But with and through and above all these various spirits there is most of all that abstract spirit of poetry, which, though not possessed by the Middle Ages or by Romance alone, seems somehow to be a more inseparable and pervading familiar of Romance and of the Middle Ages than of any other time and any other kind of literature. The sense of mystery, which had rarely troubled the keen intellect of the Greek and the sturdy common-sense of the Roman, which was even a little degraded and impoverished (except in the Jewish prophets and in a few other places) by the busy activity of Oriental imagination, which we ourselves have banished, or think we have banished, to a few "poets' scrolls," was always present to the mediaeval mind. In its broadest and coarsest jests, in its most laborious and (as we are pleased to call them) dullest expansions of stories, in its most wire-drawn and most lifeless allegory, in its most irritating admixture of science and fable, there is always hard by, always ready to break in, the sense of the great and wonderful things of Life, and Love, and Death, of the half-known God and the unknown Hereafter. It is this which gives to Romance, and to mediaeval work generally, that "high seriousness," the want of which was so strangely cast at it in reproach by a critic who, I cannot but think, was less intimately acquainted with its literature than with that either of classical or of modern times. Constantly in mediaeval poetry, very commonly in mediaeval prose, the great things appear greatly. There is in English verse romance perhaps no less felicitous sample of the kind as it stands, none which has received greater vituperation for dulness and commonplace, than _Sir Amadas_. Yet who could much better the two simple lines, when the hero is holding revel after his ghastly meeting with the unburied corse in the roadside chapel?-- "But the dead corse that lay on bier Full mickle his thought was on." In Homer's Greek or Dante's Italian such a couplet (which, be it observed, is as good in rhythm and vowel contrast as in simple presentation of thought) could hardly lack general admiration. In the English poetry of the Middle Ages it is dismissed as a commonplace.