From the first beginning of the Crusades the interest of the people was with the knight,—no longer with the priest. The chivalrous Emperors of the Hohenstaufen dynasty formed a new rallying point for all national sympathies. Their courts, and the castles of their vassals, offered a new and more genial home to the poets of Germany than the monasteries of Fulda and St. Gall. Poetry changed hands. The poets took their inspirations from real life, though they borrowed their models from the romantic cycles of Brittany and Provence. Middle High-German, the language of the Swabian court, became the language of poetry. The earliest compositions in that language continue for a while to bear the stamp of the clerical poetry of a former age. The first Middle High-German poems are written by a nun; and the poetical translation of the Books of Moses, the poem on Anno, Bishop of Cologne, and the “Chronicle of the Roman Emperors,” all continue to breathe the spirit of cloisters and cathedral towns. And when a new taste for chivalrous romances was awakened in Germany; when the stories of Arthur and his knights, of Charlemagne and his champions, of Achilles, Æneas, and Alexander, in their modern dress, were imported by French and Provençal knights, who, on their way to Jerusalem, came to stay at the castles of their German allies, the first poets who ventured to imitate these motley compositions were priests, not laymen. A few short extracts from Konrad’s “Roland” and Lamprecht’s “Alexander” are sufficient to mark this period of transition. Like Charlemagne, who had been changed into a legendary hero by French poets before he became again the subject of German poetry, another German worthy returned at the same time to his native home, though but slightly changed by his foreign travels, “Reinhard the Fox.” The influence of Provence and of Flanders is seen in every branch of German poetry at that time; and yet nothing can be more different than the same subject, as treated by French and German poets. The German Minnesänger in particular were far from being imitators of the Trouvères or Troubadours. There are a few solitary instances of lyric poems translated from Provençal into German;(5) as there is, on the other hand, one poem translated from German into Italian,(6) early in the thirteenth century. But the great mass of German lyrics are of purely German growth. Neither the Romans, nor the lineal descendants of the Romans, the Italians, the Provençals, the Spaniards, can claim that poetry as their own. It is Teutonic, purely Teutonic in its heart and soul, though its utterance, its rhyme and metre, its grace and imagery, have been touched by the more genial rays of the brilliant sun of a more southern sky. The same applies to the great romantic poems of that period. The first impulse came from abroad. The subjects were borrowed from a foreign source, and the earlier poems, such as Heinrich von Veldecke’s