osener's
"Chronicle" there is a description of the citizens of Strassburg defending
themselves against their bishop in 1312; in Twinger's "Chronicle" a
picture of the processions of the Flagellants and the religious enthusiasm
of that time (1349). The poems of Suchenwirt and Halbsuter represent the
wars of Austria against Switzerland (1386), and Niclas von Weyl's
translation gives us a glimpse into the Council of Constance (1414) and
the Hussite wars, which were soon to follow. The poetry of those two
centuries, which was written by and for the people, is interesting
historically, but, with few exceptions, without any further worth. The
poets wish to amuse or to instruct their humble patrons, and they do this,
either by giving them the dry bones of the romantic poetry of former ages,
or by telling them fables and the quaint stories of the "Seven Wise
Masters." What beauty there was in a Meistergesang may be fairly seen from
the poem of Michael Beheim; and the Easter play by no means shows the
lowest ebb of good taste in the popular literature of that time.

It might seem, indeed, as if all the high and noble aspirations of the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries had been lost and forgotten during the
fourteenth and fifteenth. And yet it was not quite so. There was one class
of men on whom the spirit of true nobility had descended, and whose works
form a connecting chain between the great era of the Crusades and the
still greater era of the Reformation. These are the so-called
Mystics,--true Crusaders, true knights of the Spirit, many of whom
sacrificed their lives for the cause of truth, and who at last conquered
from the hands of the infidels that Holy Sepulchre in which the true
Christian faith had been lying buried for centuries. The name of Mystics,
which has been given to these men, is apt to mislead. Their writings are
not dark or unintelligible, and those who call them so must find
Christianity itself unintelligible and dark. There is more broad daylight
in Eckhart and Tauler than in the works of all the Thomists and Scotists.
Eckhart was not a dreamer. He had been a pupil of Thomas Aquinas, and his
own style is sometimes painfully scholastic. But there is a fresh breeze
of thought in his works, and in the works of his disciples. They knew that
whenever the problems of man's relation to God, the creation of the world,
the origin of evil, and the hope of salvation come to be discussed, the
sharpest edge of logical rea