"Ach herzen Trut, genaden vol, Ach wol u je mer mere wol, Ein suez in Arzeniê Ach herzen bruch, ach herzen not. Ach Rose rot, Ach rose wandels vrie! Ach jugend in jugent, ach jugender Muot, Ach bluejender herzen Minne!" And so on for pages; the sort of words which poor Brangwain may have overheard on the calm sea, when the terrible knowledge rushed cold to her heart that Tristram and Yseult had drained the fatal potion. All this is foolish and unwholesome enough, just twice as much so, for its spiritual allegorising, as the worldly love poetry of these often foolish and unwholesome German chivalrous poets. But, for our consolation, in that same huge collection of Von der Hagen's Minnesingers, stand the following six lines, addressed to the Saviour, if tradition is correct, by a knightly monk, Bruder Wernher von der Tegernsee:-- "Dû bist mîn, ih bin dîn; Des solt dû gewis sîn. Dû bist beslozzen In mînem herzen; _Verlorn ist daz sluzzelîn: Dû muost immer drinne sîn._" "Thou art locked up in my heart; the little key is lost; thou must remain inside." This is a way of loving not logically suitable, perhaps, to a divine essence, but it is the lovingness which fertilises the soul, and makes flowers bud and birds sing in the heart of man. Out of it, through simple creatures like Bruder Wernher, through the simplicity of scores of obscurer singers and craftsmen than he, of hundreds of nameless good men and women, comes one large half of the art of Dante and Giotto, nay, of Raphael and Shakespeare: the tenderness of the modern world, unknown to stoical Antiquity. II The early Middle Ages--the times before Love came, and with it the gradual dignifying of all realities which had been left so long to mere gross or cunning or violent men--the early Middle Ages have left behind them one of the most complete and wonderful of human documents, the letters of Abélard and Héloïse. This is a book which each of us should read, in order to learn, with terror and self-gratulation, how the aridity of the world's soul may neutralise the greatest individual powers for happiness and good. These letters are as chains which we should keep in our dwelling-place, to remind us of past servitude, perhaps to warn us against future.