he is my wound, and yet my balm.
She is my heart's constant abode,
Yet makes me gray and makes me old."

While happily married himself, he knew enough of bad wives. Albrecht
Durer's unhappy married life could furnish him sufficient material for
his _Ninefold Skin of a Scold_, and _The Twelve Properties of a Bad
Woman_, against which all the arts employed in the "_taming of the
shrew_" came to naught.

In 1560 his beloved wife died, and one year later he married Barbara
Harscher, a charming girl of seventeen years, whose beauty he sang in
his _Artistic Woman's Praise_, and with whom he lived happily till 1576.
He was buried in Saint John's Cemetery at Nuernberg. The grateful city
erected in 1874 a beautiful monument in his honor. But the highest
monument, "more abiding than steel," the prince of poets, Goethe,
erected to him in his _Hans Sachs's Poetic Mission:_

"An oak wreath hovers yonder in the clouds,
With ever green fair foliage adorned;
With this the grateful nation crowns his brow."

Hans Sachs is the typical, the universal, the noblest, and the purest
Mastersinger; but he is only the first among hundreds of others who
helped to preserve in Germany the sacred fire of poetry.

The bourgeoisie womanhood of the school of humanism, of the circle where
virtue was the ideal of life, ably seconded the efforts of men like
Sachs. But no one lofty specimen of superior womanhood arose from the
atmosphere of feud, brigandage, and drunken intemperance among the
so-called higher classes. Banqueting, hunting, fighting, gambling,
carousing, and sexual excesses are recorded in plenty. _The diary of the
Silesian knight Hans Von Schweinichen_ introduces us, in the middle of
the sixteenth century, into a "noble" society full of poverty,
brutality, and ignorance. He relates the slight acquirements of his
education, interrupted by the occupation of tending the geese, his
service as a page at the court of the Duke of Liegnitz, his early
interest in women, his presence at weddings, "where he ate and drank his
fill for day and night just as they wanted to have it." Of his friendly
expedition with the Duke of Liegnitz to Mecklenburg, he says: "I have
made for myself a great reputation with drinking, as I could never get
enough to drink myself full." Anna of Saxony, daughter of Elector
Moritz, wife of William of Orange, who died of _delirium tremens_,
proves, by the way, that drunkenness was by