There we have a simplicity treated with Tennysonian artifice, which "victual" does not succeed in correcting; beautiful in its way, though its way is perhaps not so fine as the prose. Yet we notice the modern spirit in the appreciation of the "brown wild" as well as the meadow, and out of the more general and evasive "steep" is developed the picturesque "rocky pathway."

Except for the interest in establishing these forms of nature-appreciation from such older and more original sources, we might have satisfied ourselves with illustrations of them from Chaucer's early poems, where his descriptions are almost wholly derivative. His feeling for "the smale, softe, swote gras," that was sweetly embroidered with flowers; the earth's joyous oblivion of the cold, in her enthusiasm of May; his constant delight in the "smale foules," and the like, are purely conventional, though the unction with which he writes shows his real enjoyment. There are touches in Chaucer, however, that we miss in his romance predecessors, such as his eye for delicate effects—most interesting as marking the growth of accurate observation and sensitive rendering, like the description of twilight in Troylus and Creyseyde, when

or the graceful illustration in the same poem of a sudden troubling of one's mood:

Such a touch makes us feel how modern he is. Yet he does not love the picturesque. Under the influence of a Breton lay, he writes in the loveliest of all his tales, of the rugged sea-coast on whose high bank Dorigen and her friends used to walk (since "stood hire castel faste by the see") and look down upon "the grisly rokkes blake," which, in her apprehension for her lord's safe return, she would call "these grisly, feendly rokkes blake." But we feel that even had Arviragus been at her side she would never have regarded the coast as we should regard it. Still we observe the advance in observation and literary expression. In the Knight's Tale, the wild picturesque is employed again to connote the terrible, but no poet, from Statius to Boccaccio, his guides in the passage, had written such lines as his setting for the temple of the God of War:

Nothing even in Childe Roland sketches desolating natural effects with more power. Yet Chaucer had a superior, in the sympathetic eye and adequate expression for the stern and stormy phases of nature, in a countryman of whom perhaps he never heard. We do not know the name of the author of Sir Gawayn and the Grene Knyght. But the poem marks on the whole the noblest conception in our literature before Spenser. It possesses moral dignity, romantic interest, simplicity, and directness, united with deep seriousness of style, creative imagination in dealing both with character and with nature. Chaucer wrote nothing so spiritual, though much of course more artistic and poetically valuable. In regard to this one matter of the interpretation of nature, it would be difficult to point out passages in the whole range of mediæval literature so fine and so remarkable as such descriptions as follow, of the northern winter scenes through which Gawayn passed on his weird mission.

That is what we find in the North, and such English feeling for the sublime is nothing new; it goes far back beyond these lines into the generations that seem misty as the air which their poets are wont to describe. Mr. Stopford Brooke's recent volume on Anglo-Saxon poetry makes it unnecessary to enter into the subject of old England's eye and ear for nature. Its accounts of the sympathy for the bold and fierce bear out what one might guess without knowledge—that the stern northern climate and familiarity with ocean life found large poetical expression. Luxury, southern artifice of sentiment and literary manner, had not invaded the rugged men of the North; they delight in describing elemental conflicts, and sometimes with studied elaboration. But if the pictures of the German and French poets are uniform in their mildness, those of these Anglo-Saxons are marked by their stormy aspect. We exchange spring for winter.

The same contrast holds true when we take up the Scandinavian poets; they show much feeling and power, but little susceptibility to the beauty of gentleness and grace. Mr. Brooke has remarked upon a similarity between the Tempest of Cynewulf and Shelley's Ode to the West Wind. A closer parallel may be observed in the Lines Among the Euganean Hills and the so-called Helgi poet; where we find a curiously identical image of rooks and hawks flying into the early morning with wings sparkling from the mists through which they have passed. The Norse poems are fond of screaming eagles, and ravens on the high branches.

That weird northern imagination too has vivid pictures, as the shields of the night-warriors shining in the waning moon. Nature also occasionally speaks to their personal moods, both by harmony and contrast. A poet's boat is swept fiercely by the tempest, as he dies with thoughts of his "linen-clad lady" in his heart. Another watches the sea dashing against the steep cliff, and thinks of his far-away love, in the control of his rival. Like the early English, they feel exultation in sea and storm. They know them intimately and their descriptions are spirited and faithful. They love them, but they love fiercely, terribly, as they do their women. Yet even as in their human passions, there are tranquillities. "They rode their steeds through dewy dales and dusky glens: the air, a sea of mist, shook as they passed by." We linger behind the storming horsemen for a moment, to look back as the silence steals in again through those dusky glens.

But to return to what is our real subject, the sentiment for nature in what we may term the polite literatures of mediævalism.

The reason for their feeling about winter is summed up in one of the Latin student songs, "the cold icy harshness of winter, its fierceness, and dull, miserable inactivity." It kept them within, when their interests and concerns were so mainly out-of-door. The poets are for ever singing in praise of spring, not so much because they loved it for itself, as because it brought them a life that was gay and easy. They seldom introduce touches of appreciation in their descriptions of the wintry season. Snow may have appeared lovely to them, but we observe Dante as doing something singular when he compares the talking of ladies, which was mingled with sighs and tears, to raindrops interspersed with beautiful snowflakes (cp. Inf., 14, 30; 24, 5), and one of the most memorable lines in his friend Guido Cavalcanti's poems is the one which mentions the dreamy sinking down of snow, falling when the air is windless. The old-time gentlemen apparently hugged the fire and drank of "their bugle-horn the wyn," and ate "brawn of the tusked swyn," when winter came, instead of watching the snow, through their little windows.

There are many phases of nature which it seems to us impossible not to notice and enjoy, of which we seldom find a trace. We should expect them in the large body of lyrical verse, and still more in the copious romance literature, which corresponds to the modern novel, both in incident and in the invitation to bits of passing local color. Clouds, for instance, aside from their glory of line and mass, and the grace and loveliness of their lighter forms, are curious and oddly suggestive, as Antony reminds Eros, and they are constantly before the eye; yet let any reader of mediæval poetry recall how imperceptible a part they play in it, even as plain facts of description. A line in one of the Latin songs expresses the feeling: their thought of clouds is, how delightful not to see them. Moonlight, too, is seldom dwelt on as poetical; the most romantic touch that comes to my mind in connection with it, is in Chrestien de Troyes, where it shines over the reconciliation of estranged lovers. Just as we find little notice of sunrise, sunset, clouds, and moon, we find little feeling for the stars. They are mentioned occasionally in a facile way, though scarcely ever with manifest sentiment. There are two or three passages, however, in Aucassin et Nicolette, that show the daintiest sort of sentiment for moonlight and stars. Here, for instance, where the lovers are confined for the sake of thwarting their love:

"'Twas in summer time, in the month of May, when the days are warm, long, and clear and the nights calm and cloudless. Nicolette was lying one night in her bed, and she saw the moon clearly shining through a window, and she heard the nightingale singing in the garden and she thought of Aucassin her lover, whom she loved so much."

So making a rope of the bedclothes she lets herself down into the garden.

"Then she caught her gown by one hand in front and by the other behind, and tucked it up on account of the dew which she saw was heavy on the grass, and she went down through the garden.... And the daisy-blossoms that she broke with the toes of her feet, that lay over on the small of her foot, were even black, by her feet and legs, so very white was the dear little girl. Along the streets she passed in the shadow, for the moon shone very clear, and she went on till she came to the tower where her lover was."

And again when the lover is in pursuit of her, after she had built herself a lodge in what she thought a safe retreat; he does not know where she is, and his thoughts are so absorbed that he falls and puts out his shoulder, and then creeps into her vacant shelter:

"And he looked through a break in the lodge and saw the stars in the sky, and he saw one brighter than the rest, and he began to say:

Yet even here there is nothing of the deeper sensibility to midnight sky, common alike to ancient and modern seriousness. Yet we find notes also of this. It is hard, for example, to think of giving up the genuineness of Dante's letter refusing to return to Florence, if only for the rare touch of everywhere seeing the sun and the stars (nonne solis astrorumque specula ubique conspiciam?), that bears out such evidences as the last word of each of the divine canticles and other fine proofs that he felt the high wonder and peace of the stars at night. Who can doubt that he did—that every deep nature always has? Yet the poetical evidence for it is curiously scanty throughout these centuries. It is a surprise to come upon such an exclamation as this of Freidank's: "The constellations sweep through heaven as if they were alive,—sun, moon, the bright stars,—there is nothing so wonderful!"

Indeed, I can recall no writer to whom the material world seems to suggest such inner sensations as he who called himself Freidank, the German free-thinker. He was not much of a poet, so far as his verses go, but his soul knew life as mystery. He also made one of the band of reformers three centuries before Luther. He saw the corruption of the Church, yet he revered the sacred institution; in spite of his faith, he was a Christian rationalist. Some of his sentences almost startle us, as words before their season: "If the Pope can forgive sins by indulgence, without repentance, people ought to stone him if he allows any one to go to hell." "God is constantly shaping new souls, which he gives to men—to be lost. How does the soul deserve God's wrath before it is born?" He is haunted by the secret of life: "How is the soul made? No one tells me that. If all souls could be in a hand, none could see or grasp their glory." "Earth and heaven are full of the Godhead. Hell would be empty, were God not there." "Whatever the sun touches, the sunlight keeps pure. However the priest may be, the mass is still pure. The mass and the sunshine will always be pure." "I never cease wondering how the soul is made. Whence it came, and whither it fares—the path is hidden. Nay, I know not who I am myself.[4] Lord God, grant me that I may know thee, and also myself." So when Freidank hears the roar of the wind, its invisible might reminds his skepticism that the soul may well be great, though none can see it: while he watches the wide mist which no hand can seize upon, a symbolism of the soul comes to him again. He is oppressed by the restless energy of being: "Our hearts beat unceasingly, our breaths are seldom still:—and then, our thoughts and dreams!" As he rides through spring, he observes the infinite diversity of nature:

"Many a man looks out at the stars, and tells what wonders take place there. Let him tell me now (something closer at hand), what is the weed in the garden. If he tells me that truly, I shall be more ready to believe the other." It is the germ of Tennyson's Flower in the Crannied Wall. Nature's commonplaces hold the heavenly mystery in a common bond with their own. Such subtle blendings of the outward and inward vision could come only from a refined and pensive spirit—such as his who sums up thus the discipline of life: "Many a time the lips must smile when the heart weeps."

One of the marked deficiencies of all these descriptions of nature is in the indefiniteness of the terms employed. In minute accuracy, Dante, to be sure, is one of the world's greatest masters; but elsewhere it is rarely that we come upon anything concrete or specific. It is not until centuries later, indeed, that, so far as nature goes, we find habitual composition "with the eye upon the object," but, as it seems, most mediæval poets never carried their observation beyond the barest general impressions. We do not expect Tennyson's "More black than ashbuds in the front of March," or Browning's eye for the fact that when "the leaf-buds on the vine are woolly," the red is about to turn gray. The outer world's "open secret" is not open enough to make us demand minute attention. But it is surprising that they did not more frequently record easy impressions, and in their inventions introduce definite details. The poetical effect of even apparently prosaic precision is at times imaginative, but the art of this was kept for the later romanticists.

