The Italians are the first among modern peoples by whom the outward world was seen and felt as something beautiful.... By the year 1200, at the height of the Middle Ages, a genuine hearty enjoyment of the external world was again in existence, and found lively expression in the minstrelsy of different nations, which gives evidence of the sympathy felt with all the simple phenomena of Nature--spring with its flowers, the green fields and the woods. But these pictures are all foreground without perspective. Among the Minnesingers there were traces of feeling for Nature; but only for certain stereotyped phases. Of the individuality of a landscape, its characteristic colour, form, and light, not a word was said. Even the Carmina Burana were not much ahead of the Minnesingers in this respect, although they deserve a closer examination. These Latin poems of wandering clerks probably belong to the twelfth century, and though no doubt a product in which the whole of Europe had a share, their best pieces must be ascribed to a French hand. Latin poetry lives again in them, with a freshness the Carlovingian Renaissance never reached; they are mediæval in form, but full of a frank enjoyment of life and its pleasures, which hardly any northerner of that day possessed. Often enough this degenerated into frivolity; but the stir of national awakening after the long sleep of the Middle Ages is felt like a spring breeze through them all. It is a far cry from the view of Nature we saw in the Carlovingian monks, to these highly-coloured verses. The dim light of churches and bare cell walls may have doubled the monks' appreciation of blue skies and open-air life; but they were fettered by the constant fight with the senses; Nature to them must needs be less a work of God for man's delight, than a dangerous means of seduction. 'They wandered through Nature with timid misgiving, and their anxious fantasy depicted forms of terror or marvellous rescues.[3] The idyllic pleasure in the simple charms of Nature, especially in the monastery garden of the Carlovingian time, contrasts strikingly with the tone of these very mundane _vagantes clerici_, for whom Nature had not only long been absorbed and freed from all demoniac influence, but peopled by the charming forms of the old mythic poems, and made for the joy and profit of men, in the widest and naivest sense of the words. Spring songs, as with the Minnesingers, take up most of the space; but the theme is treated with greater variety. Enjoyment of life and Nature breathes through them all. One runs thus: Spring cometh, and the earth is decked and studded with vernal flowers. The harmony of the birds' returning song rouses the heart to be glad. It is the time of joy. Songs 98 to 118 rejoice that winter is gone; for instance: