Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 12.djvu/602

586 586 HYMNS [GERMAN. rest. One for Christmas, &quot; Vom Himmel hoch da komm ich her&quot; (&quot;From Heaven above to earth I come&quot;), has a reverent tenderness, the influence of which may be traced in many later productions on the same subject. That on salvation through Christ, of a didactic character, &quot; Nun freuet euch, lieben Christen g mein&quot; (&quot;DearChristian people, now rejoice &quot;), is said to have made many conversions, and to have been once taken up by a large congregation to silence a Roman Catholic preacher in the cathedral of Frankfort. Pre-eminent above all is the celebrated para phrase of the 46th Psalm : &quot; Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott &quot; (&quot; A sure stronghold our God is He &quot;), &quot; the production &quot; (as Ranke says) &quot; of the moment in which Luther, engaged in a conflict with a world of foes, sought strength in the consciousness that he was defending a divine cause which could never perish.&quot; Carlyle compares it to &quot;a sound of Alpine avalanches, or the first murmur of earthquakes.&quot; Heine called it &quot; the Marseillaise of the Reformation.&quot; Luther spent several years in teaching his people at Wittenberg to sing these hymns, which soon spread over Germany. Without adopting the hyperbolical saying of Coleridge, that &quot;Luther did as much for the Reforma tion by his hymns as by his translation of the Bible,&quot; it may truly be affirmed that, among the secondary means by which the success of the Reformation was promoted, none was more powerful. They were sung everywhere, in the streets and fields as well as the churches, in the workshop and the palace, &quot; by children in the cottage and by martyrs on the scaffold.&quot; It was by them that a con gregational character was given to the new Protestant worship. This success they owed partly to their metrical structure, which, though sometimes complex, was recom mended to the people by its ease and variety ; and partly to the tunes and melodies (many of them already well known and popular) to which they were set. They were used as direct instruments of teaching, and were therefore, in a -large measure, didactic and theological; and it may be partly owing to this cause that German hymnody came to deviate, so soon and so generally as it did, from the simple idea expressed in the ancient Augustinian definition, and to comprehend large classes of compositions which, in most other countries, would be thought hardly suitable for church use. Fol- The principal hymn- writers of the Lutheran school, in lowers of t j ie latter part of the 1 6th century, were Selnecker, Nicholas Hermann, and Hans Sachs, the shoemaker of Nuremberg, also known in other branches of literature. All these wrote some good hymns. They were succeeded by men of another sort, to whom Cunz gives the name of &quot; master- singers,&quot; as having raised both the poetical and the musical standard of German hymnody : Riugwaldt, Helmbold, Pappus, Schalling, Rutilius, and Weingartner. The prin cipal topics of their hymns (as if with some foretaste of the calamities which were soon to follow) were the vanity of earthly things, resignation to the Divine will, and pre paration for death and judgment. The well-known English hymn, &quot; Great God, what do I see and hear,&quot; is founded upon one by Ringwaldt. Of a quite different character were two of great beauty and universal popularity, com posed by Philip Nicolai, a Westphalian pastor, during a pestilence in 1597, and published by him, with fine chorales, two years afterwards. One of these (the &quot; Sleepers wake ! a voice is calling,&quot; of Mendelssohn s oratorio, &amp;gt;St Paul) belongs to the family of Advent or New Jerusalem hymns. The other, a &quot; Song of the believing soul concerning the Heavenly Bridegroom &quot; (&quot; Wie schiin leucht t uns der Morgen&tern,&quot;- &quot; O morning Star, how fair and bright &quot;), became the favourite marriage hymn of Germany. The hymns produced during the Thirty Years War are characteristic of that unhappy time, which (as Miss Luther. Winkworth says) &quot;caused religious men to look away Period from this world,&quot; and made their songs more and more Thirty expressive of personal feelings. In point of refinement ^f ars and graces of style, the hymn-writers of this period excelled their predecessors. Their taste was chiefly formed by the influence of Martin Opitz, the founder of what has been called the &quot; first Silesian school &quot; of German poetry, who died comparatively young in 1639, and who, though not of any great original genius, exercised much power as a critic. Some of the best of these works were by men who wrote little. In the famous battle-song of Gustavug Adolphus, published (1631) after the victory of Leipsic, for the use of his army, &quot; Verzage nicht du Hauflein klein &quot; (&quot; Fear not, O little flock, the foe &quot;), we have almost certainly a composition of the hero-king himself, the versification corrected by his chaplain Fabricius, and the, music composed by Altenburg, whose name has been given to the hymn. This, with Luther s paraphrase of the 67th Psalm, was sung by Gustavus and his soldiers before the fatal battle of Liitzeri. Two very fine hymns, one of prayer for deliverance and peace, the other of trust in God under calamities, were written about the same time by Lowen- stern, a saddler s son, poet, musician, and statesman, who was ennobled after the peace by the emperor Ferdinand III. Martin Rinckhart, in 1636, wrote the &quot;Chorus of God s faithful children&quot; (&quot;Nun danket alle Gott,&quot; &quot; Now thank we all our God &quot;), introduced by Mendelssohn in his &quot;Lobgesang,&quot; which has been called the &quot; Te Deum&quot; of Germany, being usually sung on occasions of public thanks giving. Weissel, in 1635, composed a beautiful Advent hymn (&quot;Lift up your heads, ye mighty gates&quot;), and Meyfart, professor of theology at Erfurt, in 1642, a fine adaptation of the ancient &quot; Urbs beata Hierusalem.&quot; The hymn of trust in Providence by Ncumarck, librarian to that duke of Weimar who was a distinguished general in the war (&quot; Wer nur den lieben Gott liisst walten &quot;- &quot; Leave God to order all thy ways &quot;), is scarcely, if at all, inferior to that of Paul Gerhardt on the same theme. Paul Flemming, a great traveller and lover of nature, who died young in 1639, also wrote excellent compositions, coloured by the same tone of feeling; and some, of great merit, were composed, soon after the close of the war, by Louisa Henrietta, electress of Brandenburg, granddaughter of tlio famous Admiral Coligny, and mother of the first king of Prussia. With these may be classed (though of later date) a few striking hymns of faith and prayer under mental anxiety, by Anton Ulrich, duke of Brunswick, whose nominal conversion to Romanism cast a shade over the close of a life otherwise conscientious and honourable. ; The most copious, and in their day most esteemed, hymn- Heer writers of this first half of the 17th century, were Heermann man &quot; and Rist. Heermann, a pastor in Silesia, the theatre (in a peculiar degree) of war and persecution, experienced in his own person a very large share of the miseries of the time, and several times narrowly escaped a violent death. His Devoti Musica Cordis, published in 1630, reflects the feel ings natural under such circumstances. With a correct style and good versification, his tone is subjective, and tlio burden of his hymns is not praise, but prayer. Among his works (which enter largely into most German hymn-books), two of the best are the &quot; Song of Tears,&quot; and the &quot; Song of Comfort,&quot; translated by Miss Winkworth in her Christian Singers of Germany. Rist published about 600 hymns, Rist. &quot;pressed out of him,&quot; as he said, &quot;by the cross.&quot; He was a pastor, and son of a pastor, in Holstein, and lived after the peace to enjoy many years of prosperity, being appointed poet-laureate to the emperor, and finally ennobled. The bulk of his hymns, like those of other copious writers, are of inferior quality ; but some, particularly those for Advent, Epiphany, Easter Eve, and on Angels, are very