There is a lyric, however (belonging, I believe, to the twelfth century), by a poet of northern France, and written as a satire on the love-romance literature of the age, which contains one or two happy instances of just this missing trait. So charming it is in itself that I have translated it as a whole, though it belongs to an essay on the lyrical romances, instead of on nature. What a light touch the unknown writer shows, what dainty fancy! Sir Thopas is hardly a parallel to this blending of poetry with humor, a humor too gracious to be derisive, whose genial satire sparkles and dances to meet its sister wave of sentiment and beauty, till they ripple together, and each seems to have absorbed the other. The opening stanza is the poet's introduction of himself, and from the olive we may draw an inference respecting his local associations:

Everything here is definite and concrete, and how delightful the picture all is. Such plastic art as the "rose-bushes three" is not unworthy of the great modern poets of whom its magic and romantic definiteness reminds us,—as the "five miles meandering of Alph, the sacred river," or the "kisses four" with which the pale loiterer shut the eyes of La Belle Dame sans Merci. The description of the nightingale on its high branches, too, is a noticeably accurate touch, as we compare it, for example, with Coleridge's nightingale descriptions.

The explanation for the usual vague and indefinite description is not found in saying that they could not describe minutely. We meet with abundant details of such material interests as embroideries or armor. There is artistic emotion in Villehardouin's account of the glorious sight of Constantinople, as it rose before the crusaders, just as distinctly as in Lord Byron's letter. But, to their simple eyes, nature not only failed to suggest associated fancies, like Shakespeare's

or Wordsworth's ash,

but they see natural objects as units, without lingering upon their parts. When we find, for example, a line that marks the jerky flight of a swallow, we are surprised at the specific touch; we look almost in vain for such landscape details as the colors of autumn. Neidhart von Reuenthal is marking his originality, when he speaks of the red tree-tops, falling down yellow.

The want of observation and the shallow sympathy with nature shown by most poets before Dante are much more surprising than their preference for placid effects. It is unusual, for instance, to meet such a suggestive note of association as in the stanza by the Frenchman Gaces Brulles:

This paraphrase, indeed, is unworthy of the charming simplicity of the original. Surely, when Matthew Arnold made his sweeping characterization of mediæval poetry as grotesque, he forgot what a straightforward evolution of narrative or of quiet sentiment, and what a transparent expression, we find in some of these minor poets. They are as direct and unadorned, as they are graceful. It is almost impossible to translate them without substituting for the fresh and delicate touch, some metaphysical warping of the idea, or some rhetorical consciousness in words. What for instance could be more elegantly remote from the grotesque than this literal translation of Brulles' expression of his sensibility to the song-birds of his home: "The birds of my country I have heard in Brittany; by their song I know well that in sweet Champagne I heard them of old."

We may sum up these outline statements to this effect.

The northern poets described storm, winter, the ocean, and kindred subjects, with considerable force and fulness. In the cultivated literatures to the south, natural description was mainly confined to the agreeable forms of beauty; the grand, awesome, and inspiring were scarcely felt, and the literal fact of their physical expression was hardly ever noticed. The exterior world was not made a subject of close observation, nor was its poetic availability realized as a setting for action, or as an interpreter of emotion.

The people of the north, through being habituated to severer weather, not merely as a fact of climate, but from their rougher, less politely organized habits of living, [we should especially observe their activity on the sea,] regarded the violent seasons and aspects of nature with the sympathetic acquiescence of custom. Moreover, this influence tended to develop sturdier and more rugged character, race-temperament obviously being in part a geographical result, which acts with the forces of social organization, especially those that affect the moral qualities, such as rude or luxurious living. This vigorous character was more susceptible to impressions of native power, as well as from association more interested in recalling them. Accordingly, we find the early northern poetry an anticipation of the seriousness of modern English literature, and, as well, of its unequalled recognition of physical symbolisms of the sublime. Where the northern force blended with more southern lightness and elegance, as it did in the Mabinogion, we find a deeper poetic sentiment; where it coincides with moral earnestness, we find such nature sensation as in the poetry of Sir Gawayn. But the literature of the Germans and their romance originals, aim at courtly levities; they artificialize sentiment and thought, as well as manner. The deeper and more spiritually sympathetic minds did not as a rule devote themselves to belles-lettres. The Church drew them into her sober service, and even though they wrote, the close theological faith was not favorable to their poetic expansion. Most of all, there was but little individualism, and any artistic sensation of our modern complex inner consciousness was still crude, even when it existed at all.

