Luther's own hymns, thirty-seven in number (of which about twelve are translations or adaptations from Latin originals), are for the principal Christian seasons; on the sacraments, the church, grace, death, &c.; and paraphrases of seven psalms, of a passage in Isaiah, and of the Lord's Prayer, Ten Commandments, Creed, Litany and "Te Deum." There is also a very touching and stirring song on the martyrdom of two youths by fire at Brussels, in 1523-1524. Homely and sometimes rugged in form, and for the most part objective in tone, they are full of fire, manly simplicity and strong faith. Three rise above the rest. One for Christmas, "Vom Himmel hoch da komm ich her" ("From Heaven above to earth I come"), 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, "Nun freuet euch, lieben Christen g'mein" ("Dear Christian people, now rejoice"), 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 paraphrase of the 46th Psalm: "Ein' feste Burg ist unser Gott" ("A sure stronghold our God is He")--"the production" (as Ranke says) "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." Carlyle compares it to "a sound of Alpine avalanches, or the first murmur of earthquakes." Heine called it "the Marseillaise of the Reformation." 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 "Luther did as much for the Reformation by his hymns as by his translation of the Bible," 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, "by children in the cottage and by martyrs on the scaffold." It was by them that a congregational character was given to the new Protestant worship. This success they owed partly to their metrical structure, which, though sometimes complex, was recommended 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. Followers of Luther