...The final fate of Christianity is dependent upon our need of it. This religion has for eighteen centuries been a blessing to suffering humanity; it was providential, divine, holy. All that it has benefited civilisation, by taming the strong and strengthening the weak, by uniting the nations through like emotions and a like language, by all that its panegyrists extol--all these are insignificant in comparison with that great consolation which in itself is bestowed upon mankind. Eternal praise is due to that symbol of a suffering God, the Saviour with the crown of thorns, the Christ crucified, whose blood was a soothing balsam dripping into humanity's wounds. The poet, in particular, will reverently recognise the solemn grandeur of that symbol. The whole system of allegory, as expressed in the life and art of the middle ages, will in all times excite the admiration of poets. What colossal consistency in _the_ Christian art!--that is, in architecture! How harmoniously those Gothic cathedrals are adapted to the religious services of the Church, and how the fundamental idea of the Church itself is revealed in them! Everything towers upward; everything transubstantiates itself; the stone blossoms into branches and foliage and becomes a tree; the fruits of the vine and of the wheat-stalk become blood and flesh; man becomes God, and God becomes a pure, abstract spirit. The Christian life during the middle ages is for the poet a rich, inexhaustible store-house of precious materials. Only through Christianity could, in this world, such varied phases arise--contrasts so striking, sorrows so diverse, beauties so strange, that one is inclined to believe that they never did exist in reality, and that all was but a colossal fever-dream, a delirious fantasy of an insane God. Nature herself appeared in those times fantastically disguised; but notwithstanding that man, occupied with abstract metaphysical speculations, turned peevishly away from her, yet at times she awoke him with a voice so solemnly sweet, so deliciously terrible, so enchanting, that he involuntarily listened and smiled, then shrank back with terror, and sickened even unto death. The story of the nightingale of Basle here comes to my mind, and, as it is probably unknown to you, I will relate it.