the same collection, Klara Hatzlerin presents rather barren encomiums
on Saint Mary, all of which were composed by Muscatbluet. Feebly, the
Maria-cult arose once more with a narrow and superstitious treatment,
painfully different from the beautiful conceptions of the older periods.
Here everything is Philistine. The statutes of the Rosenkrantz order and
the brotherhood of Saint Ursula decree eleven thousand prayers in honor
of the eleven thousand virgins who are still adored as saints, with
their seat at Cologne. Spiritual songs exalt Saint Mary as equal in
strength to Christ, nay, in the estimation of the lowly masses, superior
to Him. There is a bombastic praise of all her material and spiritual
perfections. The songs are scholastic in their exaggeration, artificial
in form, and barbarous in language; in pompous terms church
controversies are treated there: the Trinity, original sin, the last
judgment, and other orthodox and mystic broodings, similes, allegories,
etc. A type of the treatment is the description Muscatbluet gives of the
Blessed Virgin when he calls her "a chest in which God himself dwells,
the rod of Aaron, a well illuminated torch, a chaste Arc of Noah, a deep
pond, a cask of myrrh, a reed of grace in God's field, her body a coffin
or a castle the decadence is marked everywhere. We look back with
longing eyes to the pure, the beautiful, the lofty, all-merciful Mother
of God of the rich, uncontaminated past, the Holy Virgin who has
enriched, ennobled, purified the German nation, German literature,
German music, and, above all, the German arts of painting, sculpture,
and architecture."

Next to those bombastic, pseudo-pious songs we find hideous drinking
songs, poems of gluttony and licentiousness, all of which are,
nevertheless, highly valuable to the historian of culture. There are
authentic documents revealing the tremendous downfall of national ideals
from the pedestal of the glorious past, and the immense recuperative
power of the nation in struggling upward again after two centuries and a
half to the Second Period of Bloom, crowned by Lessing, Schiller,
Goethe!

A poem in the compilation of Klara Hatzlerin, _On the Nature of the
Child_, is intensely interesting, first, as regards the popular
physiological knowledge of the time on the mystery of gestation;
secondly, as a cultural document on the character of Klara, the nun's,
occupation during her leisure hours. She appeals first to her patroness: