2. The poet said to the bird, " Do not make me jealous. "
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ABOUT a hundred years ago Coleridge wrote: “I can scarcely conceive a
more delightful volume than might be made from Luther’s letters,
especially those from the Wartburg, if translated in the simple, idiomatic,
hearty mother-tongue of the original.” One’s first impulse on reading those
words is to search for this “delightful volume,” but, though nearly a
century has elapsed since Coleridge thus wrote, no such volume is to be
found in present-day German, even in Germany. This treasure ought to be
accessible to all classes. The reason why all classes have not had access to
Luther’s letters long ago is, that they have lain embedded, many of them in
Latin, in the volumes of De Wette; also in Old German, in the twenty-four
huge volumes of Walch’s edition of Luther’s Works, published about 170
years ago; and in the three volumes of Dr. Gottfried Schutze’s German
edition of Luther’s hitherto unpublished letters, translated from the Latin in
1784.
From the two latter sources De Wette culled most of the 2,324 letters
published in 1826, in his first five volumes, which he dedicated to the
Grand Duke Karl August, of Saxe-Weimar, Goethe’s friend, in grateful
remembrance of the services rendered by the princes of the Saxon
Ernestine line to the Reformation, and of the use he had been permitted to
make of the treasures in the Grand Ducal library in Weimar. De Wette
gives the literary history of every letter, thus making them a Tagebuch of
Luther’s life.
In the Preface to Dr. Schutze’s German edition of Luther’s letters the
translator says: “From different quarters a wish has been expressed to see
Dr. Schutze’s unprinted letters in the hands of the German public, and I did
not know how one could become better acquainted with the character of
this Paul-like man than from his letters, in which his heart lies exposed, and
which bring us so much in contact with the spirit of the Reformation; and
if, at times, they verge on vehemence, yet they never leave the reader
unedified.” The Latin edition is dedicated to Frederick V. of Denmark. In
the Preface to Stroebel’s Selected Letters — Nurnberg, 1780 — the author
says: “The more of Luther’s letters I read, my respect for this wonderful
man always increased, and most of them gave me such pleasure that I
believed I would be conferring a favor on many of his admirers, especially
among the laity, to whom his voluminous works were scarcely accessible,
if I made them better acquainted with his noble and honest heart, thus
inspiring his ungrateful children with more respect for him to whom they
owe so much, and who, in every relation of life, appears as noble as he was
amiable, although many who never read his works assert the opposite.”
Dr. Enders, in his splendid collection of Luther’s “Briefwechsel,” mostly in
Latin — the first volume was published in 1884, and the tenth in 1903 —
says that they are intended not only for the learned, but for a larger public
who are interested in all Luther’s letters. Dr. Enders derives most of those
letters from De Wette, Walch, Aurifaber, Schutze, and Stroebel.
Luther was the first classic writer of the German language, and his words,
as Richter says, were half-battles; while according to Coleridge, his
“miraculous and providential translation of the Bible was the fundamental
act of the construction of literary German.”
This busiest of men was the most indefatigable of letter-writers; and in his
letters all the events of those stormy times are mirrored, as well as the
influences which developed his own religious life. His letters are specially
valuable because of his allusions to his herculean labors in the field of Bible
translation.
But his love for the Scriptures lightened the task. Referring specially to the
Psalms, which occupied him so continuously through life, Luther said:
“The Holy Scriptures were to believing souls what the meadow is to the
animal, what the home is to man, the nest to the bird, the cleft of the rock
to the sea-fowl, the stream to the fish.”