...More noteworthy and of more importance than his prose writings are Luther's poems, the songs which in battle and in trouble blossomed forth from his heart. Sometimes they resemble a floweret that grows on a rocky crag, then again a ray of moonlight trembling over a restless sea. Luther loved music, and even wrote a treatise on the art; hence his songs are particularly melodious. In this respect he merits the name, Swan of Eisleben. But he is nothing less than a wild swan in those songs wherein he stimulates the courage of his followers and inflames himself to the fiercest rage of battle. A true battle-song was that martial strain with which he and his companions marched into Worms. The old cathedral trembled at those unwonted tones, and the ravens, in their dark nests in the steeple, startled with affright. That song, the Marseillaise of the Reformation, preserves to this day its inspiriting power. ...The expressions "classic" and "romantic" refer only to the spirit and the manner of the treatment. The treatment is classic when the form of that which is portrayed is quite identical with the idea of the portrayer, as is the case with the art-works of the Greeks, in which, owing to this identity, the greatest harmony is found to exist between the idea and its form. The treatment is romantic when the form does not reveal the idea through this identity, but lets this idea be surmised parabolically. (I use the word "parabolically" here in preference to "symbolically.") The Greek mythology had an array of god-figures, each of which, in addition to the identity of form and idea, was also susceptible of a symbolic meaning. But in this Greek religion only the figures of the gods were clearly defined; all else, their lives and deeds, was left to the arbitrary treatment of the poet's fancy. In the Christian religion, on the contrary, there are no such clearly-defined figures, but stated facts--certain definite holy events and deeds, into which the poetical faculty of man could place a parabolic signification. It is said that Homer invented the Greek gods and goddesses. That is not true. They existed previously in clearly-defined outlines; but he invented their histories. The artists of the middle ages, on the other hand, never ventured the least addition to the historical part of their religion. The fall of man, the incarnation, the baptism, the crucifixion, and the like, were matters of fact, which were not to be intermeddled with, and which it was not permissible to remould in the least, but to which poetry might attach a symbolic meaning. All the arts during the middle ages were treated in this parabolic spirit, and this treatment is romantic. Hence we find in the poetry of the middle ages a mystic universality; the forms are all so shadowy, what they do is so vaguely indicated, all therein is as if seen through a hazy twilight intermittently illumined by the moon. The idea is merely hinted at in