[End of February] 1521.
To the man distinguished by godliness and scholarship, Conrad Pellican, Franciscan, his superior in Christ, Martin Luther sends his greetings.
That you praise my work on the Psalms in this way, I cannot accept; I fear that you have let yourself be guided too much by your goodwill. I, at least, do not like my interpretation of the Psalter at all, not only because of its meaning, for I believe that it is the right one, but also because of its prolixity, disorder and desolate, not well worked out mass. For it is a book that I have had to conceive, form, nourish and give birth to with one and the same labor, for lack of time and leisure. For a long time I have been thinking of revoking it. For by the living voice the listeners attain much light and pleasantness, which this desolate mass of letters neither has nor can grasp. If the 12th Psalm (Psal. X1) is not yet printed, I would like you to erase twelve lines at the end of the last page of Litera B with the three following lines of Litera C. 1) For you see how shamefully I have erred there with the word XXXX. But I have not been with the thing and, as also otherwise often, with many a thought busy. For I am very much overwhelmed with business: I preach two sermons a day, I work on the Psalter, I have the postils (as they are called) under my hands, and I answer the enemies, and I fight against the bull in German and Latin, and defend myself; not to mention the letters that I write to friends.
1) Marginal gloss of the Basel edition: "He is talking about the page number of the Wittenberg edition." - What is meant is the second paragraph of § 67 of the 12th Psalm, which we have marked with square brackets.
and the matters that occur in the house and elsewhere. What else I have forgotten: Please, in the 14th Psalm (Psal. XIII) erase everything I dreamed about the word, twenty-six lines. 2) I shall take pains to apply a similar labor to the explanation of the words expressing a cognizance (intelligendi) as I have done in the 21st Psalm (Psal. XX) to the words denoting a power [Ps. 21, § 41 ff.]. Of many other errors, but of lesser concern, the book teems through the fault of the printer.
You do well to pray for me; I am oppressed by many evils and prevented from doing holy things; life is a cross to me. I have the twenty-second (vicesimum primum) psalm under my hands. I would like to give myself over to the hope that the Psalter could be completed if Christ would give peace, so that I could lay myself completely on it. But now not even the fourth part [of my time] serves the Psalter; indeed, I have to steal the time I spend on it. You rightly remind me that I should be restrained; I feel it myself, but I am not powerful. I am carried away, I don't know by which spirit, although I know that I don't want to harm anyone; but they also oppress me most furiously, so that I can't watch out enough for Satan. Therefore pray the Lord for me, that I may remember, speak and write what is good for him and me, not what is good for them, and live well in Christ. Wittenberg, 1521.
2) This refers to Ps. 14, § 73. We have put the relevant passage in square brackets.
*) We have translated this letter according to the Basel edition. About the location of this letter in the editions, the time determination, etc., the necessary has already been said in the note to the superscription of the "Works of Luther on the first 21 Psalms".