While by speech and deed, writing, preaching, and acting, he fomented and directed the mighty struggle for liberty, whereto his bold words--called by his countryman Jean Paul "half-battles"--had roused the civilized world, Luther took time to labor at the task whose accomplishment was to forward so immensely his triumph, and which, executed as it was by him, is an unparalleled literary achievement. At the end of thirteen years, he finished his translation. "Alone he did it;" and alone it stands, pre-eminent in the world among cotemporaneous performances for its spiritual agency, and in Germany for its influence upon literature. Before him, there scarcely existed a written German prose. He presented to his country a complete language. With such a compelling and genial power did he mould into a compact, fully equipt whole, the crude and fluctuating elements of the German language of the 15th century, that it may be said, his mother tongue came from him suddenly perfected. And not only did he, in vigor, flexibility, precision, and copiousness, vastly excel all who had written before him, but not even could those who came after him follow in his footsteps in command over the new language, for a century. The time when the pliant, well-proportioned body he created was to indue the spirit of the German people, was postponed to a distant period: and of this very postponement, was he too the cause; for the religious and civil wars, the disputes and jealousies, consequent upon the great schism he produced, so engrossed during a long period the German mind, that literature languished. In the latter half of the 16th century, it was poor. In the 17th, through the impulse given to thought by the Reformation, it would have revived, but for the outbreaking of the terrible _thirty years' war_, which, remotely caused by the division between Catholics and Protestants, commenced in 1618 and lasted till 1648, and which not only during its continuance desolated and brutalized Germany, but left it impoverished, disorganized, and, by the protracted internal strife and foreign {376} participation therein, in spirit to a great degree denationalized. Here in our rapid survey of German literature, it will be well for a moment to pause, and before entering upon the period in which it attained its full multiform development, cast a look back upon the stages through which we have traced its progress.