ese inward struggles and scruples of
conscience assume to the daughter of the fifteenth century a palpable
form: they become to her an outward reality that mysteriously assails
her. Her soul is not tormented with thoughts alone that accuse and
excuse each other, but with delusive appearances that strike her with
terror.

This activity of the senses, which clothes with an appearance of
outward life all that rises in the soul, of the fearful and
incomprehensible, is generally and peculiarly characteristic of the
early life of every people. The souls of individuals are not
sufficiently free to enable them to understand the inward struggles of
their own minds: they begin by contending against what torments them,
as if it were an outward form or enemy. Such were the noble struggles
of Luther; and when the incomparable English poet of the sixteenth
century caused his tragic hero to struggle with the apparitions of
murdered men, and with the dagger which was the implement of his crime,
this conception, which we consider as a highly poetical and spiritual
creation, had a far deeper truth for him and his spectators.

CHAPTER III.

THE TRAVELLING STUDENT.
(1509, and following years.)

The fifteenth century passed away. To us Germans it appears an
introduction to the great events of the following one,--a period of
earnest but imperfect striving towards improvement. The excitement of
the masses in the great half-Sclave population of the Roman empire had
brought death and destruction over the German provinces, and the
fanaticism of the Hussites had appeared to exhaust itself in the
burning ruins of hundreds of cities and villages; but the same feeling
had stirred the hearts of two generations, and in the next century the
flame again blazed forth, more powerful and unquenchable, a pillar of
fire to all Europe. The house of Luxemburg had passed away; its last
heirs had mortgaged the Hungarian crown to the Austrian Hapsburgers,
and bequeathed to them their claims to the wide and insecure
acquisitions of their race. In the next century Charles V. made them
the greatest dynasty of the world. It was a century of strife and
reckless egotism, and on all sides arose knightly associations and
confederacies; but it was also a time when the German mind, having
become more practical in its tendencies, arrived at the greatest of all
new discoveries,--the art