ds depress the intellectual life of nations. The subject is very
wide. It would embrace a discussion of the effects of war when it occurs
during a period of great literary and artistic splendor, as in Athens
and in the Italian Republics; whether intellectual decline is postponed
or accelerated by the interests and passions of the strife; whether the
preliminary concentration of the popular heart may claim the merit of
adding either power or beauty to the intellectual forms which bloom
together with the war.

These things are not entirely clear, and the experience of different
countries is conflicting. The Thirty Years' War, though it commenced
with the inspiration of great political and religious ideas, did not
lift the German mind to any new demonstrations of truth or impassioned
utterances of the imagination. The nation sank away from it into a
barren and trivial life, although the war itself occasioned a multitude
of poems, songs, hymns, and political disquisitions. The hymns of this
period, which are filled with a sense of dependence, of the greatness
and awfulness of an invisible eternity, and breathe a desire for the
peaceful traits of a remote religious life, are at once a confession of
the weariness of the best minds at the turmoil and uncertainty of the
contest and a permanent contribution of the finest kind to that form of
sacred literature. But princes and electors were fighting as much for
the designation and establishment of their petty nationalities, which
first checkered the map of Europe after the imperial Catholic power was
rolled southwardly, as they were for the pure interest of Protestantism.
The German intellect did eventually gain something from this political
result, because it interrupted the literary absolutism which reigned at
Vienna; no doubt literature grew more popular and German, but it did
not very strikingly improve the great advantage, for there was at last
exhaustion instead of a generously nourishing enthusiasm, and the great
ideas of the period became the pieces with which diplomatists carried on
their game. The _Volkslied_ (popular song) came into vogue again, but it
was not so fresh and natural as before; Opitz, one of the best poets of
this period, is worth reading chiefly when he depicts his sources of
consolation in the troubles of the time. Long poetical bulletins were
written, in the epical form, to describe the battles and transactions
of the war. They had an immense circulatio