In Jan., so his anxious pupil Veit Dietrich writes, Luther had a foreboding of some illness impending and fancied it would come in March; in reality it came on on Jan. 22. “Very early, about four o’clock, he felt a violent buzzing in his ears followed by great weakness of the heart.” His friends were summoned at his request as he did not wish to be alone. “When, however, he had recovered and had his wits about him (‘_confirmato animo_’), he proceeded to storm against the Papists, who were not yet to make gay over his death.” “Were Satan able,” he says, “he would gladly kill me; at every hour he is at my heels.” “The physician declared,” so the account goes on, “after having examined the urine, that Luther stood in danger of an attack of apoplexy, which indeed he would hardly escape.” The prediction was, however, not immediately verified and the patient was once more able to leave his bed. On Feb. 9, however (if the date given in the Notes be correct),[336] after assisting at a funeral in the church of Torgau, he was again seized with such a fit of giddiness as hardly to be able to return to his lodgings. When he recovered he said: “Do not be grieved even should I die, but continue to further the Word of God after my death.… It may be we are still sinners and do not perform our duty sufficiently; if so we shall cloak it over with the forgiveness of sins.” This time again he was not able to work for a whole month. What he at times endured from the trouble in his head we learn from a statement in the Notes of the Table-Talk made by Cordatus: “When I awake and am unable to sleep again on account of the noise in my ears, I often fancy I can hear the bells of Halle, Leipzig, Erfurt and Wittenberg, and then I think: Surely you are going to have a fit. But God frequently intervenes and gives me a short sleep afterwards.”[337] No notable improvement took place until the middle of 1533. The noises in the head began again in 1541. He fancied then that he could hear “the rustling of all the trees and the breaking of the waves of every sea” in his head.[338] When he wrote this he was also suffering from a discharge from the ear, which, for the time, deprived him of his hearing; so great was the pain as to force tears from him. Alluding to this he says that his friends did not often see him in tears, but that now he would gladly weep even more copiously; to God he had said: “Let there be an end either of these pains or of me myself,” but, now that the discharge had ceased, he was beginning to read and write again quite confidently.[339]