Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/378

358 Silesius (of whom the next volume speaks) and Friederich von Spee (1591-1635), and the religious sonnets of Andreas Gryphius. But the best has the simplicity and strength of folk-song. The greatest of these hymn-writers is the author of "Befiehl du deine Wege" and "Nun ruhen alle Wälder," Paul Gerhardt (1607-76), who also has been included in the subsequent volume of this series.

The dramatic preparation of the sixteenth century, which has been described in a previous volume, produced no adequate result in the seventeenth. No Shakespeare arose to harmonise the popular and learned elements in a drama vital and artistic. The school Latin drama of the preceding century remained Germany's greatest achievement in drama till the appearance of Lessing, Goethe, and Schiller. For a Shakespeare or a Corneille, Germany produced only an Andreas Gryphius (1616-1664).

A native of Glogau, in Silesia, Gryphius had a troubled early life, in which he made himself master of all the languages which the confusion of the Thirty Years' War brought together in Germany, as well as composing the usual epic poem. A patron gave him the means of proceeding to Leyden to study, where he brought out two books of sonnets, Son- und Feyrtags Sonnete (1639), accomplished in form, and full of passionate religious zeal. He visited Italy and many parts of Germany, and died at his native town in 1664.