One point, however, should be observed in any inquiry into the reasons for the inadequateness of these ages' feeling for nature; that many latent sympathies may never have found a voice. Many through the centuries before our later ease of publication, may have felt the modern sensations, without ever thinking of putting them into words. In any new movement, of art as of practice, a great leader of expression is needed. Men are sheep to their leaders in various admirations, and many genuine æsthetic tastes are acquired, through stages of more or less unconscious imitation. Browning puts this in an acute sentence where Fra Lippo Lippi explains his usefulness as a painter:

There were few new departures, there was little originality, in the methods of mediæval literature. Descriptions of the physical world as a field of power and sublimity would have fallen dead on the ears of a public who had never dreamed that storm and cliffs were beautiful. What if Wordsworth had tried to support himself and win fame by singing at castles? Nor is it easy, though the taste has been established, to describe a sunset, or the sublimity of the Alps. We say to each other "How beautiful!" "How grand!" seldom more. Rare imagination and the tact of genius are necessary to tell what we really need to show. The sense of physical sublimity is complex. Its distinctive element is moral or spiritual emotion. For a full delineation it requires a more subtle, verbal repertory than those popular poets usually possessed. Yet these modifications no longer apply when we come to Dante, and superior as his interpretations are to his predecessors' we miss even in him, as we miss in the great poets for four hundred years afterwards, appreciation of the material world's sublimity.

Macaulay and others have said that it was not until man had become the master of nature that he learned to love its stern and violent aspects. But thunder storms, for example, are as dangerous now as they ever were, at least to a traveller. Still, Byron wrote of them with raptures amid the Pindus mountains as his predecessors did not.

Winter was scarcely colder or bleaker for mediæval poets than for Scottish peasants a century ago, yet Burns would sing as they could not:

Others have accounted for this change by the era of science, with its close scrutiny of the world, and its enthusiasm for physical knowledge. But the scientist masters the world as a reality where the poet sees it as a symbol. The two modern tendencies may be the result of a common cause—that recognition of complexity, and disposition to observe, which is a main fact in man's expansion.

A better explanation may be found, I believe, in modern refinement and ethical sensitiveness.

Side by side with the new appreciation of nature may be observed a steady growth in sensibility. Our modern moods of inward contemplation—we are famous for them—our modern zeal for humanity down to its lowest grades; nay, even our tenderness for the brutes, have been distinguishing marks of the poet guides under whom we have learned to appreciate our new physical symbolisms of human emotion. Modern melancholy, as well, a melancholy more subtle and thoughtful, more poetical too, than that of mediævalism, has touched men with its pensive fascination. Philosophical pantheism such as Wordsworth's or Tennyson's, feels deity in nature; the new Christianity incarnates divinity in universal man. Man is more than he used to be, his moods are deeper, his thought freer. He seeks more ardently than of old, because with less constraint, the mystery in whom he lives and moves and has his being. He no longer quails before the majesty and awe of its forever elusive presence. For he knows that though he cannot find it, it enfolds him with love and beauty, it cries back to his passion and pain in winter and storm; from the solemn mountains it reminds him of himself, an unconquerable partner of its own eternity.

If our guesses at a truth beneath the stories of widowed ladies rescued from bandits of the forest and recreant knights, or of lovely ladies rescued from worse than death by the capture of castles through the prowess of generous champions—stories which every one knows and incredulously likes—send us to a study of the times when they were composed, we find that the age, when stripped of romantic embellishments, in its actual life felt a sentiment for women unequalled by earlier times. We wonder what caused it. Can it have been the increase in the culture of the Virgin, that beautiful and beneficent phase of mediæval religion? In its larger development, this appears rather the parallel expression of some common influence, these adorations of the divine and human conceptions of woman seeming to be mutually impulsive, and drawn alike from some undetermined tendency of social and spiritual refinement. Or was it the Crusades? For a German essayist has suggested that we may count this increase of sentimentalism among their many influences upon western Europe; the beauty of the women and the more luxurious habits of the East, its more effeminate emotionalism, finding impressionable subjects in the hearts of those stranger knights lying, wakeful for home, beneath southern stars. Perhaps the conjecture is equally reasonable that the influence came from French poets who, as they travelled with the early Christian armies, caught such suggestions from snatches of oriental poetry. Yet it seems more natural to regard the growth of knightly sentiment toward ladies as the more delicate manifestation of a spontaneous increase of social personality, which was stimulated by that general motion in mind and heart which we observe in the progress of chivalric and crusadal life, and based, as we must not forget, upon that Teutonic character, whose ancient deference to woman is recorded by Tacitus side by side with his account of knighting youthful soldiers with spear and shield.

