These men were well aware of the magnitude of their loss and consented most unwillingly to his release, after imposing the condition that he should continue to superintend from Weimar the organ repairs which he had commenced. [Illustration: MORNING PRAYERS IN BACH FAMILY. From a painting of an ideal scene.] Among the most remarkable of the false impressions which have prevailed concerning Bach's personality, must be accounted the idea that he was himself a pietist. Attempts have been made to prove this on the one hand from the nature of the poems composed by him, on the other, from the character of his music. And indeed, it is not difficult to discover in many of the poetical texts which he wrote for his own church music, the pietistic forms of expression. But since these forms, notwithstanding a certain bombastic quality, a rapturous, exaggerated sentiment and an exuberant tenderness, still strike a note of genuine poetry, they were habitually employed by all writers of that day. Not a single pietist, however, was included in the number of the poets who wrote for Bach. One of these, Erdmann Neumeister, was, on the contrary, a zealous champion of orthodoxy. And concerning the sympathy between Bach's music and pietism, it must also be said here that nothing beyond a certain analogy exists. A strong intensity of feeling is common to both, and the profound intelligence exhibited by the musician in following the most hidden meanings of his text, resembles the fervid devotion with which the pietists were wont to read the Bible. Moreover, the lofty idealism which inspired his artistic creations, causing him to regard everything _sub specie aeterni_, as it were, corresponds in a certain way to the unworldly spirit of the apostles of Spener, who, lost in ecstasy, directed their gaze towards the pictured glories of the heavenly sphere. But, while these pious souls gave themselves up unreservedly to this sort of subjective fanaticism, with Bach the personal feeling is always controlled by the utmost conceivable severity of the musical form. The pietists renounced the world and the forces at work in it; Bach founded his activity upon what had been created before him in his art, and rejoiced, after the manner of his ancestors, in a hearty enjoyment of the world and its beauty. It is not merely because pietism interfered with the free exercise of his art that Bach refused it his support, but rather because this particular religious bent was distasteful to him in every way. The old Lutheran form of Protestantism was an inheritance of his race, and his education had been carried on in places where orthodoxy flourished. In Arnstadt it had victoriously trampled under foot, before his coming, some feeble germs of pietism, which of itself is almost sufficient reason for the attitude of quiet hostility towards Spener, assumed by him from the beginning. The second clergyman of the town, Georg Christian Eilmar, was an orthodox of the