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FAMOUS SONGS
wide popularity. Its survival is entirely due to oral transmission, for it is not included in any of the present collections of national songs, nor was it printed in any Commers-book during the last century. Wittekind has imitated the metre in his " Krambambuli-Lied" (1745), and Koromandel in his " Doris" and " Dorothee." Till the middle of this century the melody of the " Kanapee»Lied" was identical with that of the " Krambambuli-Lied/' but a few decades ago the " Kanapee-Lied" assumes a new form, and was set to a new melody.
As there is a story, apocryphal or otherwise, of some interest connected with Luther's cele-brated hymn, " Ein Feste Burg," the particulars of the same may well find a place here. This piece has been aptly entitled the " Marseillaise of the Reformation," and in it we find the re-markable genius and religious fire of Luther, together with the nervous feeling of those troublous times. According to one account the words, which are a free translation of the Latin version of the 46th Psalm, were written in Coburg, 1521, while one authority inclines to the belief that they were composed on the road to Worms. Hiibner declares that Luther wrote it on the Wartburg, and having finished upset the inkstand over it, whereupon the devil
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