But, to waive the question of its origin, we find its main expression in the old society, in that protracted and conventional wooing which, we should remember, was not usually directed toward marriage. As gentlemen grew hyperbolical and fantastic in their professions of regard and devotion, feminine coquettishness and love of admiration naturally became fastidious and exacting. Ladies grew arbitrary and capricious, and began to demand substantial proofs of their lovers' concern for them. It became a trait of elegant culture for a lady to pose as inexorable, while still retaining her control over the wooer; while he, complaisant to the sentimental fashion, sighed in a cheerful melancholy, obeyed, adored, and waited. The mistress set tasks, often no trifles, which the loyal subject must perform—hard feats of arms, long and perilous journeys, abnegations of pride or comfort. When these were accomplished, he sometimes returned to receive a new test, involving a continued delay of his reward. These mediæval ladies were as pitiless as the mystic spiritual dictatress of Browning's Numpholeptos, to their devotees:

In the fourteenth century something of this romantic tyranny survived. We find Chaucer, for instance, in one of his early poems, mentioning in praise of his heroine that she did not impose dangerous expeditions to distant countries, or extravagant exploits upon her lover:

Extended probations, courtships long enough to satisfy Ruskin, were an established convention. Wolfram von Eschenbach, in the seventh book of Parzival, represents Obie as indignantly telling her royal lover, who has asked her to marry him after what seems to him a reasonable love-making, that if he had spent his days for five years, in hard service, under full armor, with distinction, and she had then said "Yes" to his desire, she would be yielding too soon.

Jane Austen, in the novel to which Trollope gave the palm of English fiction before Henry Esmond, has expressed in Mr. Collins's address to Elizabeth exactly the notion of the significance in a rejection, held by well-bred gentlemen six centuries earlier:

"'I am not now to learn,' replied Mr. Collins, with a formal wave of the hand, 'that it is usual with young ladies to reject the addresses of the man whom they secretly mean to accept, when he first applies for their favor; and that sometimes the refusal is repeated a second or even a third time. I am therefore by no means discouraged by what you have just said, and shall hope to lead you to the altar ere long.'"

But these exercises, as was suggested, were not usually directed toward the altar. A characteristic of the age is the relation, less or more sentimental, between a married knight and a lady not his wife; a relation rather expected of the former, and countenanced in the latter. This peculiar dual system of domestic and knightly love may be ascribed to various influences, such as the prosaic influence of early and dowered marriages, subject to parental arrangement, or the feudal life which for considerable periods kept gentlemen away from their own homes in residence in the larger castles, or the idleness of such a society, or again the popularity of love-lyrics and romance-recitals, which would tend to sentimentalize their audience. At any rate, it came to be a fashionable idea that the highest love was independent of marriage, and the most poetically inclined,—the troubadours and the minnesingers—were famous for their impassioned and submissive service of married ladies. It is from these poets' accounts of their own love-trials that we learn most about this phase of mediævalism, and in their contented sufferings we see once more that the joy of all romantic love is in the lover.

