“At length, after he had been labouring for ten days in a grievous pleurisy, God’s mercy saw fit to free his holy soul from prison. I who was his familiar above the rest,” says the biographer, “came to his couch at dawn of day, and asked him whether he was not feeling a little better. ‘Do not ask me,’ he replied, ‘but rather listen to what I have to tell you. I shall die very soon and shall not recover: so to thee and all my friends I commend my sinful soul. This whole night I have been rapt in ecstasy. With such complete memory as we have for the Lord’s Prayer, I seemed to be reading over and over Cicero’s _Hortensius_, and likewise to be scanning the substance and very written pages of what I intended to write Concerning the Vices--just as if I had it already written. I am so stirred and lifted by this reading, that the earth and all pertaining to it and this mortal life are despicable and tedious; while the future everlasting world and the eternal life have become such an unspeakable desire and joy, that all these transitory circumstances are inane--nothing at all. It wearies me to live.’”[399] Was not this a scholar’s vision? The German dwarf reads and cares for the _Hortensius_ even as Augustine, from whose _Confessions_ doubtless came the recommendation of this classic. The barbarous Latin of the _Vita_ is so uncouth and unformed as to convey no certain grammatical meaning. One can only sense it. The biographer cannot write Latin correctly, nor write it glibly and ungrammatically, like a man born to a Latinesque speech. Hermann’s own Latin is but little better. It approaches neither fluency nor style. But the scholar ardour was his, and his works remain--a long chronicle, a treatise on the Astrolabe, and one on Music; also, perhaps, a poem in leonine elegiacs, “The Dispute of the Sheep and the Flax,” which goes on for several hundred lines till one comes to a welcome _caetera desunt_.[400] Thus, with a heavy-footed Teutonic diligence, the Germans studied the Trivium and Quadrivium. They sweated at Latin grammar, reading also the literature or the stock passages. Their ignorance of natural science was no denser than that of peoples west of the Rhine or south of the Alps. Many of them went to learn at Chartres or Paris. Within the mapped-out scheme of knowledge, there was too much for them to master to admit of their devising new provinces of study. They could not but continue for many decades translators of the foreign matter into their German tongue or German selves. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries they will be translators of the French and Provençal literatures.