepare themselves by religious acts for their work, and to abstain from all licence while it was in progress. Of course a more secular tendency gradually showed itself; still on the whole the drama was a plant of very late growth in Germany, and it was long before it attained as much importance in its purely secular shape as it possessed in the Middle Ages in its religious form. The 83 mystery has never quite died out there; many of us are probably aware that once in ten years a genuine ancient mystery is still performed in a little village of the Bavarian Tyrol.

The Popular Song

Another style of poetry sprang up in these centuries which had the most genuine life in it of any type that we have yet met with, and that has continued characteristic of the German people to this day. It is that of the "Volkslied," or popular song, and in these far-back days it holds somewhat the same place in German literature that the ballad does in our own. The narrative form of the ballad seems to have been less congenial to the German mind than to the English. We find, indeed, some poems on contemporary events--like that on the Battle of Sempach, by Halbsuten--but they are wanting in the life, terseness, and swing of the ballad. The German popular song, on the other hand, even in its rudest days, is full of freshness and vigour, often of sweetness and pathos, though lax and unpolished in form and marked by abrupt transitions and quaint similes. But it has the true breath of the people's life in it, which it deals with in its most varied forms--in songs of love, of dancing, of drinking, of wandering and parting, of spinning and weaving, and of the huntsman's and forester's crafts, which are some of the best of all. It furnished the type that, in Luther's hands, was refined and strengthened into the congregational hymn which became so powerful an instrument in the spread of the reformed religion; and at this period the best of its sacred poems are those which more or less partake of this character.

It was natural that poetry of this simple and direct 84 style should concern itself more with the great facts of the Christian faith than with the minor phases of spiritual experience; and, accordingly, we find most of the poems of this kind are composed for one or other of the chief festivals of the Church. That of Christmas was an especial favourite with the warm-hearted, child-loving Germans, and for it Tauler wrote the following symbolical little poem, which soon became one of these popular songs:--

Another Christmas carol of this date is the following on

A favourite song, or we might almost call it a ballad for Easter, was this one:--

Easter Sequence

The Easter and Whitsuntide sequences which were introduced in the previous period were now expanded into longer hymns, of which many variations are still preserved. One of the best is this:--

A sequence found about the same date is called in old manuscripts

We have a testimony to the use of Easter hymns in church in the following poem by Conrad von Queinfurt, belonging to the fourteenth century (he died in 1382 in Silesia), which is quite in the style of the Minne-singers both in thought and the carefully varied metre.

Many also of the popular songs were translated, if one may so call it, into a religious form, often in the most tasteless and absurd manner, but occasionally with so much success, that the religious entirely superseded the secular version. This was the case with the following little hymn, the idea of which was taken from the song of a wandering artisan, that begins, "Innsbruck, I must forsake thee." In its sacred 91 form, however, it speedily became very popular, and many other hymns were afterwards written on its simple and pathetic melody.

Henry of Loufenburg

Henry of Loufenburg, who was a priest at Freiburg, and afterwards a monk in the convent of St. John in Strasburg, was the chief sacred poet of the fifteenth century in Germany, and furnished a large number of these transformations of secular into religious songs, and he also translated many of the great Latin hymns. He was himself a fertile composer, and some of his hymns are very graceful and sweet, but many 92 are prolix and fantastic; and though they seem to have been liked in the religious world of his own day, they scarcely bear transplanting to ours. One of the best is

Another tenderly-conceived little poem of his is this:--

Henry of Loufenburg also wrote and widely introduced the use of many hymns in mixed Latin and German. Verses of this kind had long been a favourite amusement among the monks, and they seem now to have acquired a general popularity. The best-known of them all was a Christmas carol dating from the fourteenth century, which is found in many various versions, and of which the following is an imitation:--

CAROL.

i

In dulci Jubilo, singet und seid froh

Earliest Hymn-Books

This latter class of mixed hymns has been commonly, but erroneously, attributed to Peter Dresdensis, who died in 1440, as rector of Zwickau. His real work with regard to hymnology lay in the strenuous efforts he made to introduce hymns in the vernacular more freely into public worship, especially into the service of the mass. No doubt he had been led to this by his acquaintance with Huss, whose assistant he had been at Prague. It was in 1467 that the followers of Huss formed themselves into a separate and organized Church, known as that of the Bohemian and Moravian Brethren, one of the distinctive peculiarities of which was the free use of hymns and prayers in their mother tongue. Many such hymns were already in existence, and others were soon written, and in 1504 they were collected and published by their archbishop, Lucas--the first example of a hymn-book composed of original compositions in the vernacular to be found in any Western nation which had once owned the supremacy of Rome. Somewhat earlier than this book, however, towards the end of the fifteenth century, we find two or three collections of German versions of the Latin hymns and sequences. For the most part they are of such inferior merit that they quite lose the 96 grandeur of the original, and so we need not linger over them.

Hymns to the Virgin

But there is one large class of sacred poems very characteristic of the mediaeval period, which has not yet been mentioned--the poems addressed to saints, and, above all, to the Virgin Mary. The former class is not very important, either as to number or quality; but not so the latter. "Marien-lieder," and, in a minor degree, "Annen-lieder," hymns to St. Mary and to St. Anne, constitute a very large and well-known class among the poems of the ante-Reformation times in Germany. It is in the age of the Crusades and the Minne-singers that they first assume a prominent place in its literature. The intercourse of Christians with Saracens tended to intensify the devotion paid to the Virgin, just because such a sentiment towards a woman was a most distinctive peculiarity of the Christian mind. Again, the chivalry which owed so much to the Christian idea of womanhood, had in its turn a reflex action on religious thought, favourable to the worship of a feminine ideal. The hymns addressed to the Virgin at this time form a sort of spiritual counterpart to the minne-songs or love-songs addressed to his earthly lady by the knight. It was easy to transfer the turn of expression and tone of thought from the earthly object to the heavenly one, and the degree to which this is done is to us often very startling. After this period, for a while these poems become less frequent, but in the fifteenth century they revive in the most extravagant forms. The honours and titles belonging to our Lord Jesus Christ are attributed to His mother; God is said to have created the world by her and to 97 have rested in her on the seventh day; she is said to have risen from the grave on the third day and ascended into heaven; she is addressed, not only as a persuasive mediator with her Son, but as herself the chief source of mercy and help, especially in the hour of death and at the day of judgment. By degrees, her mother is invested with some of her own attributes; for it is said, if Christ would obey His own mother, ought not she much more to obey hers? And so a set of hymns to St. Anne sprung up, in which she is entreated to afford aid in death, and obtain pardon for the sinners from Christ and Mary, who will refuse her nothing. Some of the earlier hymns to the Virgin, especially those on her lamentation beneath the cross, are very sweet and touching; but the greater number of such as we have now been speaking of have not much poetical merit. They are often mere lists of titles, or word-play on her name or on the relation of the words "Ave" and "Eva." As Wackernagel says, "The existence of so many godless hymns addressed to the Virgin and the saints, or teaching the whole doctrine of indulgences, is a perfectly irrefragable testimony to that degeneracy of the nation which rendered the Reformation necessary; the existence of so many breathing an unstained Christianity is a witness to the preservation of so much true religion as made the Reformation possible."

CHAPTER V.
LUTHER AND HIS FRIENDS.
A.D. 1500-1580.

The opening of the sixteenth century marks the commencement of one of the great transitional eras of history, and its changes were not in one direction only. Men's horizon on the physical earth had been suddenly widened by the discovery of a new world; their mental horizon by the re-discovery of an old one, in the revival of letters consequent on the fall of Constantinople and the invention of printing. An intellectual eagerness and a trust in the unbounded possibilities of the future had taken possession of their minds and they were not likely to be satisfied with such a present as they saw around them.

Ulrich von Hutten

Ulrich von Hutten -- P. 98

It was for the schools and universities that reformers first sprung up in Erasmus and Reuchlin; then, almost at the same time, an Ulrich von Hutten began to call on his countrymen to feel and to assert their national unity and their ancient rights against Italian priests and Spanish mercenaries, and to reform their own lives. His vigorous appeals, expressed, not in Latin, but in clear and trenchant German, made themselves heard by all classes, and helped to pave the way for the reformation that was coming. The following 99 poem, written when he had been forced to seek an asylum in the castle of his friend Franz von Sickingen, was ere long circulated all over the country on broadsheets, and became a favourite song of the earliest adherents of the Reformation.

The Reformation

But a far deeper ground of dissatisfaction lay behind than any discontent with the education or politics of the time; religion, which touches the life of all classes in its inmost springs, had fallen into a deep degeneracy. If the common man had a hard life of it in this world, compelled to incessant toil, subject to pestilence, bad harvests, and the exactions of his superiors, what was there to raise him above his troubles or give him hope for the future? That conception of an inward self-surrender to God which He would inspire, and to which He Himself would respond by His helping presence now, and heaven hereafter--the conception which had been the very kernel of religion to Tauler and his school--was preserved but in few hearts. To most men, religion was an outside thing of rules and ceremonies; God was a harsh judge, whom all the sacrifices and merits of the saints could scarce propitiate while their appointed instructors, the clergy, were in popular estimation the very types of a proud, idle, often sinful life, led at the expense of other people. Once the clergy had been the preservers of learning, the protectors of the common people, and the assertors of justice against oppressive custom; now their luxury, their ignorance in many cases, their avarice, and their often impure lives, were the favourite themes of the satirical poems, which are the most important productions of the secular literature of this period.¹⁰¹⁰This is the era of "Renard the Fox," "Till Eulenspiegel," Brant's "Ship of Fools," and the poems of Rosenblüt. The way in which such men adapted the consolations of religion to the wants of the common people, shows a state of mind which it is very difficult for us to realize at all. Pious brotherhoods were 102 formed for accumulating a stock of spiritual treasures, the benefits of which were to secure to each member eternal salvation. Thus, for instance,¹¹¹¹Freytag, "Bilder aus der deutschen Vergangenheit," vol. i. p. 90. that of the Eleven Thousand Virgins, called St. Ursula's Ship, to which the Elector Frederick the Wise belonged, had a stock of 6,455 masses, 3,550 whole psalters, 200,000 rosaries, 11,000 prayers to St. Ursula, 630 times 11,000 Paternosters and Ave Marias, &c. &c. &c. All these were available to wipe out the sins of the individual members of the brotherhood. But in one respect this association was one of the best: a man could become a member by the mere repeating of a certain number of prayers, and it was therefore open to the poor; where payment of money was required, as was frequently the case, of course the poor man was excluded.

It is easy to understand how in a country where such societies already existed, Tetzel, the German Dominican, to whom Leo X. had confided the sale of indulgences in Germany, should have found there a good market for his wares. He rode from town to town, everywhere received with great pomp and ceremony by the clergy. His great red cross was set up in the nave of the parish church, and day by day he preached and exhorted the people not to lose such an opportunity of securing heaven, resorting often to the coarsest and most profane expressions and devices. On his way he came to a village near Wittenberg, where the sale of indulgences was to begin on All Saints Day, the festival of the dedication of the church; but the night before, another monk of the Augustine order had affixed to the church-doors his famous 103 "Ninety-five theses on the power of indulgences," and henceforward their sale was to be checked.

Martin Luther

Luther, born in 1483 in the village of Eisleben, sprang from the people, for he was the son of a pious and honest, but stern peasant. He had known want and hardships in childhood, and terrible mental conflicts in later years. One of these drove him into a monastery, and there they did not cease. "Of a truth I was a pious monk, and kept the rule of my order more strictly than I can tell. If ever a monk got to heaven by monkery, I was determined to get there. I strained myself to the very utmost, and tormented and plagued my body with fastings, vigils, prayers, and other exercises, far more than my bitterest enemies can torment me now. I, and others too, have toiled to the utmost, with a deadly sincerity, to bring our hearts and consciences to rest and peace before God, and yet could never find that same peace amid such horrible darkness." "For I knew Christ no more, save as a severe judge, from whom I sought to escape, and yet could not." In this distress of mind he was comforted by an aged monk, who taught him that Christ was the atonement for all our sins, and that this was proclaimed by the Church in the Apostles' Creed, and directed him to the study of the Epistle to the Romans.

From this time he was a zealous preacher and professor of theology, and he had always been an earnest Romanist. Even his visit to Rome in 1510, though he had been greatly shocked at the infidelity and immorality he met there, had not led him to think for a moment of such a thing as setting himself in opposition to the Papal authority. Nothing short 104 of seeing that the authorities of the Roman Church in that day countenanced a practice so clearly contrary to the Gospel, and ruinous to men's souls, as this sale of indulgences, could have moved him to take a step of such tremendous import. Many years afterwards he said, "I entered on this affair with great fear and trembling. I was alone, and had entangled myself in the contest without forethought, and on many and weighty points I gave way to the Pope; not only because I could not draw back, but because I sincerely and earnestly worshipped him from the bottom of my soul . . . . How and what my heart suffered and underwent in those first two years, and in what a sense of unworthiness (not false and affected, but true and sincere), nay, in what sheer despair I was plunged, is little conceived by those who have since assailed the Pope's majesty with great pride and arrogance. But I, alone in the breach, was none so joyous and sure of my cause."

It was in 1517 that he published his Theses, and during the next three years, while engaged in disputes with Cajetan and Eck, he wrote and brought out several of his most important works, among them his Commentary on the Galatians, his Address to the Christian Nobles of Germany, and his sermon on the Liberty of a Christian Man. In 1520 came his open breach with the Pope, when he burnt the Papal bull of excommunication. Then followed his appearance before the Diet of Worms in 1521; his concealment on the Wartburg, and return to Wittenberg in 1522; his marriage in 1525; and his life at Wittenberg, until the year 1546, when he died on a journey, at Eisleben, at the age of sixty-three.

Luther was a true representative of the German people, in the depth and force and honesty of his nature, in his keenness of intellect and his occasional coarseness, in his love of art and humour and domestic life. Hence all he said and did was caught up by the people with an enthusiasm which can scarcely be conceived. "His Theses flew over Germany," says a contemporary, Myconius, "as if the angels of God had been his messengers, and carried them to all men's eyes." The works that so quickly followed them, seemed to utter the very words for which men's souls were thirsting. His great doctrine of justification by faith in Jesus Christ, the one Mediator between God and man, gave peace to the conscience by delivering it from the burden of past sins, and a new spring of life to the soul by showing men that their dependence was not on anything in themselves, no works of their own performance, but on the infinite love and mercy of God which He had manifested to all mankind in His Son. And again, his doctrine of the universal priesthood of all believers put a new spirit into the Church, by vindicating for every member of it his right and duty to offer for himself the sacrifice of praise and prayer, and to study for himself God's word in the Scriptures.

Luther's Bible

It was on the Wartburg that he began his translation of the Bible, the first part of which, the New Testament, was published in 1522, and the whole Bible in 1534. "In this work," says Grimm, "Luther has made use of his mother-tongue with such force, purity, and beauty, that his style, from its powerful influence on our whole language, must be considered to have been the germ and laid the basis of the 106 modern high German language, from which, up to the present day, but few deviations have taken place, and those mostly to the detriment of its force and expressiveness."

Luther's Hymns

His next effort was to give the people the means of worshipping God in their own language. In 1523 he published a treatise "on the ordering of Divine Service in the Church;" and at Christmas 1525, service was celebrated in the parish church of Wittenberg according to this new German rendering of the mass. In 1526 came out a complete new German liturgy, and now was felt the want of German psalms and hymns to fill the place of the Latin hymns and sequences. Luther at once set to work to supply it. He was intensely fond of both music, and poetry, and was himself a master of vigorous and simple German. What he thought of music may be seen from the preface to this work; and long before Shakespeare he had said, "He who despises music, as all fanatics do, will never be my friend." He would have all children taught to sing: "For I would fain see all arts, specially music, in the service of Him who has given and created them."

From this time onwards, throughout his life, he was an active reformer of church music and hymns, and enlisted in the same work the large circle of friends whom he gathered round him. At Wittenberg he kept open house, and many who came from a distance to see and consult with the great reformer, or poor students who came to attend his lectures, found a place at his table. After dinner, whether he dined at home or abroad, it was his custom to take a lute and sing and play for half an hour or more with his friends. In 1524 he invited Conrad Rupf, choir-master 107 to the Elector of Saxony, and Johann Walther, then choir-master to Frederick the Wise at Jorgau, to live with him until the work of reforming and readapting the liturgy for popular use should be completed. With this "house-choir," as he calls it, he studied the old stores of church music, with which he had already considerable acquaintance from his own education as chorister, and selected those tunes which lent themselves best to their new purpose. A large number of chorales belonging to the old Latin hymns, others of German origin--whether sacred, or, in some cases, secular--were thus appropriated; a still larger number of new tunes were composed. Luther himself composed several;¹²¹²He is the undisputed author of three chorales, and about fifteen may in all probability be ascribed to him. among others, the splendid chorale to his own hymn, "A sure stronghold our God is He," and that to his Christmas carol, "From heaven above to earth I come." But it was in the composition of the hymns that his own chief work lay. "It is my intention," he writes to his friend Spalatin, "after the example of the prophets and the ancient fathers, to make German psalms for the people; that is, spiritual songs, whereby the Word of God may be kept alive among them by singing. We seek, therefore, everywhere for poets. Now, as you are such a master of the German tongue, and are so mighty and eloquent therein, I entreat you to join hands with us in this work, and to turn one of the psalms into a hymn, according to the pattern (i.e. an attempt of my own) that I here send you. But I desire that all new-fangled words from the Court should be left out; that the words may be all quite plain and common, such as the common 108 people may understand, yet pure, and skilfully handled; and next, that the meaning should be given clearly and graciously, according to the sense of the psalm itself." Luther himself had recourse to this most ancient treasury of sacred song, and wrote versions of various psalms, choosing them, as we may observe, from their adaptation to his own circumstances and feelings. He also translated afresh many of the Latin hymns, which he counted among the good things that God's power and wonderful working had kept alive amid so much corruption, and gave new versions of several of the early German hymns.

Altogether he wrote certainly thirty-seven hymns. More are frequently ascribed to him, but with doubtful accuracy. Of these, twelve were translations from the Latin, and four were new renderings of the old German Leisen; the remainder were purely original compositions. The intention with which they were written is clearly enough to be discerned. They were not so much outpourings of the individual soul, as the voice of the congregation meant for use in public worship, or to give the people a short, clear confession of faith, easily to be remembered. But they are not written from the outside; Luther throws into them all his own fervent faith and deep devotion. The style is plain, often rugged and quaint, but genuinely popular. So, too, was their cheerful trust and noble courage; their clear, vigorous spirit, that sprang from steadfast faith in a Redeemer. All the many conflicts, inward and outward, of Luther's life, had only deepened his experience; they had by no means damped his courage or his power of enjoyment. Since he himself had once found peace in Christ, 109 and could trust in God, he was at leisure to feel all the delightfulness of music, of children, of birds and flowers, of the society of pleasant friends; he had, too, a strong sense of humour, which, in his polemical writings, shows itself in very downright, and often coarse forms, but which gives a peculiar raciness and life to his letters and sayings.

In the years when he was composing most of his hymns, four printers in Erfurt alone were entirely occupied in printing and publishing them. Nor could they be prevented from penetrating where his printed works were carefully excluded; they were carried over the country by wandering students and pedlars, and here and there found their way even into Roman Catholic churches. "The whole people," writes a Romanist of that day, "is singing itself into this Lutheran doctrine." Collections of hymns sprang up at this time with astounding rapidity, and in several of these Luther took part. The four principal ones, which have prefaces written by him, and contain most of his hymns, passed through many editions, and are known by the names of their printers.¹³¹³They are the "Erfurter Enchiridion," the hymn-book of Johann Walther, that of Joseph Klug, and that of Valentin Babst. Of these, the earliest, the "Enchiridion," published at Erfurt in 1524, was at first placed in the people's hands for reading while the choir were singing, for the congregation was so unused to joining in the public service, that they could not at once adopt the new practice. It was some four or five years before Luther taught the people in his own parish church of Wittenberg to sing in church, but then the custom spread very swiftly.

The best known of all Luther's hymns is that founded on the forty-sixth Psalm, which has been already mentioned. It is supposed to have been written on his way to the Diet of Worms, from the coincidence of the third verse with Luther's answer to Spalatin, who tried to dissuade him from the journey: "If there were as many devils in Worms as there are tiles on the roofs, I would go, and would not be afraid. If Huss was burnt to ashes, the truth was not burnt with him." Some, however, think that it was composed at the close of the Second Diet of Spires--that in 1529, which revoked the religious liberty granted in the previous one of 1526, and against which five sovereign princes and fifteen free cities protested, and so earned the name of Protestants, a title which is, however, very rarely used in Germany, as "Evangelical" is the word used there in contradistinction to Roman Catholic.

Still more popular in its own day was the second hymn that Luther ever wrote; no doubt from its containing in short compass a complete epitome, at once of the reformed doctrine of salvation, and of the actual experience of those who had passed through the same conflicts as Luther himself. An eye-witness of the Reformation says: "Who doubts not, that many hundred Christians have been brought to the true faith by this one hymn alone, who before, perchance, could not so much as bear to hear Luther's 112 name. But his sweet and noble words have so taken their hearts that they were constrained to come to the truth." A curious use was made of it in the year 1557, when a number of princes belonging to the reformed religion being assembled at Frankfort, they wished to have an evangelical service in the church of St. Bartholomew. A large congregation assembled, but the pulpit was occupied by a Roman Catholic priest, who proceeded to preach according to his own views. After listening for some time in indignant silence the whole congregation rose and began to sing this hymn, till they fairly sang the priest out of church. Its tune is that known in England as Luther's Hymn, and tradition says that Luther noted it down from the singing of a travelling artisan. Luther's own title to it is--

We add Luther's version of the Song of Simeon:--

Justus Jonas

Justus Jonas -- P. 115

Among the friends enlisted by Luther as writers for the new hymn-books, the principal were Justus Jonas, who was for many years his colleague in the professorship of theology at Wittenberg; and Paul Eber, who stood in a similar relation to Melancthon. Melancthon himself wrote no hymns, for the one or two often attributed to him are really passages from his writings versified by friends. His work lay in the scholarship which produced what was long the standard edition in Germany of the Greek Testament, and in the theology that gave shape to the Confession of Augsburg. Justus Jonas was the son of the burgomaster of Nordhausen, a clever young lawyer, who very early became professor of jurisprudence at Erfurt 116 and a friend of Erasmus and Luther. So close was his intimacy with the latter, that he accompanied him to Worms, an act for which he was deprived of his salary as professor. Luther then induced him to study divinity and take orders, and for many years the two men lived in constant association at Wittenberg; Justus Jonas accompanied his friend on his last journey, stood by his death-bed, and with many tears preached his funeral sermon. Luther's death was followed, as he had himself foretold, by troubles and strife. For six years (from 1546 to 1552) Germany was distracted by a civil war, of which the object was to obtain toleration for the reformed doctrine, an end achieved at last by Maurice of Saxony, in the treaty of Passau. Nor was this the only struggle that was going on. Differences of opinion on intricate theological questions had already begun to divide the Reformers themselves. Various sects arose, but the chief division was that between the followers of Luther who adhered to the Confession of Augsburg, and those of Zwinglius who adopted the more Calvinistic views of the Swiss reformers, with a lower sacramental theory. These called themselves distinctively the Reformed Church, while the Lutherans adopted the name of the Evangelical Church; but the latter were by far the most numerous body, and occupied in most States the position of the National Protestant Church of Germany, while the Reformed Church took up that of an important and tolerated sect. Justus Jonas, who was not merely a good theologian, but a skilful jurist, naturally had to take part in all the many discussions and conferences in which the evangelical doctrine gradually 117 assumed definite form and consistency, and the legal and political rights of its adherents were ascertained and asserted; and of course he had to bear his share of the difficulties in which he was thus involved. On one occasion a Spanish officer quartered in his house received a large bribe to assassinate him, but was so much impressed by the piety, integrity, and kindness of his intended victim, that he confessed his purpose to him, and entreated forgiveness. Yet on his deathbed this well-proved servant of Christ suffered much from mental doubts and conflicts, until at last peace returned, and he fell asleep "as a tired soldier." What he did for hymnology was to help Luther in preparing metrical German versions of the Psalms, choosing by preference, as one can well understand, those which speak of David's sufferings from his enemies, and his trust in God's deliverance. Some of these are very celebrated, especially the one here given:--

Paul Eber

Paul Eber -- P. 119

As Justus Jonas had somewhat of Luther's talents and frank courage, so Paul Eber was not unlike his great friend Melancthon. He was the son of a poor tailor, a small delicate child, whose love of books induced his father to stint himself even in food, in order to send the boy to the Grammar School of Nuremberg, one of the first schools into which the reformed doctrine had penetrated, Paul Eber at once imbibed its spirit, and as soon as he was old enough, went to Wittenberg to sit at Luther's feet. Attracted by his thoughtfulness and purity of manners, Luther invited him to his table, where he met Melancthon, and as the lad wrote a remarkably clear and delicate hand, while Melancthon wrote a particularly bad one, the latter took him for his amanuensis. From this time they lived on terms of the closest intimacy, so that Luther used to call him "Philip's familiar," and "Philip's treasury." He became professor 120 of Hebrew at Wittenberg, and married a wife whom Melancthon chose for him, with whom he lived most happily. But in the theological disputes of those days he, like many others of Melancthon's special followers, was accused of concealed Calvinism, and bitterly attacked; and finally, at the conference of Altenburg, in 1569, he was named among those who were excluded on this ground from the Lord's Table and the privilege of becoming sponsors. He went home in cold March weather, wounded to the heart by this intolerance; his health gave way, and the death of his wife, which occurred unexpectedly about this time, was his own deathblow. He died in 1569.

Eber's hymns have a tone of tenderness and pathos about them, which is much less characteristic of this period than the grave, manly trustfulness of Luther and Jonas. But they soon became very widely known, and in the following age, that of the Thirty Years' War, few hymns were more constantly used both in public and private, than one of his beginning:--

This hymn was composed in 1547, when the Imperial armies were besieging Wittenberg, and Eber with two others were the only professors who remained in the university. Two of his hymns for the dying 121 have been always very commonly used at deathbeds and funerals in the Roman Catholic as well as the Evangelical parts of Germany. The one is,¹⁴¹⁴"Herr Jesu Christ, wahr Mensch und Gott." "Lord Jesus Christ, true Man and God." the other is the following childlike expression of perfect trust:--

CHAPTER VI.
HYMNS OF THE REFORMATION.
A.D. 1520-1600.

Luther and his immediate friends were only the founders of the new German hymnology; it rapidly spread over a much wider field. The number of hymn-writers who suddenly sprang up at this time is indeed far too great to admit of any detailed account of them. It included not only clergymen and professors like those already mentioned, Erasmus Alber, whose secular writings especially his fables were also celebrated, and Nicholas Decius, a converted monk, whose German version of the "Gloria in excelsis,"

"All glory be to God on high,"

with its noble chorale, soon came into use all over Germany; it also included men of all ranks--princes, like the Margraves of Hesse and Brandenburg; soldiers and lawyers, like Reissner, who was at the siege of Rome, and Spengler, the town-clerk of Nuremberg; artisans, like Hans Sachs the shoemaker; and the unknown authors of those popular sacred songs which were on the lips of wandering craftsmen and maids at their work. But the ground-tones of this 123 religious poetry were everywhere the same--on the doctrinal side a joyful assertion of God's free grace and goodwill towards men, as shown in our Lord Jesus Christ; and on the experimental side an ardent expression of hope in God for the future, and acceptance of His will in the present. These men felt that He had suffered a great new light of Truth to dawn on the world, and so though it might bring much conflict it filled them also with a new life and courage, and with a confident anticipation of a better future, which found its expression even in the services for the dying and the dead. Thus these hymns have a certain manliness, breadth, and fervour about them, which pre-eminently adapted them for use in the church as the common voice of praise and prayer.

Paul Speratus

Even those which seem to us least adapted for such a purpose, the doctrinal ones, were more truly popular in those days, when this especial aspect of religion was the thing men were thinking about and fighting for, than we can well understand now. So a hymn by Paul Speratus, the chaplain of the Duke of Prussia, which begins--

goes on through several verses with a statement of the doctrine of justification by faith that sounds to us like a bit out of the Augsburg Confession done 124 into rhyme. But in his own day it was as popular as Luther's hymns, and Luther himself is said to have given his last coin to a Prussian beggar from whom he heard it for the first time. Equally characteristic of the other class of hymns is such an one as that long attributed to the Elector John of Saxony, because he frequently used it during his imprisonment, but really written by Ambrosius Blaurer, a monk from the Black Forest who joined the Reformed Church.

Or take the following hymn, which surely embodies a noble conception of the duty and the aspirations of a Christian sovereign, and was composed by the prince whose name it bears.¹⁶¹⁶In the original the verses form an acrostic on his name.

Hans Sachs

It is curious also to note that now, for the first time, Northern Germany furnishes the largest proportion of singers; hitherto the southern half of Germany had claimed nearly all its literary and poetical activity,--now on the contrary, the North supplanted the Southern "Volkslied" on its own ground. But the South could still boast of possessing at Nuremberg the best poet of his day, the one who linked the times that were passing to the new period that was coming in, for he characteristically belonged to the Middle Ages, and yet was among the earliest and warmest adherents of the Reformation. Nuremberg itself was one of the most splendid results of those ages. It was a great free city, whose social polity was the pride of its citizens and the admiration of strangers, wealthy, and full of stirring and successful commercial enterprise; the home of the great mechanical and scientific inventions of the day; and rich in treasures of Gothic art in its streets and churches. Martin Schön was engraving, and Albert Durer was painting there, where, according to the old doggrel rhyme--

was winding up with his own name the long roll of her "Master-singers," and opening the way to the new style of modern poetry. Hans Sachs was the son of a tailor, and was born in 1494, during a fearful 129 epidemic of the plague. His parents were industrious, God-fearing people, who early sent him to the grammar-school; but as his health was not strong, they thought it better he should be put to a trade than allowed to study as he wished. At fourteen, accordingly he was apprenticed to a shoemaker, but about the same time he made the acquaintance of Leonard Nunnenbeck, who was a weaver and also the most celebrated "Master-singer" of the day. Nunnenbeck remarked the boy's talent, and at once received him among his pupils; and when, at seventeen, Hans Sachs set out on his wanderings, his object was to perfect himself not only in the craft of shoemaking, but also in that of verse-making. He visited the great schools of his art in Mayence and Strasburg, and ere long made such progress that he himself acted as teacher in Frankfort and Munich. He was a favourite everywhere for his talent and his wit, but he led a singularly pure and abstemious life; and at twenty-two returned to his native city, presented his master-piecc as a shoemaker, and when admitted to the guild, married, and settled down in Nuremberg. Here he spent the rest of his long life,--for though he was a delicate child, he lived to be eighty-one,--working sometimes at his trade, sometimes giving instruction in the art of composition, more often engaged on his own compositions. These earned him in his own day great renown and a wide popularity, and he was the first author who lived to see a complete collected edition of his own works. It was published at Nuremberg in 1558, in five folio volumes. He was indeed a most prolific writer, surpassed only by Lopes de Vega, for he published more than six thousand 130 poems, of course of very varying excellence. Almost every style of poetry, except the dramatic which he but slightly attempted, is largely represented among them,--lyrical, narrative, satirical, humorous and earnest. His highest merit, which won for him the admiration of Goethe, lay in his short tales, many of which are comic, though all have some moral point, and which are told with a spirit and humour, a freshness and pathos that both render them attractive in themselves and valuable as a vivid picture of the life of his times. The greater number of his more humorous poems belong to his later years; most of his earlier ones are serious--first love-songs of a very pure and domestic character, then poems chiefly of the political and religious class. Such works, handling the most important topics of the day and circulated on broadsheets as fast as they were written, helped to form the public opinion of the times as powerfully as newspapers do now, and it was no slight gain to the cause of the Reformation that so ready and favourite a writer should from the first have taken that side. In 1523 he published a poem which soon spread all over Germany, called the "Nightingale of Wittenberg." It described the state of Christendom, by picturing the miseries of a poor flock of sheep which have fallen among wolves, and are especially exposed to the rapacity of a lion (Leo X.), who had craftily undertaken to defend them. Suddenly they hear the clear notes of a nightingale, foretelling the day-dawn, and the sheep who follow this voice are led out into a lovely sunny, safe meadow. His keen, shrewd rightmindedness made him appreciate how great an influence the new mode of thought would inevitably 131 exercise on the domestic life, and also on the social and political condition of the nation; and hence many of his poems take up the questions of the honourableness of marriage, the necessity of concession on the part of the rulers, and of love of the commonwealth and readiness to make sacrifices for it on the part of the people of Germany. He saw, too, the dangers of discord and quarrels among the Reformers; and when Luther dies, he represents Theology as weeping over the coffin of the man of God, and mourning the treatment she receives at the hands of presumptuous sectaries. He comforts herby telling her that she has yet defenders left, and that Luther's doctrine has at least put an end for ever to all the monkey-tricks of relics and shrines, pretended miracles and indulgences. But he does not conceal his fears of the dissensions among Christians themselves, and exhorts them to hold fast by the pure Gospel: "Love God above all, and thy neighbour as thyself; against that doctrine ban and edict, clergy and laity, school and preaching, monks and old women, will alike be powerless."

The most famous of his hymns is one that he wrote during the terrible siege of Nuremberg in 1561:-- "Why art thou thus cast down, my heart?"¹⁷¹⁷"Warum betrübst du dich mein Herz." Of his others we give two; the first is called

As this poem makes us understand what many men must have felt when the Gospel was once more made accessible to them in their own language, and without 134 the intervention of "men's devices," so the next little song expresses that trust in Christ as the only Mediator and channel of salvation, which had been long obscured by teachings about the Virgin and the saints.

Bohemian Brethren

Another link between the religious poetry of the Reformation and of that preceding age, was the hymnology of the Bohemian Brethren, which often reminds us in tone of the mediaeval Latin hymns. These Brethren were the remains of an ancient Slavonic Christianity, which owed its origin to the teaching of two Greek monks in the ninth century, and was in existence before the papal authority and Roman liturgy found their way to Bohemia. Throughout the Middle Ages a tacit struggle existed between these two elements; the Roman prevailed, but the earlier Greek still showed itself in the demand of the people for the possession of the Scriptures and the performance of worship in the vernacular; and it was in a great measure due to his meeting this want that the doctrines of Huss were so readily received. At last the smouldering conflict burst into open warfare, which raged at intervals throughout the fifteenth century. It was a terrible war, embittered by the animosities alike of religion and race--a history of virulent and unrelenting persecution on one side, and of cruel retaliations on the other. At last a peace was made; the Hussites withdrew to the borders of Bohemia and Moravia, and maintained a precarious existence, until the scanty remnants found a refuge in Saxony in 1725.

When the Reformation began, the Bohemian Brethren were among the first to hail it; as early 136 as 1522 they sent messengers to Luther to wish him success, and confer with him on questions of church discipline. One of these was Michael Weiss, who afterwards became the pastor of the German-speaking congregations of Landskron and Fulnek, and for their benefit translated into German the finest of the Bohemian hymns, adding some of his own. Luther greatly admired and highly recommended this hymn-book; it was republished with further additions by their Bishop, John Horn, in 1540, and passed through many editions both in Germany and Holland. Its contents are of various kinds: some are entitled "Hymns of Instruction," and were designed to put the great truths of Christianity and the chief events of the Gospel history, into a form in which they might be easily understood and retained by unlettered minds; others are liturgical, adapted to the festivals of the Church, or morning and evening prayer, and among these many are antiphons, often of very elaborate structure, intended to be sung alternately by priest and people; others again are simply hymns of Christian experience. The versification is fluent and musical, reminding us that the Bohemian race has always been distinguished by its musical gifts: the tone has no fierceness, but much tenderness and earnestness; and the frequent references to persecution only implore steadfastness and protection, never vengeance. The Christian sacrifice of entire self-surrender to God, the union of the Church in Christ, reliance on God in trouble,--these thoughts, which the circumstances of their own career must have brought very close to their hearts, meet us again and again in their hymns. The following is

The next is a

The last is one of a class of hymns for which they are celebrated--morning and evening hymns.