Although there is danger of generalizing too widely from literary indications, we may believe that chivalric society was appreciably marked by formal amatory disciplines. Was it all for nothing these ceremonial disciplines? Can it be that these Don Quixote prototypes, who trifled away their frivolous days in lady-worship so trivial, did anything to help the Prince to take Cinderella from the ashes? The ashes, then the fairy coach; first the drudge, then the sentimental plaything, then at last the friend. In those days, as perhaps always, the lover objectified himself in his love, to the extent of finding in her his own ideal feminine. The very fact that this self, which he probably called into conscious life only as he created it in another, represented the most refined side of his thought, as is shown in the old poets' recurrent epithets of "constant, chaste, good," etc., made the devotion a refining and dignifying experience, especially for the days when men and women had less in common than they have now. These lady-services, where the lover often was denied intimacy for a considerable time, kept up the illusion which the devotee himself may have half felt was sentimental and artificial. We may reply to little Peterkin that some good did come of it at last, even for the more commonplace of these servants of abstract womanhood. Even if the "visionary gleam" left no permanent illumination, the men were better for seeing it brightening through their darkness now and then. At its best, lady-loving gave the mediæval knights consideration for women and a measure of gentleness. If it only stimulated some to fight hard, they would have fought anyway, and the motive was a shade less brutal than a directly selfish one.

But such an eccentric social idea, especially when the poetic exhilaration of its earlier hours has passed by, was sure to bring out extravagant sentimentalists, whose romantic sensibility with no check from practical judgment, ran wild steeplechases of nonsense. Such, for example, was the Provençal poet, Peter Vidal, one of the most famous troubadours, who carried his romantic infatuations so far that he became crack-brained. The name of one of his ladies was Lupa, Mistress Wolf; and if he had contented himself with assuming a wolfish device for his coat-of-arms, as he did, and having himself called Mr. Wolf, he would have done nothing very peculiar, for that age. But it occurred to him that it would be a graceful symbol to wear a wolf's skin, and after he had procured one which quite covered him, he got down on all-fours, and trotted through the street; and all went charmingly until one day, while he was exhibiting himself in this fashion about his lady's estate, a pack of dogs was deceived by the metaphor, and the allegorical lover was badly bitten before rescue arrived.

But the most detailed example of mediæval gallantry is that presented in the work already mentioned, the autobiography of the thirteenth-century minnesinger, Ulrich von Liechtenstein. The poem is a prolix narrative of his amatory religion, extending through some sixteen thousand lines, and containing a large number of lyrics composed in the wooing of two ladies to whom he consecrated his literary and romantic life. We utterly tire of the commonplaces in which he praises them. We reflect that not a single specific incident is ever introduced to illustrate the inner character of either; the descriptions have no color, except in the heartlessness of the first beloved, whose virtue and humor alike Ulrich apparently misses. Yet this presumably undesigned caricature of the more poetic twelfth-century chivalric love gives important suggestions of the times, and Ulrich himself is a knight and a poet worth knowing.

The impression that his romance makes upon a modern reader is something like that of a beetle hovering above a lily. He played zany to the gentlemen of an early generation who had amused their leisurely lives by courtly lady-service; as he emulated their feats of sentimental gallantry, he stumbled and fell. The odd thing is that after each fall he called for his tables: "Meet it is I set it down." Undoubtedly many marvelled and admired, as they looked on: others marvelled and laughed. Perhaps he mistook the laughter for applause. It may be that the sound was lost in the applause of his own simple-minded complacency. But yet, though this gallant was born to a foolish horoscope, his life gained a good fortune denied multitudes who lived sensibly,—he saw the stars of his destiny, and he loved them. Their combination caused a silly career, yet individually they were admirable,—simplicity of nature, theoretical reverence for womanhood, patient love, regard for stately old usages. If defective eyesight makes a man fancy a burdock a rosebush, and if he tends and cherishes the absurd idealization,—at least, the man has a sentiment for roses.

