For EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage. Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & Co. Single Numbers of THE LIVING AGE, 18 cents. see, And, thro' vain longings, pass to blank despair." O brother, treading ever-darkening ways, O sister, whelmed in ever-deepening care, Would God we might unfold before your gaze Some vision of the pure, and true, and fair! Better to know, tho' sadder things be known, Better to see, tho' tears half blind the sight, Than thraldom to the sense, and heart of stone, And horrible contentment with the night. Oh! bring we then all sweet and gracious things To touch the lives that lie so chill and drear, That they may dream of some diviner sphere, Whence each soft ray of love and beauty springs. ing? Into the air, the viewless air, To be lost there, There am I blowing. Clear wave, swift wave, where art thou flow ing? Unto the sea, the boundless sea, To be whelmed there, There am I flowing. Young life, swift life, where art thou going? Down to the grave, the loathsome grave, To moulder there, There am I going. MRS. KEMBLE From The Contemporary Review. shadeless; the replacing of the long si THE OUTDOOR POETRY OF THE MIDDLE lence by the endless twitter and trill of AGES AND THE RENAISSANCE. I. alone birds, endless in its way as is the sea, twitter and trill on every side, depths and and faintness, a sea of bird song; and depths of it, of every degree of distance vation to all the earth and to man's own along with this the sense of infinite renoheart. Of all nature's effects this one alone finds a response in mediæval poetry. goes sparkling to the head; and it Spring, spring, endless spring-for three long centuries throughout the world a dreary green monotony of spring all over France, Provence, Italy, Spain, Germany, England; spring, spring, nothing but spring, even in the mysterious countries governed by the Grail king, by the Fairy Morgana, by Queen Proserpine, by Prester John; nay, in the new Jerusalem, in A GREAT difference must naturally exist between what was felt and written about the country and the seasons by an ancient, by a man of the sixteenth century, and by a contemporary of our own: a difference, however, solely of mode; for we feel sure that of the three men each would find something to delight himself and wherewith to delight others among the elm-bounded English meadows, the flat corn-fields of central France, the vine and olive yards of Italy - wherever, in short, he might find himself face to face and, so to speak, hand in hand with nature. But about the man of the Middle Ages (unless, perhaps, in Italy, where the whole Middle Ages were merely an earlier Renaissance) we could have no such assurance; nay, we might be persuaded that, however great his genius, be he even a Gottfried draught of water in the desert. The von Strassburg, or a Walther von der Vogelweide, or the unknown Frenchman who has left us “Aucassin et Nicolette,” he would bring back impressions only of two things, authorized and consecrated by the poetic routine of his contemporaries - of spring and of the woods. There is nothing more characteristic of mediæval poetry than this limitation. Of autumn, of winter, of the standing corn, the ripening fruit of summer, of all these things so dear to the ancients and to all men of modern times, the Middle Ages seem to know nothing. The autumn har vests, the mists and wondrous autumnal transfiguration of the humblest tree, or bracken, or bush; the white and glittering splendor of winter, and its cosy life by the kingdom of Heaven itself, nothing but spring; till one longs for a bare twig, for a yellow leaf, for a frozen gutter, as for a green fields and meadows enamelled with painted flowers, how one detests them! how one would rejoice to see them well Sprinkled with frost or burnt up to brown which warble through every sonnet, canin the dry days! the birds, the birds zone, sirventes, glosa, dance lay, roundelay, virelay, rondel, ballade, and whatsoever else it may be called, - how one wishes them silent forever, or their twitter, the tarantarantandei of the eternal German nightingale especially, drowned by a good howling wind! After any persistent study of medieval poetry, one's feeling towards spring is just similar to that of the morbid creature in Schubert's "Mül lerin," who would not stir from home for the dreadful, dreadful greenness, which he would fain bleach with tears, all around. Ich möchte ziehn in die Welt hinaus, hinaus in die weite Welt, Wenn's nur so grün, so grün nicht wär da draussen in Wald und Feld. hearth or stove; the drowsiness of summer, its suddenly inspired wish for shade and dew and water, all this left them stolid. To move them was required the feeling of spring, the strongest, most complete and stirring impression which, in our tem- Moreover, this mediæval spring is the perate climates, can be given by nature. spring neither of the shepherd, nor of the The whole pleasurableness of warm air, farmer, nor of any man to whom spring clear, moist sky, the surprise of the shim- brings work and anxiety and hope of gain; mer of pale green, the yellowing blossom it is a mere vague spring of gentle-folk, or on treetops, the first flicker of faint shad- at all events of well-to-do burgesses, takow where all has been uniform, colorless, ing their pleasure on the lawns of castle parks, or the green holiday places close to the city, much as we see them in the first part of "Faust;' a sweet, but monotonous charm of grass beneath green lime-tree, or in the south the elm or plane, under which are seated the poet and the fiddler, playing and singing for the young women, their hair woven with chaplets of fresh flowers, dancing upon the sward. And poet after poet, Provençal, Italian, and German, Bernard and Armand, Nithart and Ulrich, and even the austere singer of the Holy Grail, Wolfram, pouring out verse after verse of the songs in praise of spring which they make even as girls wind their garlands: songs of quaint and graceful ever-changing rhythm, now slowly circling, now bounding along, now stamping out the measure like the feet of the dancers, now winding and twining as wind and twine their arms in the long-linked mazes; while the few and ever-repeated ideas, the old, stale platitudes of praise of woman, love pains, joys of dancing, pleasures of spring (spring, always spring, eternal, everlasting spring), seem languidly to follow the life and movement of the mere metre. Poets, these German, Provençal, and French, essentially (if we venture to speak heresy) not of ideas or emotions, but of metre, of rhythm and rhyme; with just the minimum of necessary thought, perpetually presented afresh just as the words, often and often repeated and broken up and new combined, of a piece of music poetry which is in truth a sort of music, dance or dirge, or hymn music as the case may be, more than anything else. As it is in mediæval poetry with the seasons, so it is likewise with the country and its occupations: as there is only spring, so there is only the forest. Of the forest, medieval poetry has indeed much to say; more perhaps, and more familiar with its pleasures, than antiquity. There is the memorable forest where the heroes of the Niebelungen go to hunt, followed by their wagons of provisions and wine; where Siegfried overpowers the bear, and returns to his laughing comrades with the huge thing chained to his saddle: where, in that clear space which we see so distinctly, a lawn on to which the blue-black firs are encroaching, Siegfried stoops to drink of the spring beneath the lime-tree, and Hagen drives his boar spear straight through the Nieblung's back. There is the thick wood, all a golden haze through the young green, and with an atmosphere of birds' song, where King Mark discovers Tristram and Yseult in the cave, the deceitful sword between them, as Gottfried von Strassburg relates with wonderful luscious charm. The forest, also, more bleak and austere, where the four outlawed sons of Aymon live upon roots and wild animals, where they build their castle by the Meuse. Further, and most lovely of all, the forest in which Nicolette makes herself a hut of branches, bracken, and flowers, through which the stars peep down on her whiteness as she dreams of her lord Aucassin. The forest where Huon meets Oberon; and Guy de Lusignan, the good snake-lady; and Parzival finds on the snow the feathers and the drops of blood which throw him into his long day-dream; and Owen discovers the tomb of Merlin; the forest, in short, which extends its interminable glades and serried masses of trunks and arches of green from one end to the other of medieval poetry. It is very beautiful, this forest of the Middle Ages; but it is monotonous, melancholy, and has a terrible eeriness in its endlessness. For there is nothing else. There are no meadows where the cows lie lazily, no fields where the red and purple kerchiefs of the reapers overtop the high corn; no orchards, no hayfields; nothing like those hill slopes where the wild herbs encroach upon the vines and the goats of Corydon and Damoetas require to be kept from mischief; where, a little lower down, the Athenian shopkeeper of Aristophanes goes daily to look whether yesterday's hard figs may not have ripened, or the vine wreaths pruned last week grown too lushly. Nor anything of the sort of those Umbrian meadows, where Virgil himself will stop and watch the white bullocks splashing slowly into the shallow, sedgy Clitumnus; still less like those hamlets in the cornfields through which Propertius would stroll, following the jolting osier wagon, or the procession with garlands and lights | all their asceticism, were both as gross to Pales or to the ochre-stained garden and as æsthetic in sensualism as antiquity god. Nothing of all this: there are no cultivated spots in mediæval poetry; the city only, and the castle, and the endless, all-encompassing forest. Had they no eyes, then, these poets of the Middle Ages, that they could see, among all the things of nature, only those few which had been seen by their predecessors? At first one feels tempted to think so, till the recollection of many vivid touches in spring and forest description persuades one that, enormous as was the sway of tradition among these men, they were not all of them, nor always, repeating mere conventional platitudes. This singular limitation in the medieval perceptions of nature a limitation so important as almost to make it appear as if the Middle Ages had not perceived nature at all-is most frequently attributed to the prevalence of asceticism, which, according to some critics, made all mediæval men into so many repetitions of Bernard of Clairvaux, of whom it is written that, being asked his opinion of Lake Leman, he answered with surprise that, during his journey from Geneva to the Rhone valley, he had remarked no lake whatever, so absorbed had he been in spiritual meditations. But the predominance of asceticism has been grossly exaggerated. It was a state of moral tension which could not exist uninterruptedly, and could exist only in the classes for whom poetry was not written. The mischief done by asceticism was the warping of the moral nature of men, not of their æsthetic feelings; it had no influence upon the vast numbers, the men and women who relished the profane and obscene fleshliness and buffoonery of stage plays and fabliaux, and those who savored the delicate and exquisite immoralities of courtly poetry. Indeed, the presence of whole classes of writings, of which such things as Boccaccio's tales, "The Wife of Bath," and Villon's “Ballades," on the one hand, and the songs of the troubadours, the poem of Gottfried, and the romance or rather novel of "Flamenca," are respectively but the most conspicuous examples, ought to prove only too clearly that the Middle Ages, for had been before them. We must, therefore, seek elsewhere than in asceticism, necessarily limited, and excluding the poetry-reading public, for an explanation of this peculiarity of medieval poetry. And we shall find it, I think, in that which during the Middle Ages could, because it was an all-regulating social condition, really create universal habits of thought and feeling, namely, feudalism. A moral condition like asceticism can leave unbiassed all such minds as are incapable of feeling it; but a social institution like feudalism walls in the life of every individual, and forces his intellectual movements into given paths; nor is there any escape, excepting in places where, as in Italy and in the free towns of the north, the feudal conditions are wholly or partially unknown. To feudalism, therefore, would I ascribe this, which appears at first so purely æsthetic, as opposed to social, a characteristic of the Middle Ages. Ever since Schiller, in his “Gods of Greece," spoke for the first time of undivinized nature (die entgötterte Natur), it has been the fashion among certain critics to fall foul of Christianity for having robbed the fields and woods of their gods, and reduced to mere manured clods the things which had been held sacred by antiquity. Desecrated in those long mediæval centuries nature may truly have been, but not by the holy water of Christian priests. Desecrated because out of the fields and meadows was driven a divinity greater than Pales or Vertumnus or mighty Pan, the divinity called Man. For in the terrible times when civilization was at its lowest, the things of the world had been newly allotted; and by this new allotment, man the man who thinks and loves and hopes and strives, man who fights and sings was shut out from the fields and meadows, forbidden the labor, nay, almost the sight, of the earth; and to the tending of kine, and sowing of crops, to all those occupations which antiquity had associated with piety and righteousness, had deemed worthy of the gods themselves, was assigned, or rather condemned, a creature whom every advancing |