We now proceed with more satisfaction to an estimate of the bourgeoisie. They became more and more cultured, and took upon themselves the task of raising the standards of education and morality, of upholding the sacred flame of German spiritual and intellectual life. They began to spin again the thread of poetry that had broken in the brutalized hands of a degraded nobility. This thread was now the "_Mastersong_." Mastersong, though of a prosaic, mechanical style, was nevertheless an ennobling, purifying element of culture in the frivolous and impure life of late mediæval German cities. Mastersong formed the bridge between the world of everyday realism and the world of ideals. Mastersong alone prevented an entire break of the continuity of German civilization between the two great periods of bloom, the thirteenth and the eighteenth centuries. As the bourgeoisie acquired a social position and a personal worth of their own, as the German peasantry, in the extreme North at the mouth of the Elbe between marshes and sea, the Ditmarschen and Stedingers, and again in the South between the Alpine passes, the Swiss, heroically defended their manhood and liberties, there began among those lowly born, but high-minded, vigorous, and comparatively pure classes an intellectual and a moral life of a higher order. The folk song of love, of warlike honor, of victory over the brutal squirearchy, of invigorating patriotism, of a national union embracing all classes, begins to ring through the German "poetic forest," as Uhland calls it. The loving maid speaks of the falcen, and means the lover; the rose garden signifies love's favor; flowers are maidens, like the rose on the heath that is plucked by the boy in spite of its thorns; the forget-me-not designates modesty, humility, chastity. There are little love songs describing the sorrow of parting, the joy of the dance, the dream of love under the tree from which a rain of blossoms bedews the sleeping beauty. Emperor Maximilian (1493-1519), "the last knight," the best-beloved son of the house of Habsburg, reigns now in Germany. It is a time of transition, of universal change. The world has doubled its size by the discovery of America, and the horizon has been enlarged accordingly. The printing press has revolutionized the arts. Yet poetry is dry, allegorical, wooden. Maximilian, aided by his secretaries, relates in a rimed allegorical romance, Teuerdank, his wooing of Mary of Burgundy, or, as he calls her in his poem, the beautiful and illustrious virgin Ehrenreich, only daughter of the powerful king "Glorious" (_Ruhmreich_). He recounts the mighty deeds which he must accomplish before he can possess her.