The earliest fact which Ulrich has confided to us, is that in his childhood he used to ride about on sticks, in imitation of the knights, and while in that simple age he noticed that the poetry which people read, and the conversation of wise men which he overheard, kept declaring that no one could become a worthy man without serving unwaveringly good ladies, and that "no one was right happy unless he loved as dearly as his own life some one whose virtue made her fitly called a woman." Whereupon, he thought in his simplicity that since pure sweet women so ennoble men's lives, he, whatever happened, would always serve ladies. In such thoughts he grew up until his twelfth year, when he began a four or five years' term as page to a lady who was good, chaste, and gentle, complete in virtues, beautiful, and of high rank. She was destined to give Ulrich much trouble, and the lover's sweet solicitude began at once, as he started in his teens. For his constant attention found nothing in her but what was good and charming, and he feared—this boy of thirteen—that she might not care for him. His ups and downs of fortune are reported for us in the popular mediæval form (used for example by Map, and one as late as by Villon), of a dialogue between his heart and his body. Heart is hopeful, but Body has the better wit. Yet even if she is too high-born to notice him, he will always serve her late and early, and in the interim between his childish page-waiting, and the bold knighthood to be his when he grows up, he gathers pretty summer flowers, and carries them to her. When she took them in her white hand, he was happy.

As the time came near for him to leave her household, the youth grew emotional: when at table water was poured over those lovely white hands, he transformed her finger-glass into a tumbler. A German dry-as-dust has laughed at Ulrich for this.

But the tender little Teutonic blossom could unfold its youth no longer in the sunshine of its lady-desire. The stern father appeared, and transferred the lover, his "grief showing well the power of love," to the service of an Austrian Margrave. "My body departed, but my heart remained"; and Ulrich pauses for a moment to point out the strangeness of the paradox. "Whenever I rode or walked, my heart never left her; it saw her at all times, night and day."

His new master was a knightly gentleman, professedly a lady-servant, and the lessons that Ulrich had caught as a child from the conversation in his father's hall were reinforced by this Margrave Henry. He was taught the best style of riding, the refinements of address to ladies, and poetical composition, and assured that whoever would live worthily must be a lady's true subject. "It adorns a youth—sweet speech to women.... To succeed well with them, have sweet words with true deeds."

After four years of such instruction, his father's death called him home to inherit his property, and he spent the three years that followed by tourneying in the noviciate of knighthood. At Vienna, in 1222, during the great festival in celebration of the marriage of Leopold's daughter, where five thousand knights were present, and tourneying and other entertainments of chivalry were mingled with much dancing, Ulrich made one of the two hundred and fifty squires who received their spurs. But the occasion was otherwise memorable to him, for here he saw his lady again. She recognized him, and told one of his friends of her pleasure at seeing become a knight one who had been her page when a little fellow. The mere simple foolish thought that she would perhaps have him for her own knight, as he tells us, was sweet and good, and put him in high spirits. Indeed this was all the contentment which the blushing young knight desired:

"Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams?"

Ulrich did not wake from his to do anything so practical as to speak face to face with her, but gaily rode off to a summer of adventure in twelve tournaments, wherein he invariably fared well, thanks to his devotion.

German sentiment has always shown a butterfly's sensibility to winter and rough weather, and with the last of autumn, Ulrich's spirit grows heavy. He longs to see his lady, he knows that now he would speak to her. There are no tourneys to distract him, and in care of heart he rose, lay down, sat, and walked. As it chanced, a cousin of his knew this only lovely one, and the taxing office of a lover's confidante fell heavily upon her, and remained for some years. After beating about the bush with her for a while, he confessed the truth, only to receive point-blank advice to give up so hopeless an aspiration. Never! on the contrary she must help him in his perseverance by visiting the lady and presenting her with a copy of the verses which Ulrich has been composing for her as a confession of his love. His cousin consented, but her mission resulted in a scornful rejection of the suit, softened by compliments upon the poem. He was advised to abandon his quest, for the lady seriously objected to his mouth. "Nothing but grim death can drive me from her; I will serve her all my life," he exclaimed. But he felt that the criticism upon his mouth was a fair one, and he determined to pay attention to it.

Poor Ulrich, with so much sentiment, yet with such physical deficiencies; with such correct perception of the use of lips, yet having such uninviting ones of his own. In one of his songs he tells us: