These Wittenbergers, I think, must be of the same conservative
turn of mind.
Failing to get a carriage to the station, we started to walk. I paused
a moment before the church, to make some little corrections and
emendations in my engravings, and thought, as I was doing so, of that
quite other scene years ago, when the body of Luther was borne through
this gate by a concourse of weeping thousands. These stones, on which
I was standing, then echoed all night to the tread of a closely-packed
multitude--a muffled sound, like the patter of rain among leaves.
There rose through the long, dark hours, alternately, the unrestrained
sobbings of the throng, and the grand choral of Luther's psalms, words
and music of his own. Never since the world began was so strange a
scene as that. I felt a kind of shadow from it, as I walked homeward
gazing on the flat, dreamy distance. A great windmill was creaking its
sombre, lazy vanes round and round,--strange, goblin things, these
windmills,--and I thought of one of Luther's sayings. "The heart of a
human creature is like the millstones: if corn be shaken thereon, it
grindeth the corn, and maketh good meal; but if no corn be there, then
it grindeth away itself.
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