Not a few of the songs of the Troubadours, Trouvères, and Minnesingers have been preserved to us and have been deciphered with great care by students. It seems certain that the decipherings are in the main correct. The songs are well worthy of study. Naumann, in his ‘History of Music,’ gives four harmonized according to modern principles. Unlike any of the church music of the time, these songs are in the modern major scale. They are, probably, the earliest melodies preserved to us which seem to have an affinity with modern music. All music preceding them, as all the church music following them for at least two centuries, sounds strange to our ears; we cannot grasp it, much less enjoy it, without making a conscious allowance for its seemingly outlandish construction. But the songs of the courtly minstrels might almost have been written by Schumann or Brahms. It is possible, of course, that they have been somewhat modernized in transcription. But the fact remains that they are predominantly in the modern major scale and that their turns of phrase show a feeling for melody as such in a way never revealed by the church composers until after Palestrina’s time. The loveliness of these songs grows on one. We must, perhaps, make a preliminary allowance for the length of their lines and for a certain aimlessness which seems to reside in the melody. The musicians of the time did not feel accent and metre so strongly as we do and the regular sing-song of contrasting lines (which sometimes mars modern lyrics) was hardly felt in their songs. They flow lightly and smoothly; their phrases are distinguished by a pause rather than by a system of balancing and contrasting. They must be delivered with the utmost repose, in transparent flowing tones that never betray the breath behind them. There must be hardly any accentuation and very slight use of dynamics. Artistic construction, in the more rigid modern sense, is not to be found in them; they have no ‘climax point,’ obviously prepared, with passages leading ‘up to’ and ‘down from’ it. They are rather like the softest breeze in the morning of a sunny summer day. They breathe the spirit of the following lovely verses by Walther von der Vogelweide: ‘Love is neither man nor woman, Soul it hath not, nor yet body, And no earthly sign or token; Though the tongue of man hath named it, Never mortal eye hath seen it. Yet without it can no creature Win Heaven’s pitying grace and favor; Nor where love is will there linger Aught of fraud or baseness ever; To the traitor, the false-hearted, Love hath come not, cometh never.’