Johann Matthesius

Two more singers of this period must be named here, because they as distinctively connect this age with the coming one, as Hans Sachs did with the past. They were fast friends and fellow-helpers,--the pastor and precentor of Joachimsthal, Johann Matthesius and Nicolas Hermann. Joachimsthal was a large village in the mountainous border-land between Saxony and Bohemia; mines had lately been discovered in its neigbbourhood, and it was rapidly growing into a prosperous little town; it had embraced the Reformed religion, and was distinguished by its 141 good schools. Here for many years Matthesius and Hermann led such a life as, happily for Germany, has been characteristic of many of her secluded districts since the Reformation,--quiet as to outward tenor amid those eventful times, hardworking in the cause of religion and education, homely in its circumstances, yet linked to the wider world and the best life of its time by its religious thought and its culture of poetry and music. The two friends were very unlike. Matthesius had been converted by reading accidentally some of Luther's tracts, and left the grammar-school of Joachimsthal of which he was rector, to become again a student at Wittenberg, and hear the lectures of Melancthon and Luther. Justus Jonas introduced him to Luther, who invited him to become one of the regular guests at his table, and ere long admitted him to his most intimate friendship. Luther very soon urged him to take orders, for which indeed he was well qualified, for he was a man of ability, of great piety, and had a gift of singularly persuasive eloquence; but he was so self-distrustful, that on his first attempt to preach he ascended the pulpit three times without being able to bring out a single word; and it was only Luther's almost vehement insistance that induced him to make one more effort, when he gave "a capital glorious sermon," as Luther says. He sympathised with Luther too in his love and practice of music, and after Luther's death wrote a biography of him, which is still a standard work. From Wittenberg he returned as pastor to Joachimsthal, where he laboured for the rest of his life, greatly cherished by its somewhat rough and mixed population, who were very proud of their 142 pastor's eloquence and singularly pious and charitable life. Yet though outwardly smooth, life was no easy thing for him: he suffered much from the cares of a large family, especially after the death of his helpful wife; and from mental and spiritual conflicts, which at times seriously affected his health. He died as he had often wished, in harness, being seized with a fit at the conclusion of a sermon. He wrote various devotional works, and some very good and sweet hymns; of which several for the morning, for marriage, a cradle hymn, and for the miners, became very popular.

[The hymns most frequently to be met with, are of course those adapted to Church use. A morning hymn--

was the favourite morning hymn of Gustavus Adolphus.]

But his influence on literature was not so great as that of his friend, who was precentor and organist of the church and master of the schools.

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 143 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--

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

And of Matthesius we give this Miner's Song:

CHAPTER VII.
AN INTERVAL.
A.D. 1560-1616.

The later years of the sixteenth and the opening of the seventeenth century are by no means so rich in hymn-writers as the era of the Reformation itself. Not that there was any diminution in the quantity of religious poetry, but the quality grew much poorer and thinner, and it fell chiefly into the hands of professional authors, instead of springing up all over the country out of the heart of the people. Still this period, too, has some very good and fine hymns, but a marked change of tone is perceptible in most of them; they are no longer filled with the joyful welcome of a new day, they more often lament the wickedness of the age, and anticipate coming evil times or the end of the world itself. And yet that age, so far from being at all particularly wicked or calamitous, was a time on the whole of peace and prosperity. Pestilences did indeed visit Germany at intervals, as in 1563 and 1597, but this was no new thing; such outbreaks occur periodically throughout the previous centuries.

Progress of Germany

In other respects Germany was making rapid progress, both material and mental. In the course of a few 147 years after the peace of Passau, the Reformed religion had spread over more than three-fourths of the country, including all the most populous and active regions; while in literature so great a change had taken place, that whereas a work of the fifteenth century seems far away from us both in thought and language, a work from the latter half of the sixteenth is written nearly in the same German that is used now, and breathes comparatively the spirit of modern life. The great idea that every man is personally responsible for his belief and his actions to God Himself, was making itself felt in every field, breaking up old organizations and the orderly but rigid routine of mediaeval life prompting to new enterprises, inspiring men with courage to bear imprisonment, exile, or death for their faith. But it had brought its dangers and difficulties too, not only in the actual persecutions and wars which, though on a very limited scale, existed throughout this period until they culminated in the great struggle of the Thirty Years' War; but still more in an excessive individualism which rendered common action almost impossible. For the new mode of thought gave rise to mental conflicts and doubts and scruples of conscience, for which there was no longer the easy resolution of an authoritative decision of Church or priest, and which saddened the lives of many whom we should not now call specially religious persons; and it brought endless disputes on doctrinal questions among the professors of the evangelical faith themselves. Over the temporary compromise between the Romanist and Protestant religions, known as "the Interim;" over every shade of more or less Calvinistic views of the Atonement and the Sacraments, 148 they quarrelled, not in words only but deeds: men were deprived of their offices or salaries, banished from one State to another, or excluded from the Lord's Supper and from the privilege of sponsorship. The political circumstances of the day bore the same impress of lack of unity. Germany was broken up into a multitude of little States, without a real centre of authority, and with no clearly defined relations between the princes and people within each State. Against all this division was ranged the growing power of the Order of the Jesuits on the religious side, and of the House of Hapsburg on the political; two powers that indeed represented unity, but unity springing from and leading back to despotism, and which soon formed a close and mighty alliance. It might well be that to thoughtful men the future looked dark.

Out of this time we choose Ambrose Lobwasser, Bartholomew Ringwaldt, Selnecker, and Helmboldt as the men who best represent its religious poetry.¹⁸¹⁸It should be remarked that it was during this period that two men wrote, whose prose works powerfully affected the religious life of Germany. One was the mystic, Jacob Böhme (died in 1624), whose influence becomes apparent in the literature of the period following the Thirty Years' War. The other was Johann Arndt (died 1621), whose works on the Christian Life--the "True Christianity," and "Garden of Paradise"--were the favourite devotional reading of all earnest Christians in Germany for more than a hundred years. Lobwasser was a professor of jurisprudence at Königsberg, and had strong leanings to the Calvinistic Church, though not actually belonging to it. He made a complete translation of the French Psalter of Marot and Beza, which was published with Goudimel's melodies in 1573, and went through many subsequent 149 editions. It is noticeable chiefly because it long remained the recognised psalter, like Sternhold and Hopkins with us, and was the only hymn-book admitted to use in public worship by the Calvinistic churches. Otherwise its poetical merits are very small; it does not rise above the level of a sort of rhymed prose, and it furnished an unfortunate model for a flood of very prosaic rhymed paraphrases of doctrinal statements or passages of Scripture, which become wonderfully numerous at this time.

Bartholomew Ringwaldt

Ringwaldt was the author of the hymn so well known in England under the mistaken title of "Luther's Hymn,"--

which is in fact a quotation rather freely handled from a celebrated hymn of his on the Second Advent to judgment. He was a native of Frankfort-on-the-Oder; a man of cheerful, courageous, genial spirit, whose life was passed as the pastor of a little place called Langfeldt, where he died in 1598. But his many hymns and religious works strongly illustrate what has been said of the tone of feeling at that time, for they are generally penitential, or filled with warnings of the coming judgment. Among the best of the former is the following:--

Nicholas Selnecker

The career of Nicholas Selnecker, on the other hand, affords an example of that discord and persecution among the Protestants of which we have spoken. He was a cultivated, agreeable, and very able man, springing from one of the oldest families of Nuremberg, who prided themselves on their culture. As a boy, his remarkable musical gifts and personal beauty attracted the notice of Ferdinand, King of Rome, and his Italian confessor; and they laid a plan for having the boy kidnapped and carried to Spain. Fortunately his father discovered it in time to have him secretly conveyed to Wittenberg, where he was boarded in the house of Melancthon. As a man, the highest offices in the Lutheran Church were open to him, and he was distinguished by several of the Evangelical sovereigns. But he had an acute, and singularly just and candid mind, which inclined him to decided but moderate views, and hence he became a constant mark for attack to the extreme partisans on both sides. He was incessantly involved in controversy; he was seven times banished from Saxony--whenever, in fact, the ultra-Calvinistic party got the upper hand--and was seven times implored to return; while he was turned out of Jena and Brunswick for being too lenient 152 to the Calvinists. So the life that might have been rich in value and usefulness was almost wasted in fruitless disputes and struggles, which were full of suffering to a man who loved peace, and was keenly alive to the dangers of disunion. He died in 1592, at the age of sixty-two. Being a great lover of church-music, he devoted much time and attention to the improvement of the German liturgy, and himself wrote several hymns, of which only two short ones can be quoted here. The first is still commonly used at the close of evening worship:--

For his own daily prayer he wrote this:--

Louis Helmboldt

Louis Helmboldt belongs in age to this date, but in the tone and power of his compositions he is more nearly akin to Luther and his contemporaries. He was, like Selnecker and Ringwaldt, a native of one of the great free cities, Mulhausen, where his father, a wealthy woollen manufacturer, was a senator and had married into one of the neighbouring noble families. At fifteen the young Louis already went to the university of Erfurt, and at eighteen his native city made him head-master of one of its schools--a position, however, which he found it best to resign in about eighteen months. He then returned to Erfurt, obtained a professorship, and for seventeen years was Dean of the Philosophical Faculty. At this university there was at that time both a Romanist and an Evangelical party; and when the former from political circumstances for a while obtained the preponderance, Helmboldt, as a leader of the latter, was obliged to leave, to the great indignation of the town and the students. He went back to Mulhausen, and at the age of forty took orders, and was appointed by the town-council to one of their churches, and to the rectorship of a great school; and was finally made general-superintendent, an office answering to that of a bishop with us. He was one of the principal poets of his day, and published a number of Latin odes and elegies, for which the Emperor Maximilian, at the Diet of Augsburg, awarded him the honours and emoluments of poet-laureate. Of his German writings the odes are said to be very poor, but he was a fertile song-writer both for the school and home, after the manner of Nicolas Hermann, and for the Church. One of his hymns is to be found in all 154 German hymn-books, and has rooted itself among the people. It was written in 1563, when a terrible pestilence attacked Erfurt, and in the course of a year destroyed 4,000 of its inhabitants, so that the university had to be broken up for some months. Helmboldt gave this hymn to the wife of one of his friends, as she was starting on a hasty flight from the city; and in most of the old hymn-books it is headed--

Weingartner

Several of the classical hymns of Germany belong to this period, and resemble in spirit those of Ringwaldt and Helmboldt just quoted. The best are by Schalling and Herberger, both pastors in Silesia, and Pappus, a professor at Strasburg.

We give one of this style by Weingartner, the pastor of Heilbronn, which became a great favourite during the Thirty Years' War, and also a little poem of a more personal character, which belongs to this date, but is of unknown authorship:--

Philip Nicolai

Hitherto the hymns of the Reformation had been distinguished by their simplicity and appropriateness to church use; their models had been found in the earlier Latin hymns, or in the Psalms of the Old Testament and the hymns handed down to us by St. Luke. Now, however, for the first time we encounter a new style, afterwards very prevalent, which reminds us of some of the later mediaeval hymns addressed to the Virgin and saints, and finds its scriptural ground in the Song of Solomon and the Apocalypse. As yet most hymns were addressed to God the Father through our Lord Jesus Christ, or to the Holy Trinity, or in the case of 159 hymns of sorrow and penitence to the Saviour. But afterwards the mystical union of Christ with the soul became a favourite subject; more secular allusions and similes were admitted, and a class of hymns begins to grow up, called in Germany "Hymns of the Love of Jesus." Some of these are extremely beautiful, and express most vividly that sense of fellowship with Christ, of His presence and tender sympathy, of personal love and gratitude to Him, which are among the deepest and truest experiences of the Christian life; but it is a style which needs to be guarded, for it easily degenerates into sentimentality of a kind very injurious alike to true religion and poetical beauty.

The earliest examples of this style are two celebrated hymns written by Dr. Philip Nicolai in 1597, during a fearful pestilence in Westphalia, where he was pastor of the little town of Unna. More than 1,400 persons died in a very short time, and from his window he saw all the funerals pass to the graveyard close at hand. From these scenes of death he turned to the study of St. Augustine's "City of God" and the contemplation of the eternal life, and so absorbed himself in them that he remained cheerful and well amid the surrounding distress. In 1599 he published the fruit of his meditations in a treatise called "The Joyous Mirror of Life Eternal," a book of pious and devout reflection, to which be affixed two hymns that speedily attained a remarkable popularity, and are indeed admirable for their fervour of emotion and mastery over difficult but musical rhythms. One is--

which is well known in England from the use of its splendid chorale in Mendelssohn's "Elijah" to the words,

"Sleepers, wake, a voice is calling."

The other hymn, "O Morning-Star," also possesses a very fine chorale; and so popular did it soon become, that its tune was often chimed by city chimes, lines and verses from it were printed by way of ornament on the common earthenware of the country, and it was invariably used at weddings and certain festivals. It is still to be found in all German hymn-books, but in a very modified form to suit more modern tastes. A translation of the original hymn is here attempted. Nicolai's title for it is--

Church Music

It has been said that Nicolai's hymns owed some of their popularity to the noble chorales he composed for them; and it may be observed in general that the rapid growth of sacred poetry in Germany at the era of the Reformation was partly due to an equally striking advance in church-music. The song-loving 163 German people seized with avidity on this new opening for their art, and a very remarkable number of fine tunes were composed in this century, so that an old writer says, "Whensoever the Holy Ghost inspireth a new hymn, it is His wont to inspire some one with a good tune to fit it." Nearly all the collections of hymns also contained tunes, which were inseparably associated with certain hymns; and it became the custom in most towns, for the city musicians to ascend the tower of the church or town-hall at certain hours of the day, and blow these sacred melodies from their horns, so that the people learnt them by heart from childhood. A great improvement took place in the organ about the same time, and Eccard, who lived at Mulhausen, and composed melodies for many of Helmboldt's hymns, introduced the practice of giving the air to the soprano instead of the tenor voice. Thus by the close of this century the chorale had assumed essentially its modern form, and the organ was universally used in Lutheran churches. The tune to Helmboldt's hymn above quoted has always been a peculiar favourite in Germany, and though harmonized by Eccard, was based on a secular air, as Helmboldt tells us--

The chorales are distinguished by breadth and simplicity, and are peculiarly adapted for large masses of voices or for organ accompaniment; while compared with the Gregorian music which had preceded them, they formed a congregational rhythmical song. Great skill may be shown in the arrangement of the inner voices, and in such skill Luther took the keenest delight: he speaks of the wonderful wisdom of God as shown in music, "when the other parts play around the air, leading as it were a heavenly dance with it; meeting with pleasure, parting in pain, embracing and kissing each other again." "Whoever is not moved by such art as this, must of a truth be a coarse clod, not worthy to hear such lovely music, but only the waste wild bray of the old chanting, and the songs and music of the dogs and pigs."

CHAPTER VIII.
THE THIRTY YEARS' WAR.
A.D. 1618-1650.

The long peace of sixty years which had followed the treaty of Passau was drawing to an end; and to understand the difference that was made by the Thirty Years' War that followed it, we must remember that Germany was already an old country, in the van of European civilization, with a social order, literature, and arts of many centuries' growth.

Some of the great cities, such as those of the Hanse League and Nuremberg for instance, were indeed beginning to lose a little of their pre-eminence, as the carrying trade of the world was finding new paths, and slipping into the hands of the English and the Netherlanders. But they were still the channel of communication between the east and west of Europe; and the great development of the internal trade of Germany, its mines and its manufactures, was supplying to some extent the place of what was lost. It was also calling into existence all over the country smaller towns, which were centres of vigorous and active life; while the country regions were thickly dotted with villages, and towns and villages alike had their local organization 166 for self-government, their churches, and schools. The standard of comfort was substantially a high one, in food, in dress, and in furniture. Of course various articles of foreign production which are common now, and the lack of which we should sorely feel, were wholly unknown then; but, on the other hand, there was far more artistic effort and beauty bestowed on the houses themselves, and on their internal ornamentation and furniture, than in later times. Many of the churches were beautiful specimens of Gothic architecture, and even in country places they were generally handsome stone buildings, often possessing rich altar furniture, painted windows, and a peal of bells--forms of decoration in which the Germans took great delight, and for which their skill was famous all over Europe. The quick-witted townspeople were accustomed greatly to despise their rural neighbours, and no doubt the difference of manners in those days of infrequent communication was far more marked than it is now; but the peasant had no reason to be ashamed of his lot. During the previous century a change had gradually taken place, which leaving certain feudal dues and rights to the lords, had in most parts of Germany practically transformed the peasant into the proprietor of his land. Agriculture was practised with great skill and care, the crops seem to have been large, the culture of wool and of the vine was carried to a greater extent even than now, and the number of animals of all kinds, but especially horses, proved by old parish records to have existed on the land, is very surprising. The houses were usually of clay, but were plentifully furnished with linen, bedding, pewter, and such wooden furniture 167 as is now eagerly bought up by connoisseurs, while the warm and abundant clothing of the people was a common subject of remark among travellers. Mentally, too, the country was full of life; education was carefully promoted, and just before the war broke out an association was formed, called "The Fruit-bearing Society," which aimed at fulfilling towards the German literature and language the functions of the Academy Della Crusca towards the Italian, and which counted among its members men of all ranks from the highest downward, and all the best writers of the day.

Over such a country swept to and fro the pitiless ever-recurring tempest of war, for the lifetime of a whole generation; and when the great peace rejoicings took place at last in 1650,¹⁹¹⁹The war began in 1618 and ended in 1648, but two years more were consumed in negotiations, during which time the armies, though not actually engaged in hostilities, were maintained, and pressed heavily the land. it was a changed land which witnessed them. It is calculated by German writers who have been investigating recently the official records still left of the state of the country before and after the war, that over a considerable extent of it, four-fifths of the population and much more than four-fifths of the property were destroyed,²⁰²⁰See Freitag's "Bilder aus der deutschen Vergangenheit," the chapters on the Thirty Years' War. and taken as a whole, at least a half of both throughout Germany must have disappeared; while it is only within the last thirty or forty years that Germany at large has attained the same point, either as to population, trade, or the productiveness of the soil, at which it stood early in the seventeenth century. Two hundred years have been necessary merely to recover lost ground!

Looked at broadly the conflict was a defensive war on the part of the Protestant against the Roman Catholic religion. During its earlier years the advantage inclined on the whole to the Imperial side; then came the "Lion of the North," Gustavus Adolphus, and swept back the tide of victory, and after his death it is hard to say which party had the advantage. Had either been strong enough to win a decided success, the war might have been sooner at an end; but the opponents were nearly matched, and the Evangelical party, princes and people alike, felt that they could not yield--for them it was a struggle of life and death. If the Imperialists had triumphed, despotism and Romanism under the Jesuits would have settled down over the whole land, as they did on the Austrian dominions.

Such a war brought with it many evils besides itself; terrible disturbances of trade and currency, which perhaps most affected the cities; bands of marauders who infested country regions where the use of locks and bolts had been almost forgotten. Evangelical territories which fell into the hands of the Imperialists had to suffer a religious persecution, which cost many their lives, and drove hundreds of thousands into exile, so that the difficulties of the fortified cities of the north were much increased by the numbers of homeless fugitives who sought shelter there. Towards the close of the war came scarcity of food, and pestilences, one of which, in 1637, was of frightful severity, such as had not been known for a hundred years. But the worst was the actual devastation of the war itself. Gustavus Adolphus succeeded in introducing a higher discipline and tone into his army, and preventing the 169 plundering and cruelties which were practised by the troops generally, but after his death no one else had the same power. As a rule, the soldiers plundered wherever they went, not only taking what they wanted, but often wantonly destroying what they could not carry off; the churches were robbed and battered down because they afforded a refuge to the poor villagers, and the bells were stolen to make guns; if a peasant was suspected of secreting any treasure, he was cruelly tortured; girls and lads were constantly carried away by force. In many parts of Germany spots are still pointed out where the peasantry made hiding-places for themselves in the woods, while their few possessions were concealed in graveyards, even in the very coffins of the dead. The towns suffered under forced contributions and the quartering of large bodies of troops, and sometimes had to endure the utmost horrors of siege and storm. Leipsic was besieged five, and Magdeburg six times. Towards the end of the war we are told of once flourishing towns reduced to forty inhabitants, who with their own hands unroofed their houses to avoid the taxation to which dwelling-houses were still liable, and dwelt in thatched hovels in the streets; and of villages wholly depopulated, or where a scanty remnant crept back to the familiar fields and cowered in clay huts without windows, lest the firelight should serve as a beacon to attract their enemies.

When we read such a tale of disasters it seems wonderful that society should have survived, or the country recovered at all. We have to remember that after all there were intervals of rest, and some districts suffered less than others, were perhaps only once or 170 twice visited by the armies. And certainly the immediate effect of the war on the mental activity of Germany was stimulating; it was not until the stillness of the peace had fully set in that the exhaustion which it had produced in this direction, as well as others, made itself felt. While the contest was going on, the call for exertion, the consciousness of fighting in a great cause, the enthusiasm excited all over evangelical Germany by the lofty character and splendid genius of Gustavus Adolphus, quickened men's love of their religion and their fatherland. This was especially true of the clergy at that time. Whether Romanist or Evangelical, the parish priests seem to have deserved well of their country by the way in which they stood by their flocks, comforting them in trouble, and encouraging the little community to re-organize itself and struggle on afresh after each new disaster. But the Evangelical clergy showed themselves particularly courageous in this way, for they were usually marked out for plunder and cruel ill-treatment by the Imperialist troops; yet when their churches were destroyed they assembled the people for prayer in the woods or on the hill-sides; when the school was broken up, they taught the children as long as it was possible to collect any; they obtained help for their people through the ecclesiastical organization from the more favoured regions; and they were the medium through which the higher intelligence of the country, and the sentiment of a common nationality and faith, penetrated to the mass of the people. Their influence is acknowledged to have been one of the most valuable in keeping society together, and preventing culture from dying out, even by those German 171 writers who lament the character of pedantry and stiffness which they impressed on literature and thought. And so it came about that this period of suffering was one of literary and intellectual activity in many ways; and that once more especially a great outburst of religious song took place, in which the clergy bore the greatest share, but which was by no means confined to them. A very large proportion of the most famous hymns and hymn-writers of Germany belong to this century, and the only difficulty is to select from the number of its names.

The Order of the Palm

Many of them were also members of the Fruit-bearing Society, which from its motto and badge--a palm-tree with the words "all for use"--is also known as the Order of the Palm. It was founded in 1617 by Ludwig, Prince of Anhalt-Cöthen, and, though meant for serious work, had its fanciful side in its imitation of an order of chivalry. Its head was always to be a German prince; no one was to be admitted to membership except persons of some distinction, either by birth or literary achievements or both, and of unblemished character; all its members were bound to promote in every possible way the purity and refinement of the German language and the enrichment of its literature, and to cultivate whatever was essentially national in language and manners. A very large number of the noble classes, among whom a high standard of cultivation was then common, joined it, as well as the principal writers of the time; and it certainly did good service in furnishing a centre for national feeling and for common action, as well as in its own proper department.

Martin Opitz

The most eminent member of this society was Martin Opitz, 172 afterwards ennobled as Opitz von Bobersfeld. He was a native of Bunzlau, in Silesia, and with him begins what is termed the Silesian era of German poetry--a time when this country held the first rank in learning and literature among the German States as markedly as Swabia had done in the days of the Minne-singers. Opitz died of the plague at Dantzic in 1639, at the early age of forty-two; but his short life had been rich in mental labour. He had travelled much, and was well known at all the chief German courts; he had taken part in one military expedition, and had acquitted himself creditably of a more congenial employment--a diplomatic mission to Paris. His great work, however, lay in his "Treatise on German Poetry," and in the practical exemplification of its principles which he gave in his own poems. He was, in fact, the first to lay down the laws of German prosody, and he may be said to have given its form to German verse, as Luther did to German prose. This service has obtained him a higher place in his country's literature than the merits of his poems would intrinsically justify. They are easy, correct, and elegant, but have scarcely a spark of originality or force, yet in his own day they procured him the highest possible eulogies from princes and scholars, and not empty praise alone, but money, friends, and rank. Opitz was essentially a clever, industrious literary man of the world, with the art of making himself everywhere agreeable, and he was petted and caressed accordingly, more than was good for his work. Such a man would probably never have written religious poetry at all in ordinary times; but living as he did when grave thoughts and terrible struggles were in all men's 173 minds, he too was influenced by his age, and he wrote a good deal of this kind--versions of all the epistles for the Sundays of the year, of many of the Psalms, and of the Song of Solomon. Among his sacred poems, however, his hymns are by far the best, and some are really fine. We give one, a

Paul Flemming

Next to Opitz, the chief poet of the time was Paul Flemming, and in real poetical genius, in truth and depth of feeling, he surpassed him; yet Flemming was but little known during his lifetime, and himself regarded Opitz with an almost idolatrous reverence. He was a Saxon by birth, the son of wealthy parents; and though he adopted medicine as his profession, he seems to have been independent of its exercise. He had an energetic and fervid temperament, and an enthusiastic love for his country and the cause of Evangelical religion, to which he often gives expression in his verse. The love of adventure, and the hope too of doing some good service to his country, induced him to join an embassy that was sent at first to Moscow, and afterwards by way of Astrachan to Ispahan, an expedition that in those days occupied seven years, and led him into an incredible number of dangers and hardships. He returned to Hamburg in 1639, and died the next year, like so many of his contemporaries, in the prime of his powers, for he was but thirty-one. Evidently he had a keen eye for natural beauty, and he writes charming descriptions of scenes that he beheld in his long journey, as well as sweet and tender songs of love and friendship; but a shade of sadness is thrown over them by his sorrow for his country, and the bitter regret he felt at having left it in its trouble, for travels 175 which did not produce the expected results. One of his hymns, written on this journey, is a classical one in Germany. It is--

The following little poem is inscribed

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:--

Hymn Writers

Other Silesians distinguished themselves both as secular and sacred poets: among them were Buchner, professor of poetry at Wittenberg, who was the most intimate friend of Opitz; Andreas Tscherning, a professor at Rostock, who wrote a little book of sacred poems called "The Spring-time of German Poetry," which had a very wide circulation in its own day; and David von Schweinitz, an upright, God-fearing statesman, whose "Spiritual Harp of the Heart" was also very popular. But from these minor poets, we must turn to the great hymn-writers of this period. In general their hymns have a more reflective tone than those of the Reformation: they are never doctrinal, but always experimental or devotional; more tender than the earlier hymns, they are not as yet deteriorated by exaggerated sentiment or self-introspection; they are simple, sweet, fervent expressions of trust in God's goodness and self-surrender to Him. Some of them breathe the very spirit of Christian courage, as that famous battle-song of Gustavus Adolphus,--

"Fear not, O little flock, the foe,"--

which was long attributed to Altenburg, a pastor in Thuringia; recent researches, however seem to 181 have made it clear that he only composed the chorale, and that the hymn itself was written down roughly by Gustavus Adolphus after his victory at Leipsic, and reduced to regular verse by his chaplain, Dr. Fabricius, for the use of the army. Such again are the hymns of Apelles von Löwenstern, the saddler who rose to be a noble, a statesman, a poet, and a musician; and such especially is the hymn which has become the popular "Te Deum" of Germany, and is always chosen on any great public occasion to express the united gratitude and praise of the people.

Martin Rinkart

This simple but noble expression of trust and praise, with its fine chorale, was composed by Martin Rinkart, in 1644, when the hope of a general peace was dawning on the country. He was one of those provincial clergymen to whom Germany had so much reason to be grateful. The son of a poor coppersmith, he made his way at the University of Leipsic by dint of industry and his musical gifts, took orders, and was precentor of the church at Eisleben, and at the age of thirty-one was offered the place of Archdeacon at his native town of Eilenburg in Saxony. He went there as the war broke out, and died just after the peace, and throughout these thirty-one years he stood by his flock, and helped them to the utmost under every kind of distress. Of course he had to endure the quartering of soldiers in his house, and frequent plunderings of his little stock of grain and household goods. But these were small things. The plague of 1637 visited Eilenburg with extraordinary severity; the town was overcrowded with fugitives from the country districts where the Swedes had been spreading devastation, and in this one year 8,000 persons died in it. The whole of the town council except three persons, a terrible number of school children, and the clergymen of the neighbouring parish, were all carried off; and Rinkart had to do the work of three men, and did it manfully at the beds of the sick and 183 dying. He buried more than 4,000 persons, but through all his labours he himself remained perfectly well. The pestilence was followed by a famine so extreme that thirty or forty persons might be seen fighting in the streets for a dead cat or crow. Rinkart, with the burgomaster and one other citizen, did what could be done to organize assistance, and gave away everything but the barest rations for his own family, so that his door was surrounded by a crowd of poor starving wretches, who found it their only refuge. After all this suffering came the Swedes once more, and imposed upon the unhappy town a tribute of 30,000 dollars. Rinkart ventured to the camp to entreat the general for mercy, and when it was refused, turned to the citizens who followed him, saying, "Come, my children, we can find no hearing, no mercy with men, let us take refuge with God." He fell on his knees, and prayed with such touching earnestness that the Swedish general relented, and lowered his demand at last to 2,000 florins. So great were Rinkart's own losses and charities that he had the utmost difficulty in finding bread and clothes for his children, and was forced to mortgage his future income for several years. Yet how little his spirit was broken by all these calamities is shown by this hymn and others that he wrote; some indeed speaking of his country's sorrows, but all breathing the same spirit of unbounded trust and readiness to give thanks.

The Königsberg Circle

Still more natural was it that at such a time the heavy sorrow, the ceaseless anxieties of earthly life, and the intense longing for the peace and joy of heaven, should find a voice in song; and of this 184 class is the lovely hymn of Meyfart, professor of theology at Erfurt, who died in 1642,

"Jerusalem, thou city fair and high,"²¹²¹"Jerusalem du hachgebante Stadt."

and so are several of the hymns of Simon Dach of Königsberg.²²²²Also of, e.g. Heinrich Held. At Königsberg in those stormy days lived a little knot of friends who by no means escaped their share of trouble, but found solace under it in their religion, their mutual friendship, and the practice of music and poetry. The eldest of them was George Weissel, pastor of one of the churches; and next to him was Robert Roberthin. Then came Simon Dach professor of poetry, and Thilo professor of rhetoric in the university, and Heinrich Albert the organist of the cathedral. All these men wrote hymns or sacred poems, and Dach and Albert also composed chorales.

Heinrich Albert

Albert especially was a very distinguished musician, [organist of the cathedral at Königsberg,] and he was the author both of the words and the flowing melody of that morning hymn,

"God, who madest earth and heaven,"²³²³"Gott des Himmels und der Erden."

which is still not infrequently played at early morning in some of the quiet little German country towns or baths. He composed airs to many of Dach's poems, and thus helped much in their rapid diffusion among the people; and the little band of friends often assembled in a garden he had purchased 185 outside Königsberg to hear some new poem or melody in the summer-house.

Simon Dach

Dach was however the most gifted of the group, [He was professor of poetry in the university of Königsberg, and also composed chorales] and ranks high among German poets for the sweetness of form and depth of tender contemplative emotion to be found in his verse. A little love-song of his, written when courting the daughter of a neigbbouring clergyman, has become one of the best known of the German popular songs, and is familiar to English readers in Mr. Longfellow's version of "Annie of Tharau."

Of his hymns, many of which are to be found in all German hymn-books, we give the following, written during the long and painful illness which preceded his death:--

Robert Roberthin

[Robert Roberthin was a layman high in office under the Elector of Brandenburg, and able from his position occasionally to protect and assist his friends. He was also a personal friend of Opitz, and was the first to introduce the new Silesian style of verse into the more barbarous Prussia.]

Of Roberthin we give a specimen of a different style, earnest and sensible, but more commonplace in expression and less fervent than Dach.

Johann von Rist

The two most famous hymn-writers of this time were, however, Johann von Rist and Johann Heermann. Rist was born in 1607, the son of a pastor at a village close to Hamburg, and was destined from the first by his father to the study of theology. As a youth he was distinguished by precocious and varied talent; he visited several universities, including Leipsic, Utrecht, and Leyden, and studied mathematics, 189 chemistry, and medicine, as well as divinity. Still quite a young man, he returned to Hamburg with the reputation of a great traveller, scholar, and poet, and was at once appointed to a church just outside Hamburg, on the banks of the Elbe. Here he spent the remainder of his life, at first pleasantly enough, but in the later years of the war suffering like others severely under its scarcity, terror, and pestilence. He was an active pastor and a great preacher, and insisted much on a certain strictness of life; for instance, he persuaded his people to abolish the customary merrymakings at Candlemas. Though he was a very strict Lutheran in doctrine, he was accused by some of the bigoted Lutherans of preaching too little against heresy and on controverted questions. His reply was "that he believed there were not above a couple of strangers in his congregation who held false doctrine, but plenty of people who led sinful lives; and to accuse men of heresy never produced a living, fruitful faith in them, only pride and impulses of hatred." But if he wisely did not preach controversy, he had no objection to print it, and he became involved in many very acrimonious disputes, theological and literary. He was in correspondence with all the principal clergymen and authors of his time, "so that scarce a day passed on which he did not receive a letter," then a matter of great wonderment. But he was most celebrated for his religious poems and hymns, of which he published ten collections, containing between 600 and 700 pieces, intended to supply every possible requirement of public worship or private experience. That in such a mass of writings on a limited range of subjects there should 190 be a great deal that is very watery and poor was inevitable; many of his poems are evidently manufactured to order; others in the attempt to attain a little individuality sink into depths of bombast and bad taste; the wonder is rather that so many are really good, and some belong to the first rank of hymns. In his own day they were all admired: he was the most fertile, and next to Opitz certainly the most favourite, poet of the time. Honours poured in upon him: he attained the highest titles in Church and State open to a clergyman, and received from the Emperor the crown of poet-laureate, and a patent of nobility. He founded a society of "Swans of the Elbe," of which he was the head, as a sort of offshoot of the great Fruit-bearing Society, and by the members of this order, and indeed by many others of his contemporaries, he is lauded as the Northern Apollo, the Cimbrian Swan, the God of the German Parnassus; a certain little hill near his residence, where he was accustomed to write his verses, being the Parnassus in question. His first volume of poems, "The Poetical Pleasure Garden," was partly secular, but his after-productions were almost exclusively sacred, they were caught up eagerly by the musicians of the day, and quickly found their way into congregational use in Evangelical Germany, while even among the Roman Catholics they were read with delight, and one Empress lamented, "that it were a great pity if the writer of such hymns should be sent to hell." He died at the age of sixty, in 1667.

In his youth Rist is said to have suffered much from mental conflicts, and one or two of his penitential 191 hymns speak of such experience; but his general tone is rather one of unhesitating faith and courage, and fervid love to the Saviour, such as breathe through his hymns for Advent, and for the Holy Communion, of which two,

"O Living Bread from heaven,"

and another,

"O Jesu, Sun of gladness,"

are still in constant use. Another hymn which, partly from its noble and pathetic melody, has become a universal favourite, and the pattern on which many others have been written, is the following one on the Entombment. Rist himself says that he found the first verse in a collection of religious popular songs, and liked it so much that he wrote the others to it.

As many hymns of Rist's are accessible to the English reader, we choose one that is less known, but that strongly illustrates his character.

Johann Heermann

Born in 1585 at Rauten in Silesia, the youth and early manhood of Johann Heermann fell in the comparatively quiet times that preceded the great war, when people still had leisure for tranquil intellectual enjoyments. Even at school the talent displayed in young Heermann's Latin orations, and the grace of his manner, attracted the notice of some of the great noble families of Silesia; and from one he received the means of travel, from another, on his return, the living of Köben. Here he had six peaceful years, "the Sabbath of his life;" happy in his work, his 195 marriage, his friendship with the family of Von Kottwitz, and his literary labours, which were already rendering him distinguished as a writer of Latin poems and epigrams. But in 1617 his troubles began: first came the death of his wife; then the failure of his own health, which henceforward caused him great suffering throughout his life; and then the war.

No part of Germany suffered more in the war than Silesia. It was the constant battle-field of the contending parties, and its peculiar position entailed on it a fearful amount of religious persecution. The Hussite tendencies among its people, who were partly of Slavonic race, opened the way for the Reformation, which was very soon embraced by many of the great noble families, as well as generally by the towns. But Silesia belonged to the House of Austria, and hence its central government and higher ecclesiastics remained attached to Rome. For some time it was happy in princes and bishops who respected the toleration secured by the Peace of Passau; but in 1609 a king succeeded who was the bitter foe of all Protestants, and was warmly supported by Bishop Charles of Breslau, a brother of the Emperor. Hence whenever in the course of the war a district fell into the hands of the Imperialists, the pastors were immediately turned out of their churches, mass was celebrated, and the people were forced by the greatest oppression to accept Jesuit priests. When the Swedes came, the Jesuits would be dispossessed and the Evangelical pastors restored, to be again banished at the next reverse of fortune. Finally, after the war was over and Silesia was left in the hands of Austria, the Evangelical religion was almost entirely suppressed, 196 only three towns being permitted to erect outside their walls one small wooden building for the performance of evangelical worship. It was during the years 1623 to 1638--fifteen long years!--that the sufferings of Silesia were at their height. More than once it was devastated by regiments of wild Poles and Cossacks under General Dohna, who was commissioned to re-introduce the Romanist religion. He boasted that he performed greater miracles than St. Peter; for St. Peter converted thousands by a sermon, but he converted thousands without a sermon. His method of proselytism was to quarter his soldiers on the principal Evangelical inhabitants of the place, and allow them to exercise what licence they pleased, until the father of the household produced a certificate from the priest of having been to confession; then they would be removed to some other house, where the same process was repeated. So great was the terror inspired by these troops, that in some places the residents came out to meet them with protestations of their readiness to embrace Romanism; in others the population emigrated en masse at their approach. During this period Köben was plundered four times, on each of which occasions Heermann lost all his moveable possessions; he was frequently in danger of his life; was several times obliged to flee, and once had to remain a fugitive in concealment for seventeen weeks. But it was in the midst of all these troubles that he published, in 1630, his "Devoti Musica Cordis," a volume of original hymns which at once made a profound impression, and which was soon followed by two more. These hymns were the first in which the correct and elegant versification of 197 Opitz was applied to religious subjects, but they possessed far higher merits than this; they are distinguished by great depth and tenderness of feeling, by an intense love of the Saviour, and earnest but not self-conscious humility, while in form they are sweet and musical, though the thought sometimes is too much expanded. A remarkably large number have made for themselves a permanent place in the hymnology of the German Church, and several of the most beautiful among them are becoming known in England through translations, especially those on the Passion. We give here two that touchingly refer to the sorrows of his country and church:--

In 1638 Heermann's health became so much worse that he was obliged to relinquish his charge at Köben altogether, and the last nine years of his life were spent in extreme distress from an affection resembling incessant catarrh and low fever of a very severe character. But he had a kind nurse in his second wife; whenever he rallied, study and writing were his recreations, and he published successively a number of devotional works. Another severe trial befell him during this period of sickness: his eldest son, a young man of much promise, fell under the influence of the Jesuits at Breslau, and was on the point of openly joining the Roman Catholic Church. 200 The remonstrances and arguments of his father, however, recalled him to the evangelical faith in which he had been brought up; but his health gave way, and he died in 1643 of a slow fever, which was commonly supposed to be the effect of a powder given him by the Jesuits when he quitted them. At last, in 1647, Heermann himself died, after many weeks of the greatest prostration, which he bore with unwearied patience. It was in the course of this last illness that he wrote a large number of verses and short poems, from which we choose the following "Sighs" and "Lament," as he himself calls them:--

CHAPTER IX.
PAUL GERHARDT AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES.
A.D. 1620-1680.

Paul Gerhardt

As the seventeenth century passed on to its zenith, the promise of literary activity given by its earlier years was not fulfilled. Opitz, Flemming, and Gryphius were certainly not stars of the first magnitude, but at least they shone with a certain steady radiance as the brightest points among a luminous cloud of smaller writers; but as they one by one went out no others took their place. Yet it was just at this time that the religious song of Germany found its purest and sweetest expression in the hymns of Paul Gerhardt, who may be said to be the typical poet of the Lutheran Church, as Herbert is of the English. George Herbert's poems are meant to be read and meditated upon; they constantly remind us that the writer was a man of high breeding and culture, no less than an earnest Christian; Gerhardt's are intended to be set to music and sung in church, or learnt by heart by the children at home, and as constantly reveal the homeliness and simplicity, the deeply devout and quietly courageous spirit of the Lutheran pastor. Of his early life little is known. He was born in 1606, in a little town, Gräfinhainichen, in Saxony, where 203 his father was burgomaster. The whole of his youth and early manhood fell in the time of war. That it must have been a period full of disappointment and hope deferred for him, is clear enough when we find a man of his powers at the age of forty-five still only a private tutor and candidate for holy orders. In 1651 he was living in this capacity in the family of an advocate named Berthold, in Berlin. He had already written many hymns, but was as yet unable to publish them; and he was in love with Berthold's daughter, but had no living to marry upon. About the close of that year however, the living of a country place called Mittenwalde was offered him: he was ordained, and in 1655 he at last married Anna Maria Berthold. At Mittenwalde he passed six quiet years, during which he began to publish his hymns, which immediately attracted great attention, and were quickly adopted into the hymn-books of Brandenburg and Saxony. His name thus became known, and in 1657 he was invited to the great church of St. Nicholas, in Berlin, where his life was soon both a busy and an honourable one. He worked most assiduously and successfully in his pastoral duties; he brought out many hymns, which were caught up by the people much as Luther's had been of old; and he was the favourite preacher of the city, whom crowds flocked to hear. He is described to us as a man of middle height, of quiet but firm and cheerful bearing; while his preaching is said to have been very earnest and persuasive, and full of Christian love and charity, which he practised as well as preached by never turning a beggar from his doors, and receiving widows and orphans who needed help and shelter into his 204 own house. His religion and his temperament alike made him cheerful, and not all the many disappointments of his life seem ever to have embittered his mood; but he had a very tender and scrupulous conscience, and wherever a question of conscience seemed to him to be involved, he was liable to great mental conflict and an exaggerated estimate of trifles. In theology he was an ardent Lutheran, and ere long his zeal for his Church was put to the test.

Prussia was at that time governed by Frederick William I., "the Great Elector," whose memory is still revered in the country as the founder of its greatness. The mass of his people were Lutherans, but he himself belonged to the Reformed Church, to which his grandfather, the Elector Sigismund, had seceded from political motives. At the Peace of Westphalia, he was the one important German prince who acted as spokesman for the Calvinistic churches, and it was through his efforts they obtained the same legal recognition as the Lutherans. His next endeavour was to make peace between the two Churches within his own dominions. He saw clearly enough the waste of strength and the evil passions caused by their disunion and perpetual controversies, and he is not accused of any unjust bias or partiality towards his own Church, but the times were not then ripe for such an attempt, and he met with little success. In 1662 and 1663 he summoned the leading men of both Churches to a series of conferences on the points of dispute between them, in the hopes of thus arriving at some approximation of opinion, or at least at a declaration that the points of difference were "non-essential." But the result 205 was the precise reverse of the Elector's hopes; the more the doctors argued the farther apart they found themselves. The Calvinism of those days was not of the modified type to which we are accustomed, but advocated what would now be termed "extreme views," while the Lutherans, on the other hand, were very rigid in their own definitions of doctrine, and were in the habit of preaching against the Reformed Church with a scornful and bitter vehemence. Gerhardt, indeed, was not among those who did so; his sermons, as well as his writings, were so free from controversy that many Calvinists attended his services, and his hymns had no greater admirer than the pious Electress Louisa, who herself belonged to the Reformed Church. But the whole cast of his thought was intrinsically anti-Calvinistic: that God is a loving Father over all His creatures, and that Christ died for all men, are the deepest, ever-recurring tones of his theology; and hence he found it impossible to allow that the points of difference between himself and the Reformed Church were "non-essential." From the conferences he at first hoped a great deal; he was diligent in attending them, and drew up most of the statements in explanation or defence of doctrine on the Lutheran side. But the Elector, wearied by the ill-success of these meetings, put a stop to them in 1664, and published an edict requiring the ministers of both communions to abstain from attacking each other's doctrines in the pulpit or elsewhere with harshness or want of charity; and in 1665 he announced his intention of demanding from every beneficed Lutheran clergyman his subscription to a document pledging himself to observe the terms of 206 this edict. This demand at once created the greatest excitement throughout the country, and in many places caused disturbances; for the stricter Lutherans, priests and people alike, regarded it as prohibiting the use of one of the recognised standards of the Lutheran faith, the "Formula Concordia," in which the doctrines of the Reformed Church were condemned in strong terms, and considered it therefore to be an infringement on their legal rights, and an unwarrantable interference on the part of the civil power with the liberty of preaching. Accordingly a great number of the clergy refused to sign, and were deposed; and these were in general strongly supported by their flocks. Nearly the whole of the Berlin clergy took this part, and one of the most resolute among them was Paul Gerhardt, who being very ill at the time, assembled his brethren around his sick-bed, and entreated them to be steadfast in asserting their right to freedom of speech. Such a man's refusal could not be passed over, and early in 1666 he was deprived of his appointment; and when it appeared that many of his congregation were in the habit of resorting to his private house for religious counsel and worship, he was interdicted from performing any function of his office even in private. Of his deprivation he had said to some condoling friends "that it was but a small Berlin sort of martyrdom;" but this last prohibition wounded him deeply, and he had much private sorrow at the same time. Three of his five children had already died in infancy, and now he lost one of his two remaining sons, the child on whose death he wrote his touching hymn,

"Thou'rt mine, yes, still Thou art mine own,"

while his wife, worn out by sorrow and anxiety, fell into a long and slow decline. Many of his most beautiful hymns were written at this time, and among others,

"If God be on my side."

Meanwhile the city of Berlin did not take the loss of its favourite preacher quietly. Meetings were held and petitions addressed to the Elector--first by the burghers and guilds of trade, then by the Town Council, and finally by the Estates of Brandenburg, whose entreaty was said to have the support in private of the Electress herself. Then the Elector gave way, and declared that considering the tender conscience of the preacher Paul Gerhardt, and that he had never been guilty of bitterness and uncharitableness in the pulpit, an exception should be made in his case, and he should be permitted to resume his office without subscription. The whole city was rejoiced, but now a new difficulty arose. The Elector had sent word by one of his secretaries to Paul Gerhardt of his re-appointment, but had said also that he relied on Gerhardt's well-known moderation and loyalty, that even without subscription he would act in conformity with the spirit of the edict. This message perplexed Gerhardt's conscience once more; an implied undertaking was, he said, to a Christian man as binding as any subscription could be, and he therefore felt himself still unable to accept office on these terms. A long period of fruitless negotiations ensued, and much mental distress on Gerhardt's part; for these new scruples appeared even to many of his friends exaggerated. But how real they were to himself, 208 is shown by his persistency, and his letters to the Town Council and Elector. "It was only the most urgent necessity," he writes to the latter, "which induced me to retire from my pastoral office, and should I now accept it again on these terms, I should do myself a great wrong; and, so to speak, with my own hands inflict on my soul that wound which I had formerly, with such deep anguish of heart, striven to avert. I fear that God, in whose presence I walk on earth, and before whose judgment-seat I must one day appear; and as my conscience hath spoken from my youth up, and yet speaks, I can see it no otherwise than that if I should accept my office I should draw on myself God's wrath and punishment." The Elector now commanded the Council to choose some one in Gerhardt's place; and Gerhardt accepted the post of Archdeacon of Lübben, in Saxony. His removal there was, however, delayed by the long sickness and death of his wife; and it was not till 1669 that he entered on his new duties. Here he spent the last seven years of his life; but they were years of sadness, for his wife was gone, his only child had more than one dangerous illness, and he was living in a land of strangers. Lübben was a small place, and the Town Council was composed of rough and half-educated people, who subjected their clergyman to many annoyances. His refuge and refreshment was in his gift of song, "under circumstances which," says one of his contemporaries, "would have made most men cry rather than sing." He died in 1676, in his seventieth year, and his last words were a line from one of his own hymns--

"Us no death has power to kill."

Compared with most authors of his time, Paul Gerhardt wrote but little. He composed altogether one hundred and twenty-three hymns, which appeared at intervals from the year 1649 onwards, many of them for the first time in the "Praxis Pietatis Melica," a collection of hymns and tunes by Johann Crüger, the famous organist and composer of chorales. After Gerhardt's death they were republished separately, revised from his own MSS. by his son. As a poet he undoubtedly holds the highest place among the hymn-writers of Germany. His hymns seem to be the spontaneous outpouring of a heart that overflows with love, trust, and praise; his language is simple and pure; if it has sometimes a touch of homeliness, it has no vulgarism,²⁴²⁴The only hymn which does not deserve this commendation is a translation trom the Latin. and at times it rises to a beauty and grace, which always give the impression of being unstudied, yet could hardly have been improved by art. His tenderness and fervour never degenerate into the sentimentality and petty conceits which were already becoming fashionable in his days; nor his penitence and sorrow into that morbid despondency which we find in Gryphius, and for which the disappointments of his own life might have furnished some excuse. If he is not altogether free from the long-windedness and repetition which are the besetting sins of so many German writers, and especially hymn-writers, he at least more rarely succumbs to them: and in his days they were not considered a blemish. One of his contemporaries, a certain Andreas Bucholz, who wrote a great deal of religious poetry which was then highly esteemed 210 formally announces in his preface that he has spun out his poems as long as he could, for he observed that when people were reading sacred poems at home, they preferred long ones. Gervinus, a severe judge of sacred poetry in general, says of Gerhardt: "If one man among the poets of the seventeenth century makes an attractive impression on us, it is Gerhardt. He recurred, as no one else had done, to Luther's genuine type of the popular religious song, only with such modifications as the altered circumstances demanded. In Luther's time the old wrathful, implacable God of the Romanists had assumed the heavenly aspect of grace and compassion; with Gerhardt the Merciful and just One is a loving and benignant Man, whom he addresses with reverential intimacy. With Luther, it was the belief in free grace and the work of Atonement, in the Redemption which had burst the gates of hell, which inspired the Christian singer with his joyous confidence; with Gerhardt it is his faith in the love of God. Like the old poets of the people, he is pious, naive, earnest, without effort or affectation; his style is as simple as refreshing, and attractive as his tone of thought."

Many of his hymns are already well known to English readers by translations from the time of Wesley downwards. We give here three of those less frequently to be met with:²⁵²⁵Two verses which contain merely an expansion of the thought, are omitted from each of these hymns.--

Electress Louisa

Among the admirers of Paul Gerhardt we have named the wife of the Great Elector, Louisa Henrietta of Brandenburg. This princess, who was herself a hymn-writer of no mean ability, shines out upon us from among the confused and tragic scenes of that seventeenth century, as almost the ideal of a noble Christian lady. She was the daughter of the Prince of Orange, and grand-daughter on her mother's side of the Admiral Coligny who fell in the Massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day. Her mother, herself a woman of unusual intelligence and piety, educated her with the greatest care; at her wish the princess was instructed in graver studies than were common with the women of those days, and also in practical household management, and all kinds of feminine handicrafts. She grew up tall, fair-haired, and graceful, and at nineteen was married, at the Hague, to the Elector of Brandenburg. As her father was then very ill with a protracted and fatal malady, she did not however at once leave home, but nursed her father till his death, and then awaited the birth of her first child. In 1649 she set out on her way to Berlin in late autumn weather, and through a country devastated by war and famine. Under the hardships of the journey her own health suffered, and her little son sickened; and when she arrived in Berlin, it was not to bring her husband and people an heir to the throne, but with 219 empty arms and an aching heart, for the poor infant had died by the way. But she found consolation in the devoted attachment of her husband; he could not bear to be separated from her, and it soon became her custom to accompany him in all the numerous journeys he was constantly making, even in more than one winter campaign against the Swedes and Poles. He consulted her on all affairs of state, and she entered warmly into his plans for restoring prosperity to the land which had suffered so much from war. She sent to Holland for skilful agriculturists, and established model farms in various parts of Prussia; she introduced the culture of the potato, which was before unknown there; and she founded primary schools all over the country, where they had been almost entirely swept away. So deep was the gratitude she won from the common people that the name "Louisa" became the favourite name for girls, and as lately as thirty or forty years ago her portrait was still to be found on cottage walls. When at home her favourite residence was her country house Oranienburg, near Berlin. She had neither inclination nor time for gaiety, beyond what her position required; for, besides all these serious occupations, she took part in works of charity, and was strict in the performance of her religious duties. She was always present at divine service, where she appeared in a very simple dress, and made it a rule never to look in her mirror before going to church. In religion she belonged to the Reformed Church, but she was in the habit of friendly intercourse with Lutherans, and earnestly desired to see peace between the two communions. But one source of sorrow weighed secretly on the princess's heart: 220 she had no second child; and if the Elector had no son, his race became extinct, and at his death a war of succession might be apprehended. Long she brooded over this grief; at last she resolved to make the greatest sacrifice in her power, and to demand a divorce for the sake of the country. She acknowledged afterwards that she found it very hard to come to this resolution, and it cost her many hours of tears and prayers, but it was done; she appeared before the Elector, and formally announced to him her intention of applying for a divorce, that might enable him for the sake of his people to marry again. But the Elector refused to listen to her proposal; had she forgotten the command that man should not sever what God had joined? If it pleased God to punish them and their country by childlessness, let them submit; but never would he consent to break an oath he had sworn in God's sight. No doubt it was with a lightened heart that she went back to Oranienburg, where a few months of tranquillity so far restored her health, that at length her wishes were fulfilled, and she bore another son. He was born on a Tuesday; and in memory of this great blessing she kept every Tuesday with its own religious observances for the rest of her life, and also founded an orphan-house at Oranienburg for fatherless children. Two more sons followed in due time, one of whom became afterwards the first king of Prussia. The last of the three was born in 1666 at Cleves, and then her health failed, worn out by the great exertions which her life had demanded, and she died, after many months of slow decline, in 1667, at the age of thirty-nine.

One of her last acts is said to have been to induce 221 the Elector to give up his demand on the Lutheran clergy, and to grant them freedom from the obnoxious subscription, an act²⁶²⁶It was not formally published till early in 1668, when Gerhardt had already accepted the archdeaconry of Lübben. which put an end to the discontent and resistance to the government then so widely spread. Among her favourite recreations, especially in times of toil and anxiety, was the reading and singing of hymns, and at her request Otto von Schwerin, the great friend of herself and her husband, made a collection of them which was afterwards published and widely circulated. To this he contributed one or two, and the Electress four hymns, two of which have become classical in Germany; one is the celebrated Easter hymn,

"Jesus, my Redeemer lives,"²⁷²⁷"Jesus meine Zuversicht."

which, with its beautiful chorale, is now in various versions becoming familiar to us in England. It is probable that the Electress composed both the words and the melody of this hymn, but that Schwerin polished the former and Crüger harmonized the latter for her. To this day it ranks among the most popular of German hymns. We give another as being less known, which contains an affecting expression of the consciousness of sin and ingratitude in a life, in which those around her could scarce discern a failing.

George Neumarck

The Court of Prussia was not the only one at which religious poetry was cultivated. At that of Weimar, the duke who had been a famous general in the Thirty Years' War was a good hymn-writer, and so was his librarian, George Neumarck, the author of one of the best known and finest of the German hymns, "Leave God to order all thy ways."²⁸²⁸"Wer nur den lieben Gott lässt walten."

Anton Ulrich

At that of Brunswick not only the Duke, Anton Ulrich, but nearly all the members of his family cultivated both poetry and music with considerable success. Anton Ulrich himself was a very learned man, pupil of two of the most distinguished scholars of the day, and a good and pious sovereign. The stain on his career is that in extreme old age he embraced the Roman Catholic religion avowedly from political motives, and then again reverted to Lutheranism on his death-bed; but except for this inconsistency he deserved and enjoyed the esteem of his people. His hymns are extremely good, graceful in form, and deep in feeling, and have become very well known. The following little song is among those less commonly to be met with:--

Albinus

Only two more names can be mentioned from this circle of writers. The first is that of Albinus, a clergyman of Naumberg, and member of the Order of the Palm, who wrote several very sweet and popular hymns on the joys of heaven, something in the style of Simon Dach.

Johann Frank

The other is that of Johann Frank (1618-1677), who ranks only second to Gerhardt as a hymn-writer, and with him marks the transition from the earlier to the later school of German religious poetry. In the former, the congregational hymn--"the church-song" as Germans call it--had furnished the type for all compositions of this class, even for those, like the "Ode" of Gryphius given above, which were not meant for church use. Hence it was required that the poem should be capable of being set to music, and should embody such phases of feeling and experience as might fairly be attributed to any large gathering of sincere Christians. These conditions necessitated a certain compression and finish in form, and a certain 227 breadth and vigour in thought; but they also excluded much both in rhythm and sentiment which might legitimately claim a place in Christian poetry. From this time onwards a more personal and individual tone is to be remarked even in congregational hymns, and with it a tendency to reproduce special forms of Christian experience, often of a mystical character. Gerhardt stands precisely on the culminating point between the two schools. His whole tone and style of thought belong to the elder school, but the distinct individuality and expression of personal sentiment which are impressed on his poems already point to the newer. Frank stands near him, but on the side of the newer school; his leading thought is the union of the soul with its Redeemer; "that Christ be in you the hope of glory" is the keynote of his hymns. The style both of his religious and secular poetry is curiously unlike what we should have anticipated from the little we know of his life. He was the son of an advocate in the little town of Güben in Saxony. Having lost his father early, he was brought up by relations, who sent him to the university of Königsberg when Simon Dach and his friends were living there; he travelled a little, and then settled down as an advocate in Güben, and became successively councillor, burgomaster of the town, and representative of the province. It sounds like the career of a diligent, sensible, quiet German citizen, but he was also one of the principal poets of the day, and a very voluminous one. His secular poems, like those of his contemporary George Neumarck, belong to the pastoral school, and are long-winded and affected to an extraordinary degree. His 228 religious songs, on the other hand, published in 1674 under the title of the "Spiritual Zion," are remarkably fine; condensed, and polished in style, with a fervid and impassioned movement of thought. The following is one of his most celebrated hymns, but from its peculiar metre it loses much in translation:--

CHAPTER X.
THE NEW SCHOOL.
A.D. 1635-1700.

Though the middle of the seventeenth century marks an epoch in the literature of Germany, different tendencies of thought are never really parted by so sharp a line of demarcation: the new school first grows up by the side of the old one; and so in this instance too we must go back to the days of the great war for the men who first introduced the new style. In an unpoetical age like the one that was now approaching--empty of the great interests and vivid sentiment of a common life that furnish the soil on which true poetry springs--the art is apt to degenerate into an artificial sort of composition of either a didactic or a sentimental kind, which here and there rises a little above the dead level of mere verse-making, where some real gift of song has been bestowed. But it also often happens that the originators of even these styles are very superior to their successors.

Friedrich von Logau

Certainly Friedrich von Logau, who may be regarded as the beginner of the epigrammatic and didactic poetry, which continued to be so popular in Germany for the next hundred years, has far more thought and vigour of expression than most who followed in his footsteps.

He was born in 1604, of one of the most ancient and noble families in Silesia; his estates lay in that province; he was privy councillor to the Duke of Brieg and Liegnitz; he was a member of the Fruit-bearing Society, and died in 1655. Few as these facts are, they at least make us understand how closely all the tumults of the war must have touched him, and how he nevertheless found time and thought for literary work. And his poems give the same picture,--of a man of strong and original genius, honest and downright, deeply interested in the questions of the day; loving his country, hating foreigners, and the war which benefited none but the foreign mercenaries; longing for a domestic country-life, and mourning over the desolation of his own paternal inheritance. He is distinguished in satire and epigram, and his principal work is a collection of more than three thousand epigrams and aphorisms in verse which were published first in 1639, and afterwards in 1654 under the title of "Three Thousand German Proverbs and Poems, by Solomon of Golaw." Some of these are rough and unpolished in form, but most have force and clear strong sense, and his influence on the writers of his own time was marked. In the next century Lessing again drew attention to his works, and he has ever since ranked among the most important writers of this period.

Logau's poems are chiefly secular, but he also composed a number of religious aphorisms, which were printed in a separate volume in 1704, and all his writings are imbued with a spirit of unaffected manly piety. it is to him we owe those sayings which Mr. Longfellow has made familiar to us, especially that profound one: