Hartman von Aue and Walther von der Vogelweide, as much of blame as of praise. But as historians, we cannot value them too highly. If we measure them with the poets that preceded and those that followed them, they tower above all like giants. From the deep marks which they left behind, we discover that they were men of creative genius, men who had looked at life with their own eyes, and were able to express what they had seen and thought and felt in a language which fascinated their contemporaries, and which even now holds its charm over all who can bring themselves to study their works in the same spirit in which they read the tragedies of Æschylus, or the “Divina Commedia” of Dante. But the heyday of German chivalry and chivalrous poetry was of short duration. Toward the end of the thirteenth century we begin to feel that the age is no longer aspiring, and hoping, and growing. The world assumes a different aspect. Its youth and vigor seem spent; and the children of a new generation begin to be wiser and sadder than their fathers. The Crusades languish. Their object, like the object of many a youthful hope, has proved unattainable. The Knights no longer take the Cross “because God wills it;” but because the Pope commands a Crusade, bargains for subsidies, and the Emperor cannot decline his commands. Walther von der Vogelweide already is most bitter in his attacks on Rome. Walther was the friend of Frederick II. (1215-50), an Emperor who reminds us, in several respects, of his namesake of Prussia. He was a sovereign of literary tastes,—himself a poet and a philosopher. Harassed by the Pope, he retaliated most fiercely, and was at last accused of a design to extirpate the Christian religion. The ban was published against him, and his own son rose in rebellion. Germany remained faithful to her Emperor, and the Emperor was successful against his son. But he soon died in disappointment and despair. With him the star of the Swabian dynasty had set, and the sweet sounds of the Swabian lyre died away with the last breath of Corradino, the last of the Hohenstaufen, on the scaffold at Naples, in 1268. Germany was breaking down under heavy burdens. It was visited by the papal interdict, by famine, by pestilence. Sometimes there was no Emperor, sometimes there were two or three. Rebellion could not be kept under, nor could crime be punished. The only law was the “Law of the Fist.” The Church was deeply demoralized. Who was to listen to romantic poetry? There was no lack of poets or of poetry. Rudolf von Ems, a poet called Der Stricker, and Konrad von Würzburg, all of them living in the middle of the thirteenth century, were more fertile than Hartmann von Aue and Gottfried von Strassburg. They complain, however, that no one took notice of them, and they are evidently conscious themselves of their inferiority. Lyric poetry continued to flourish for a time, but it degenerated into an unworthy idolatry of ladies, and affected sentimentality. There is but one