One day, as certain of his friends were singing some beautiful chants at his house, he exclaimed with enthusiasm: "If our Lord God has scattered such admirable gifts on this earth, which is but a dark corner, what will it not be in the life eternal, in which all will be perfection!"......Since Luther's time, the people have sung; the Bible inspired their songs, and the impulse given at the epoch of the Reformation produced in later years those noble oratorios which seem to be the summit of this art. Poetry shared in the general movement. In singing the praises of God, men could not confine themselves to mere translations of the ancient hymns. The souls of Luther and many of his contemporaries, elevated by faith to the sublimest ideas, excited to enthusiasm by the conflicts and dangers that continually threatened the infant Church, inspired by the poetic genius of the Old Testament, and by the faith of the New, soon poured forth their feelings in religious songs, in which poetry and music united and blended their most heavenly features. Thus in the sixteenth century the hymns were revived which in the first century had consoled the pangs of the martyrs. In 1523, Luther, as we have already seen, consecrated them to the memory of the Brussels martyrs; other children of the Reformation imitated his example; these hymns increased in number, and were circulated rapidly among the people, and contributed powerfully to awaken them from their slumbers. It was in this same year that Hans Sachs composed _The Nightingale of Wittemberg_. The doctrine that for the last four centuries had prevailed in the Church was as the moonlight, during which men lost their way in the wilderness. Now the nightingale proclaims the dawn, and, soaring above the mists of the morning, celebrates the brightness of the coming day. Whilst lyric poetry thus owed its birth to the loftiest inspirations of the Reformation, satirical verses and dramas from the pen of Hütten and Manuel attacked the most crying abuses. It is to the Reformation that the greatest poets of England, Germany, and perhaps of France, are indebted for their highest flights. [Sidenote: PAINTING.]