With even this brief treatment no reader will doubt that there is in these three epics, typical products of the literary spirit of three great European nations whose literatures rising high above these deep firm substructures, were to be of the greatest {181} influence in the development of the human mind, and yet were to remain practically always within the limits of thought and feeling that had been traced by these old founders of literature of the early Thirteenth Century, whose work, like that of their contemporaries in every other form of artistic expression, was to be the model and the source of inspiration for future generations. [Illustration] CROZIER (OBVERSE AND REVERSE) {182} XI MEISTERSINGERS, MINNESINGERS, TROUVÈRES, TROUBADOURS. It would be a supreme mistake to think because the idea of literature in the Thirteenth Century is usually associated with the Arthur Legends, the Nibelungen and Dante, that all of the literary content of the century was inevitably serious in character or always epical in form. As a matter of fact the soul of wit and humor had entered into the body social, as we shall see in subsequent chapters, and the spirit of gaiety and the light-hearted admiration for nature found as frequent expression as at any time in history. With these as always in literary history there came outbursts of love in lyric strains that were not destined to die. While the poets of South Germany and of Italy sang of love that was of the loftiest description, never mingled with anything of the merely sensual, their tuneful trifles are quite as satisfying to the modern ear in both sense and sound as any of the more elaborate _vers de societé_ of the modern times. The German poets particularly did not hesitate to emphasize the fact that sensuality had no part in Minne--their pretty term for love--and yet they sang with all the natural grace and fervid rapture of the Grecian poets of the old pagan times, worshiping at the shrines of fleshly goddesses, or singing to the frail beauties of an unmoral period. Nothing in the history of literature is better proof that ideal love can, unmixed with anything sensual, inspire lyric outbursts of supreme and enduring beauty, than the poems of the Minnesingers and of some of the French and Italian Troubadours of this period. It is easier to understand Dante's position in this matter after reading the poems of his predecessors in the Thirteenth Century.