When Homer described the pretty fright of Astyanax in his nurse's arms, amid the parting of Hector and Andromache; when Vergil made Damon recall the day when, as a little boy just able to reach up to the branches, he saw his mother and the child who was to be his fate gathering apples—the hyacinths of Theocritus were daintier—they struck two chords of feeling, one charming, the other deeper and richer, which have started vibrations whenever they have met a sympathetic reader ever since. Because we are susceptible to the poetry of childhood we are pleased to find that these ancient poets also cared for it. It adds a personal touch to our feeling for them. It gives us a thrill of the immortality of heart and its simplest, purest sentiment. There may be an element of the fictitious in our feeling about childhood. Heaven may not be about our infancy, those "sweet early days" may not have been "as long as twenty days are now"; and they may not have been the types of innocence, simplicity, the loveliness of the race taken at first hand from nature, which we fancy them. But there is something beyond a fallacy in this sentiment; it is in our purer and more refined moods that we are sensitive to it. Like a whiff of spring smoke, or woodsy odors, a reminder of our early life will sometimes throw us into a revery which is more than recollection. No one can write well about children without sensibility to youthful emotion and some love for family life. Whoever looks back with genial wistfulness upon his own early days, and enjoys renewing them in the playthings of his fancy, can hardly be without a vein of quiet refinement. When an age listens with pleasure to such sketches, it is not barren of the homely affections, nor uniformly given over to restless and unlawful passions. As one wanders through the poetry of the middle ages, one observes the frequency with which it mentions children.

These passages, judged absolutely, may not be remarkable for insight or tenderness, but in those days all emotional subjects were treated crudely. Yet they are often interesting for themselves, and they show a fact which many seem to question that the sentiments of simple family life were felt by poets and people. So much has been written by critics upon the worse side of the society of chivalry, that it is well to recognize this other aspect of its affections. The public has frequently been assured that those days knew nothing of true family sentiment. How much truth there is in the statement that fashionable love disregarded marriage, has been shown in a preceding essay. But on a priori grounds we should disbelieve that general society was permeated by artificial gallantry. Even were the testimony of lyrical lovers uniform, we must recollect how conventional all their love-poetry was; most poets composed on formal lines impersonally, in spite of their pronouns. One of the troubadours, indeed, denied that this was possible when the husband of his theme challenged him, in the lonely place where he was hunting, by his liege truth to tell him whether he had a lady love. "Sire," he replied, "how could I sing unless I loved?" But in most poems there was more business, or ambitious art, than nature. A large number of these poets impress us as having just as little emotional veracity in writing as had Cowley in The Mistress. Moreover, even if a school of poetry, not conventionalized, should treat romantic and sensational sentiment to the exclusion of domestic, it would prove nothing. What if cynical critics some centuries hence should give Mr. Coventry Patmore a place in their encyclopedias, simply on the ground that he was an exception to the nineteenth-century belief that love ended at the bridal altar? Possibly by that time love, poetry, and fiction may deal mainly with domestic emotions after marriage, and then our own romances will very likely appear strange.

From one point of view those centuries were too akin to undeveloped life to be prepared to represent it. Europe seven hundred years ago seems like a vast nursery abandoned by its governess. The people are like children of various ages and sizes, degrees of education, and innate sense of right and wrong. Children are impulsive, passionate, selfish, brutally inconsiderate; they are sometimes religious too. We find apparently sporadic susceptibility to isolation and prayer. They cry at trifles, and while their cheeks are still wet, they are smiling. Bright and simple things please them; they are fickle and impatient; they love lively music; when they are tired playing, nothing pleases them like a story—they listen intently, credulously. When spring comes they can no more help running and dancing over the grass, than sunbeams on a brook. The gentler sit in the meadow making posies, while the rougher are setting traps, and racing, and fighting: but sometimes the rough boys will come and play in the meadow, and be pleasant to the girls. All these traits of children apply to the mediÆval character, their barbarisms, their ethical inconsistencies, their delight in stories (no age has ever cared more for story telling), their love of play, their passion for spring, and the rest.

Undoubtedly the popular impression gives the period too little joyousness. Mercurial childhood has capacity for sudden pleasures even when life goes ill, and life frequently went very well even then. But the mystery and grace of motherhood and dawning life are likely to appeal to a calmer and more retrospective age. The seriousness that takes pleasure in contemplating childhood is more serene and pensive than the usual moods of an era undeveloped emotionally. So it would not be a matter for surprise if the literary remains of those days had left us mainly incidental references to children.

Of such plain facts we have many, such as, for instance, that the little ones were entertained with pet dogs, birds, and squirrels (apparently never with cats), mice harnessed to a toy wagon, clay or wooden images of animals, and tiny vessels after kitchen models, toy men, women, and children, tops, and marbles; that they played blind man's buff, and many games attended with songs. As early as the interesting Latin poem called Waltharius et Hiltgunde, which at least in a popular version Walther von der Vogelweide liked, we find the hero appealing to Hagen, by the memory of the boyish games with which they had whiled away their childhood, and over which they never had quarrelled.

We obtain considerable information about customs of education also; such as the attention paid to languages (a girl in a French romance is said to have understood fourteen tongues), and Isolde knew French and Latin as well as Irish. Boys were sent off on their travels early, going especially to Paris. Weinhold's quotation from Hugo von Trimberg illustrates the dangers that beset the pursuit of culture even then: "Many boys go to Paris; they learn little and spend much. But yet no doubt they see Paris."

When Sir Philip Sidney derided the contemporary drama's habit of carrying a play through a large part of the hero's lifetime, instead of restricting the action to a developed episode, he made a poor criticism, out of tune, as are other parts of his criticism, with the genius of Elizabethan poetry. But the passage is interesting as a reminder of the relation to that great literature of the romances which runs back through the middle ages to the later Greek writings. Such narrations as the Daphnis and Chloe, and the Aethiopica, introduce their central characters while they are still children, and whether through transmitted influence or independently, the same course is pursued by the most important romance poems of mediÆval France and Germany. To this practice we owe pleasant domestic scenes of many a hero's early life, and sometimes, indeed, a narration of early joys and sorrows of his parents' love. The Tristan of Gottfried von Strassburg, for example, begins well before the birth of its subject, with noteworthy romantic episodes. This brilliant poem's account of the early years of chivalry's typical fine gentleman illustrates the admiration paid to intellectual training at a time when polite society in general was not well educated. Tristan spent his first seven years under the care of his foster-mother, learning various lessons of good behavior; after that Rual li Foitenant provided a master, and sent him off to acquire foreign languages in their own lands, and "book-learning" as well. The luxurious temper of his chronicler stops for a long sigh at the hardship of such training, through the years when joyousness is at its best. So it is, he exclaims in his studied style, with many youth; when life is in its first bloom and freedom, away they are constrained to go from its free blossom. For seven years this young prince was constantly kept busy with the exercises of arms and horsemanship, in addition to his formal studies; he also learned hunting, and all courtly arts, especially music. Then he was called home to be prepared for his political career. The education of children was assisted by not a few treatises on manners and morals, such as Babees Books, as the old English called them. They are usually manuals of etiquette, mediÆval prototypes of such modern works as Don't. Chaucer's Prioress had evidently studied the sections on table proprieties, and her gentility, which was so tender-hearted, might well have been developed under the admonishments of the ethical passages which often accompanied them. For a tender age many of these precepts were depressing. One of the gravest and most mature of these works is called Der Winsbeke, with a sequel, Die Winsbekin, for girls, the advice of a twelfth-century Solomon, which moralizes certainly as well as most of its analogues. This stanza, for instance, shows a homely dignity:

These gnomic writings, running into a developed didacticism, are illustrated by the song of Walther von der Vogelweide on the restraint of eye, ear, and tongue. Whether this poet was the teacher of the young King Henry, as some have thought, or gained his experience in humbler ways, he evidently knew the trials of the pedagogue. "Oh, you self-willed boy," he cries, "too small to be put to work in the field and too big to whip, have your own way and go to sleep." As for flogging, this prince of the minnesingers took the side of the Matthew Feildes against the Boyers: "No one can switch a child into education; to those whom you can bring up well, a word is as good as a blow." Apropos of the teacher's view, we also find the pupil's feeling for his teacher recorded in that little poem of the English school-boy, who was late in the morning, and explained to the master that his mother told him to stop and milk the ducks. The boy recounts the details of what follows, and afterwards, instead of taking up his interrupted studies, he words out a day-dream in which the master is turned into a hare, his books into hounds, and the boy goes hunting.

There is a grain of humor, too, at least for the modern reader, in a much more sentimental child-play of the minnesinger Hadlaub. Though he mainly echoes the love singers who wrote a hundred years before him, one of the first songs in the collection of his poems raises a hope of something more than the ordinary, though this only leads us on to disappointment through the rest of his fifty-odd pieces. There is something very natural about this picture of the lover catching sight of his disdainful fair one playing with a little child. "She reached out her arms and caught it close to her, she took its face between her white hands, and pressed it to her lips and mouth and lovely cheek; ah, how deliciously she kissed it!" What did the child do? "Just what I should have done; threw its arms around her, and was so happy." When she let the little one go, the lover went after it and kissed it just where her lips had been, "and how that went to my heart!" Poor fellow! "I serve her since we both were children," and this is the nearest apparently that he ever came to the seals of love.

But instead of delaying over estrays, pleasant scraps like those left us by Heinrich von Morungen, for instance, one of the few minnesingers for whom one really cares, we may pass on to three or four more detailed examples from the thirteenth century, of household love and sympathy with the poetry of childhood. But first I will translate a simple sesame for opening again the early gates. The poet is known as the Wild Alexander, but his mood was gentle and gracious when this revery of his boyhood came upon him:

So he goes on to tell how their childhood took as a pleasure the hurts and stings that they received as they hunted for strawberries, and to recall the warnings against snakes that the herdsman sometimes shouted through the branches. Apart from its graceful manner, and the breezy freshness of its universal childhood, the poem's specific touches are unusual. "From the beeches to the firs," for instance, does not sound mediÆval aside from one's surprise that a German should have omitted the linden. We need not be as old as was Lamb in 1820, to look back with a touch of desire on the child, that other me, there in the background. Perhaps there is the glamour of sentiment about that familiar association of childhood with purity and moral grace. Yet the feeling appeals to us as true beyond mere beauty, and many may read with responsiveness these lines, hitherto unprinted, by one on whose lips, just parted for their song, silence laid her finger:

The spiritual subtlety of such a mood certainly is beyond the mediÆval poets, yet we find pleasant proofs of sensibility to the tender, unselfish nature of a loving child. Nowhere in such detail, perhaps, as in the most familiar of Middle High German poems, the Poor Henry, of Hartmann von Aue. The story is known in Longfellow's Golden Legend. This is not the place to discuss that poem, which contains some charming passages. The poet's treatment may be far from satisfactory, yet when he calls his original the most beautiful of mediÆval legends, he certainly shows a more satisfactory side of extreme estimate than does Goethe, in his curious fling at the poem (which we may notice he read in a modernized form). He says it gave him a "physico-Æsthetic pain," and adds that the notion of a fine girl sacrificing herself for a leper, affected him so that he felt himself poisoned by the book. This judgment was pronounced in Goethe's later life, and is consistent with his habitual want of sympathy with mediÆval romantic literature. It shows, moreover, a lack of historical adjustment, for the dreadful disease was so common in the twelfth century that its repulsiveness was blurred for Hartmann; yet he mentions it with the greatest reserve, though a description of its appearance could hardly be more painful than the famous conclusion of the De Rerum Natura. We are reminded of Goethe's visit to Assisi, interesting to him only as the situation of some remains of classical architecture.[10]

Hartmann von Aue ranks below his two great companions in German narrative poetry, for he is more of a translator than either Gottfried or Wolfram. His distinction is in his style; he has a very agreeable way of telling a story, and there is a quiet charm about his diction. "How clear and pure his crystal words are and always must be," is Gottfried's tribute. We come to feel a personal liking for him, through his unaffected interest in his characters, his unassuming ways and the tact by which he lightens or deepens his accentuation. We feel that he was a gentleman, and we do not wonder at the kind regard in which all his fellow poets held him. We like his refined moral seriousness and that calm temperament of which he speaks in Gregorius. The original for the Arme Heinrich is lost, but though his introduction claims for himself no merit beyond a careful selection out of the many books that he takes pains to tell us he was learned enough to read for himself, we are probably justified in feeling that he took his heart into partnership when he made the version, receiving from it touches that he did not find in the earlier treatment. To appreciate the poem we have to put ourselves into harmony with the wonder-loving, credulous, and mystically religious world of seven hundred years ago. Hartmann's simple earnestness and unobtrusive tenderness and piety constitute an ideal manner for the legend, and that ease of his soul which he hoped would come through the prayers of those who read the poem after his death, is perhaps equally well secured if he knows how some of his verses touch the sophisticated sense of to-day. He said that he was actuated in writing by the desire to soften hard hours in a way that would be to the honor of God, and by which he might make himself dear to others. He has succeeded. It is to the honor of God, and it wins the affection of others, when a poet leads his readers to a little well of pure unselfish love, hedged about by a child's religious faith.

The hero of the legend is a gentleman of position and feudal possessions, whose free and generous career is cut short by an incurable leprosy. It is in vain that he consults masters at Montpelier and Salerno, the famous seats of medicine; and the honor and affection in which a genial life had established him among his friends cannot save him from becoming a social outcast. He disposes of his wealth between the poor and the church, and retires to a fief whose tenant is willing to receive his suzerain as a guest. Here, on a little estate, away from all contact with the world, the gay lord resigns himself to the companionship of the farmer and his wife, whose gratitude for his kindness in the past distinguishes them among the multitude to whom his amiable disposition had made him a benefactor and friend. There were children in the family, the eldest a girl eight years old, when Henry came. It was because their hearts were loyal that her parents were kind, but she kept close by him because she loved to be there. She was always to be found at his feet, and his affectionate nature liked her companionship. He bought her a hand mirror, a riband for her hair, a belt and finger ring, and whatever children care for. These gifts attached her to him, yet the main secret of her love was the sweet spirit that God had given her. After three years, as the family were sitting together one day with their high-born guest, the farmer asked him why it was that he had given himself up so hopelessly to his disease, and Henry laid aside his reserve, and told for the first time about his visit to the great physician at Salerno. The only remedy was an impossible one. He might indeed be healed, but not unless a virgin made a voluntary offering of her life. Alas, God was his only physician.

The little girl, who was so inseparable a companion that he jestingly called her his bride, listened as she was holding her sick lord's feet in her lap. She could not get it out of her head (the old German idiom is better, "out of her heart") the rest of the day, and when at night she lay in her usual place at her father's and mother's feet, she felt so sorry for her dear lord that she cried, and the warm tears fell on her parents' feet, and woke them. When they asked her what was the matter, she said that she thought they ought to be sorry, too; for what would happen to them all if their lord should die? Some one else would own the farm, and no one could ever be as kind to them as he had been. They told her that was all true, but it could do no good to lament. "Dear child, do not grieve. We feel as badly as you do, but alas, we cannot help him." So they hushed her, but all the night and the next day she continued to be unhappy, and whatever else she was doing, she kept thinking of this. When she went to bed, she cried again, till finally she resolved to herself that if she lived till morning she would surely give her life for her lord. Straightway from that thought, she became light-hearted and happy, and felt free of all her cares, until it occurred to her that perhaps Henry and her parents would not permit her to make the sacrifice; whereupon the poor little girl burst out crying again, and wakened her parents, as she had done the night before. It was only with difficulty that they drew from her this simple speech: "My lord might get well in the way that he told us, and if you will only let me, I am what he needs for being cured. I am a maid, and rather than see him pass away, I will die for him." A long dialogue follows, in which the parents remonstrate with the daughter, who replies in a strain of spiritual elation. She appeals not only to her parents' worldly dependence on their master's goodness, but also to their desire for her own highest welfare. How much better for her to pass to eternal life in unstained childhood, only anticipating the death that must come some time, no less unwelcome late than soon. Her parents ceased to remonstrate, for they felt that the Holy Ghost was speaking through her, as they listened to the visionary cry. Instead of taking, two or three years hence, some neighbor for her husband, she will choose

"the Franklin, who is wooing me to a home where the plough runs easily, where there is all abundance, where horses and cattle never are lost, where no wailing children suffer, where it is neither too warm nor too cold, where the old will grow young, where is nor frost nor hunger, no kind of pain, but all joy without toil; thither will I haste me, and forsake a farm whose tillage, fire, hail, and flood destroy, so that one half-day ruins the labor of a year. Then let me go to our Lord Jesus Christ, whose grace is sure, and who loves me, poor as I am, like a queen."

Unlike our modern analysts of character, Hartmann does not stop to comment on the art of his delineation, and it is possible to miss the tact with which he keeps his heroine's renunciation consistent with a child's nature. Hartmann is not treating this character inartistically, as a mere instrument for religious culture. Earnest speech of a thoughtful parish priest; or phrases caught from the conversation of her lord touched by his sorrows, with the age's feeling de contemptu mundi, might have supplied her with some sentiments that seem beyond a child's invention, and children's emotions are sometimes precocious, especially in what seems a morbid religious development.

Those are the years of faith, credulous belief that burns with the white light of knowledge; a child's faith is a man's superstition. The peasant maid's imagination sees heaven and salvation a fact so infinitely desirable, that all dread of death was eliminated from the path of her love. The joyousness of her sacrifice, too, instead of being a romantic exaggeration, is far truer to life than a willingness touched with pain and hesitation could have been. In a noble dread, austerely controlled, lies Calvary's dignity and pathos. But her gratitude and impetuous love for what seems to her simple mind a superior and infinitely deserving object, reached that finest pitch of selfishness, where self-sacrifice becomes the demand of impulsive egotism. To an enthusiastic temperament love's passionate altruism may be consummate self-will. As the little maid came away from her deliverance, though she was happy in her lord's restoration, she was less happy than as she went.

For she did not have to die. In the tyranny of undeniable love, she broke down the opposition of her parents, and although Henry indeed hesitated, she pleaded so anxiously and drew such an eloquent sketch of the advantage and gladness death would be to her, and the value of his life compared with hers, that at last, genial and affectionate as he was, the temptation to live by the sacrifice of a mere child's life (and the feudal sense of possession ought not to be overlooked) was too strong to be resisted. Compare the scene with the one in Philaster, where Bellario wishes to offer herself for the man whom she loves with a hopeless earthly sentiment:

For her, continuance of life is only "a game that must be lost." But for the nameless German girl there is no pathos in living, beyond the thought of her master's death, and her sentiment was as childlike as when it began, while she was only eight years old. Her love is a flame that burns impatiently away from the taper that feeds it; for her generous passion is after all a beautiful devoted wilfulness. When her parents wept to lose her, and her lord wept at his own weak hesitation, she wept above them all and her tears won the day. She rode with Henry to Salerno, and was unhappy only because the journey was so long. The great physician took her hand, and led her alone into a barred and bolted room. Then he tried to frighten her and induce her to retract her consent, but she only laughed until she became afraid that he would not do his part, whereupon she broke out into an indignant scorn for his unmanly weakness. When he bade her undress, she did so without a blush; he bound her to his table, and took up his knife. He wished to render death easy (so he told himself), and taking a whetstone to make the knife sharper, he slowly whetted it—only as a pretext for delaying. The gentleman outside found himself restless. He listened, then he tried to look in and at last through a crevice in the wall he saw that "little bride" who had been his main companion and comfort during those three wretched years. By a fine touch of nature, the poet makes the sight of her perfect loveliness as she lay waiting for her celestial bridal, the force that broke the selfish charm which had enchained his manliness. He beat on the door, he called, and when no response came, he burst his way in. "The child is too lovely to die. For myself, God's will be done."

It was now that her trial came, as she wailed and beat wildly at her body, to force on him the life he was unwilling to take. She talked bitterly and peevishly, as if she had been cheated of heaven through his cruelty. But it was in vain, he dressed her again in the rich garments which he had procured for the sacrificial journey, and they set out on their return to their distant home, the sobbing girl and the leper. But as they rode along, the divine might that seemed so near to mediÆval faith was their companion, and touching the incurable disease, fulfilled love's miracle. Henry took their daughter back to the peasants, and gave her rich gifts, while he presented them with the land which they had farmed, and all its serfs and chattels. Then he went back to his estates, and to the welcome that the world was waiting to give him. By and by, when his people insisted that he should marry, he called an old-time conference about whom he should choose. There were numerous suggestions, but the advisers did not agree. He listened, and then telling them that unless they would approve his own choice, he should never marry, he stepped to the side of "the dear little wife" who had loved him as a leper.

The romance of Fleur et Blanchefleur, which goes back, though not in its present form, to the twelfth century, enjoyed such popularity that it was translated into almost every European tongue. Indeed, in some languages it is found in more than one version. The story tells of a Saracen prince, whose royal father interrupts the smooth course of his true love for a Christian girl. She was the daughter of a captive lady in the palace of the Queen, and the royal boy and the bond girl had been born on the same day. From his birth, the mother of Blanchefleur became Fleur's nurse; the pagan law required that he must be suckled by a heathen, but in all other ways the infants were treated like twins. They slept in one cradle, and when they could eat and drink they were given the same food. Thus they grew up together, until they were five years old, when the King, seeing his child as fine and promising a boy as could be found in any land, decided that it was time for him to begin his education. He selected a master, but Fleur, when he was bidden to study, burst into tears and cried, "Sire, what will Blanchefleur do? Who will teach her? I never can learn without her." The King answered that since he loved her so, Blanchefleur should go with him to school.

"So they went and came together, and the joy of their love was still uninterrupted. It was a wonder to see how each of the two studied for each; neither learned anything without straightway telling the other. At nature's earliest, all their concern was love; they were quick in learning and well they remembered. Pagan books that spake of love they read together with delight; these hastened them along in the understanding and joy of love. On their way home from school, they would put their arms about each other, and kiss. In the King's garden, bright with all plants and flowers of various hues, they went to play every morning, and to eat their dinner; and after they had eaten, they listened to the birds singing in the trees above them, and then they went their way back to school, and a happy walk they found it. When they were again at school they took their ivory tablets, and you might have seen them writing letters and verses of love, in the wax. Deftly with their gold and silver styles they made letters and greeting of love, of the songs of birds and of flowers. This was all they cared for. In five years and fifteen days, they both had learned to write neatly on parchment, and to talk in Latin so well that no one could understand."

When we follow the poem along, we find in the different versions many familiar romance expedients, conventional incidents of the pathetic, exciting, and marvellous, but the charm is in the unwavering love of these twins, who from the hour of birth breathed together, even in their sleep, yet no kin to each other, and blending brotherhood and sisterhood with the other love of man and woman in perfection, since for neither they knew the beginning. In this way the mediÆval romance is even more ideal than Beaumont's Triumph of Love, where Gerard and Violante passed from the sentiment of childhood "as innocently as the first lovers ere they fell."

"Gerard's and my affection began," the heroine tells Ferdinand,

In the early stages of Fleur's love-trials his parents attempted to persuade him that Blanchefleur was dead, and to give confirmation to their assertions they caused a superb tomb to be constructed, in a style that is of considerable interest in the study of literary origins from its obviously Oriental tone. Without delaying for its rich and curious Eastern details, we may yet notice the sentiment in the figures of the boy and girl that were placed upon it. "Never were seen images of fairer children, or more like to the lovers. The image of Blanchefleur holds a flower before Fleur, before her lover holds the fair one a rose of fine bright gold; and before her, Fleur holds a blanched golden fleur-de-lis. Close by each other they sit, a sweet look on their faces." A mechanical device is so contrived that when the wind blew and touched the children they embraced and kissed, and by necromancy they spoke to each other as in their childhood, and thus said Fleur to Blanchefleur: "Kiss me, sweet," and kissing him, she replied: "I love you more than all the world."

The story of Fleur and Blanchefleur was so popular that they became identified with the characters of another romance, and were sung of as the parents of Berte-as-graus-pies, the heroine of an attractive legend, and the mythical mother of Charlemagne. In the poem that relates her misfortunes after she has been sent from Hungary to France as the wife of Pepin, we find a suggestion of the depth of sentiment that was always associated with her legendary parents. She has been in France almost nine years without their having heard from her, and Blanchefleur determines to undertake a journey to see her child again before she dies. The King, without opposing her desire, expresses a half remonstrance that we may add to the other proofs in mediÆval poetry, that true love in our modern sense was familiar throughout those eras: "Oh, my lady, how shall we be able to live so long without each other?" Let us believe that in the Utopia where these lovers who loved from their birth resided, they found, after their own sharp trials and the trials of their daughter were safely over, a serene old age, out of which they passed unconsciously some night, sleeping themselves away in each other's arms.

This love between boy and girl was attractive to the old narrative poets. The greatest of them all touched the soul of young romance when he said of Sigune and Schionatulander, "Alas, they are still too young for such pain, yet 'tis the love of youth which lasts." Wolfram gives us pretty touches of childhood as far back as the nursery; like that of a mother and her ladies playing over the new-born baby, or of children learning to stand by taking hold of chairs, and creeping over the floor to reach them, or of Sigune's care to take her box of dolls with her when she went away. "Whoever saw this little girl thought her a glimpse of May among the dewy flowers." As she grew older, too, he describes her, assuming the airs of a young lady. "When her breasts were rounding and her light wavy hair began to turn dark, she grew more proud and dignified, though always keeping her womanlike sweetness." The story of her love with Schionatulander has delightful stanzas; their long love-pleading dialogue is much truer than most of the minnesingers' work in its restraint and in the girl's coy sweetness. She is an earlier Dorigen as she watches for the beloved who does not come, wasting many an evening at the window gazing over the fields, or climbing to the housetop to look. But what distinguishes the author of the Titurel above his fellow-poets is his sentiment for something more than romance. Children are dear to him, and the wife is dearer. His idea of love consists no more in Dante's platonic mysticism than in passion and inconstancy. Without transcendentalism its dominant tone is spiritual. Compare an earlier lover's cry in the loveliest of French romances: "What is there in heaven for me? I will never go there without Nicolette, my sweet darling, whom I love so much. It is to hell that fine gentlemen go and pretty, well-bred ladies who love." Compare that Parisian type of feeling with this of Wolfram: "Love between man and woman has its house on earth, and its pure guidance leads us to God and heaven. This love is everywhere save in hell!" To such a poet we naturally turn for the deepest mediÆval note in the treatment of childhood, and we do not listen in vain.

"What a difference there is between women," Wolfram exclaims. It seems to him the way of modern womanhood to be disloyal, worldly, selfish, like men: but in the days of which he writes in his chief poem there was a lady Herzeloide, to whom after her husband's death in the wars, the sun was a cloud, the world's joy lost, night and day alike, who for heavenly riches chose earthly poverty, and leaving her estates went with her retainers far into the unreclaimed forest to bring up her infant safe from the strife and wiles of men. This only heritage of her lost lord was the boy Parzival. She trusted that by hiding him away from all knowledge of the world, she might always keep him her own. She exacted an oath from her servants that they would never let him hear of knights and knighthood, and while they cleared farming land in the heart of the woods, she cared for the child. It was a desolate place, but she was not looking for meadows and flowers; she gave no thought to wreaths, whether red or yellow.[11]

The child grew into boyhood, and was indulged in making bows and arrows. As he played in the woods, he shot some of the birds. But after he saw them dead, he remembered how they had sung, and he cried. Every morning he went to a stream to bathe. There was nothing to trouble him, except the singing of the birds over his head: but that was so sweet that his breast grew strained with feeling; and he ran to his mother in tears. She asked what ailed him, but "like children even now it may be," he could not tell her. But she kept the riddle in her heart, and one day she found him gazing up at the trees listening to the birds, and she saw how his breast heaved as they sang. It seemed to her that she hated them, she did not know why. She wanted to stop their singing, and bade her farm hands snare and kill them. But the birds were too quick; most of them remained and kept on singing. The boy asked his mother what harm the birds did, and if the war upon them might not cease. She kissed his lips:

"Why am I opposing highest God? Shall the birds lose their happiness because of me?"

"Nay, mother, what is God?"

"My son, He is brighter than the day; He took upon himself the likeness of man. When trouble comes upon thee, pray to him: his faithfulness upholds the world. The Devil is darkness; turn thy thoughts from him, and from unbelief."

This passage is Wolfram's invention; the brilliant Gallic poet whose romance he followed could not have contrived it. This sympathy with nature belongs to our later era; it seems less strange to meet it in Keats, when the boy Apollo wanders out alone in the morning twilight:

One recalls nothing in the two centuries which Wolfram touches that equals this picture of the mother watching her child's baptism with the sad and precious gift of soul, as he stands gazing upward in his forest trance, or listening to his dawning perplexities, or teaching him his first religious lesson, or jealous of the birds, because his dreamy love for them dimly warned her of a mysterious growing soul that would not remain within her simple call. Those lines in the Princess of the faith in womankind and the trust in all things high, that come easy to the son of a good mother, certainly are appropriate to Parzival, whose faith held true and simple through his whole career as the foremost knight of chivalric legend, living for a spiritual ideal, unseduced by beauty and the ways of courts from loyalty to his first wedlock:

The description of Parzival's meeting with the knights, his mistaking them in their bright armor for angels, and his eagerness to make his way to Arthur's court are narrated by Chrestien with his own excellent vivacity, and here Wolfram only follows.

The Welsh version of the story in the Mabinogi of Peredur, though disappointing, contains a naÏve sketch of the boy's rustic attempt to imitate the knight's trappings. But for the full tenderness of his mother's parting as he goes out from home to the fierce world we must turn again to the German.[12]

She kisses him, and as he rides away "runs a few steps after him" till he has galloped out of sight and then she closes forever the eyes whose light of motherhood shone like a star above the sea, over those tumultuous years.

All through these centuries there are poems to the Virgin, especially in Latin, which manifest similar sensibility to infancy and motherhood. One of the most pleasing belongs to England, and is written in the commixture of Latin and the modern tongue, which occasionally produces quaintly pretty effects. The glorified Christ summons his mother, by the memory of their kisses when she calmed him in sweet song, to come and be crowned. "Pulcra ut luna"—lovely as moonlight—"veni coronaberis."

But perhaps the most delicate of all such sketches comes from an unexpected source. A young lawyer in the town of Todi, whose early life had combined pleasure with sufficient study to gain the doctorate, was turned aside from a prosperous public career by the tragical loss of his bride. Matthew Arnold has given a symbolism to the story of her death in the sonnet beginning:

The sorrow struck deep, even to the point of partial mania; the gay young man forsook the world and devoted years to seclusion and religious culture. Later in 1278, he entered the order of the Minorites, and ranks as one of their delirious enthusiasts, a mystic poet, a reckless satirist of evils in high places. His fanatic asceticism made him glory in bodily torments and the world's scorn. The nickname, Jacapone, he carried proudly, and even the harshness of Boniface VIII. could not quell his zest for martyrdom. We should scarcely look to him for sympathy with the sweet gaieties of the nursery, yet this little sketch of the Virgin's life with Christ, the child, came from the same hand that wrote the sorrows of the Stabat Mater.

The almost incoherent repetition of the word "Love," in one of his poems, is suggestive of the man; despair for human love led to his half-crazed absorption in the divine. Very sweetly sounds this sacred meditation's echo of his recollection of the nights of his own childhood, of which he has told, when his mother, as she waked, would make a light and come and lean over his bed, till sometimes his eyes would open to see her watching him there. His father did not spare the rod for the careless boy, nor in later years did the father of his soul; but the divine motherhood of memory and of present faith bent with yearning eyes, we may be sure, over his anxious sleep in prison or in the ascetic cell.

But it was only the greatest of all these poets who could leave us the lovely image of the new-born soul that comes forth in its simplicity from the hand that loves it before its birth, playing like a young girl who weeps and smiles. Yet Dante's principal sensation about childhood is its helplessness, and the mother's eyes, which throw its aureole about infancy, do not seem to have held their tenderest meaning for him. He would never have gone beyond the original ten lines of

But he gives beauty to the child's frightened eyes when they meet its mother's, and certainly the vision, whether real or imagined, toward the close of the Vita Nuova will please forever. This straying love is recalled to its old faithfulness by "the strong imagination" of a little figure that is habited in red, just as it had appeared to him when, perhaps in Folco's Florentine garden, the boy not quite nine fell in love with the girl of eight.

Perhaps Boccaccio's story of the falcon is too familiar to quote, though it illustrates domestic love too well to be unmentioned. One hardly can choose the best of its touches—the bright account of the boy running over the fields with his mother's old-time lover, as he hawked, always eying with a boy's eagerness for ownership the famous falcon, the only remnant of Frederick's gay and wealthy life, which he had lost for the unsuccessful love; or the picture of the mother again and again begging the child, as he lay ill, to tell her something which he desired, so that she might obtain it for him; until his feverish imagination persuaded him that to have the wonderful falcon would make him well again; or our thought of the impoverished gentleman, whose devotion had lasted under the years of exile on his little farm, his hope departed, who when suddenly visited by his widowed love, and finding nothing in the larder, nor money, nor even anything valuable enough for a pledge to secure some entertainment for her, desperately wrung the neck of his precious bird; or the delicate hesitation and awkwardness of the lady when she came to explain her errand, and the struggle, before love for her child bent both pride and pity; or the lover's broken heart when he found that his excess of devotion had cost him his only opportunity of pleasing her. The whole may be read in a little play of Tennyson's later years, or among the Tales of a Wayside Inn; but it is much better to read it in the narrative of the Certaldesian. Tuscany has sent us down no tenderer story.