Wer nicht liebt Wein, Weib, und Gesang,
Der bleibt ein Narr sein Lebenlang.
(Who loves not woman, wine, and song,
Remains a fool his whole life long.)
In short, he was a complete man. To call him a spiritualist would be to commit as great a mistake as it would be to call him a sensualist. What shall I say more? He had something about him clever, original, miraculous, inconceivable.
In an article on John de Wycliffe, in the North British Review, is the following paragraph:—
Abundant as is our historical literature, and fond as our ablest writers have recently become of attempting careful and vivid renderings of the physiognomies of important historical personages, we are still without a set of thoroughly good portraits of the modern religious reformers of different nations, painted, as they might be, in series, so that the features of each may be compared with those of all the rest. Wycliffe, Huss, Savonarola, Luther, Zwingle, Calvin, Knox, and Cranmer,—all men coming under the same general designation,—all heroes of the same general movement; and yet what a contrast of physiognomies! Pre-eminent in the series will ever be Luther, the man of biggest frame and largest heart; the man of richest and most original genius; the great, soft, furious, musical, pliant, sociable, kiss-you, knock-you-down German. None of them all had such a face; none of them all said such things; of none of them all can you have such anecdotes, such a collection of ana.
Luther, says another writer, speaking of his fondness for music, was not solely nor chiefly a theologian, or he had been no true reformer. As the cloister had not been able to bound his sympathies, so the controversial theatre could not circumscribe his honest ambition. He in whom “the Italian head was joined to the German body” would not only free the souls of men, but win the hearts of women and little children. Much had he to feel proud of during his busy life. It was no light thing to have waged successful combat with the most powerful hierarchy that the world had ever seen, or to have held in his hands the destinies of Europe. But dearer to his kind heart was the sound of his own verses sung to his own melodies, which rose from street and market-place, from highway and byway, chanted by laborers going to their daily work, during their hours of toil, and as they returned home at even-tide. How would it have gladdened his heart to have heard these same hymns, two hundred years later, sung by the miners of Cornwall and Gloucestershire!
“I always loved music,” said he: “whoso has skill in this art is of a good temperament, fitted for all things.” Many times he exemplified this power in his own person. When sore perplexed and in danger of life, he would drive away all gloomy thoughts by the magic of his own melodies. On that sad journey to Worms, when friends crowded round him and sought to change his purpose, warning him, with many tears, of the certain death that awaited him,—on the morning of that memorable 16th of April, when the towers of the ancient city appeared in sight,—the true-hearted man, rising in his chariot, broke forth with the words and music of that Marseillaise of the Reformation, Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott, which he had improvised two days before at Oppenheim,—the same stirring hymn that Gustavus Adolphus and the whole Swedish army sang a century later, on the morning of the battle of Lutzen:—
A safe stronghold our God is still,