our breaths are seldom still:--and then, our thoughts and dreams!" As he rides through spring, he observes the infinite diversity of
nature:
Many hundred flowers,
Alike none ever grew;
Mark it well, no leaf of green
Is just another's hue. [25]
"Many a man looks out at the stars, and tells what wonders take place there. Let him tell me now (something closer at hand), what is the weed in the garden. If he tells me that truly, I shall be more ready to believe the other." It is the germ of Tennyson's Flower in the Crannied Wall. Nature's commonplaces hold the heavenly mystery in a common bond with their own. Such subtle blendings of the outward and inward vision could come only from a refined and pensive spirit--such as his who sums up thus the discipline of life: "Many a time the lips must smile when the heart weeps."
One of the marked deficiencies of all these descriptions of nature is in the indefiniteness of the terms employed. In minute ac-curacy, Dante, to be sure, is one of the world's greatest masters; but elsewhere it is rarely that we come upon anything concrete or specific. It is not until centuries later, indeed, that, so far as nature goes, we find habitual composition "with the eye upon the object," but, as it seems, most mediaeval poets never carried their observation beyond the barest general impressions. We do not expect Tennyson's "More black than ashbuds in the front of March," or Browning's eye for the fact that when "the leaf-buds on the vine are woolly," the red is about to turn gray. The outer world's "open secret" is not open enough to make us demand minute attention. But
it is surprising that they did not more frequently record easy impressions, and in their inventions introduce definite details. The poeti-
cal effect of even apparently prosaic precision is at times imaginative, but the art of this was kept for the later romanticists.
There is a lyric, however (belonging, I believe, to[26] the twelfth century), by a poet of northern France, and written as a satire on
the love-romance literature of the age, which contains one or two happy instances of just this missing trait. So charming it is in itself that I have translated it as a whole, though it belongs to an essay on the lyrical romances, instead of on nature. What a light touch the unknown writer shows, what dainty fancy! Sir Thopas is hardly a parallel to this blending of poetry with humor, a humor too gracious to be derisive, whose genial satire sparkles and dances to meet its sister wave of sentiment and beauty, till they ripple together, and each seems to have absorbed the other. The opening stanza is the poet's introduction of himself, and from the olive we may
draw an inference respecting his local associations:
Will ye attend me, while I sing
A song of love,--a pretty thing, Not made on farms:--
Nay, by a gentle knight 'twas made
Who lay beneath an olive's shade
In his love's arms.
1.
A linen undergown she wore, And a white ermine mantle, o'er A silken coat;
With flowers of May to keep her feet,
And round her ankles leggings neat, From lands remote.
2.
Her girdle was of leafage green; Spring foliage, with a fringing sheen Of gold above;[27]
And underneath a love-purse hung, By bloomy pendants featly strung,
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A gift of love.
3.
Upon a mule the lady rode,
The which with silver shoes was shode; Saddle gold-red;
And behind rosebushes three
She had set up a canopy
To shield her head.
4.
As so she passed adown the meads, A gentle childe in knightly weeds Cried: "Fair one, wait!
What region is thy heritance?" And she replied: "I am of France, Of high estate.
5.
"My father is the nightingale, Who high within the bosky pale, On branches sings;
My mother's the canary; she
Sings on the high banks where the sea
Its salt spray flings."
6.
"Fair lady, excellent thy birth;
Thou comest from the chief of earth, Of high estate:
Ah, God our Father, that to me Thou hadst been given, fair ladye, My wedded mate!"
Everything here is definite and concrete, and how delightful the picture all is. Such plastic art as the[28] "rosebushes three" is not
unworthy of the great modern poets of whom its magic and romantic definiteness reminds us,--as the "five miles meandering of Alph, the sacred river," or the "kisses four" with which the pale loiterer shut the eyes of La Belle Dame sans Merci. The description of the nightingale on its high branches, too, is a noticeably accurate touch, as we compare it, for example, with Coleridge's nightingale descriptions.
The explanation for the usual vague and indefinite description is not found in saying that they could not describe minutely. We meet with abundant details of such material interests as embroideries or armor. There is artistic emotion in Villehardouin's account of the glorious sight of Constantinople, as it rose before the crusaders, just as distinctly as in Lord Byron's letter. But, to their simple eyes, nature not only failed to suggest associated fancies, like Shakespeare's
"Wrinkled pebbles in the brook,"
or Wordsworth's ash,
"A soft eye-music of slow waving boughs,"
but they see natural objects as units, without lingering upon their parts. When we find, for example, a line that marks the jerky flight of a swallow, we are surprised at the specific touch; we look almost in vain for such landscape details as the colors of autumn. Neidhart von Reuenthal is marking his originality, when he speaks of the red tree-tops, falling down yellow.
The want of observation and the shallow sympathy with nature shown by most poets before Dante are much more surprising than their preference for placid[29] effects. It is unusual, for instance, to meet such a suggestive note of association as in the stanza by the Frenchman Gaces Brulles:
The birds of my own land
In Brittany I hear,
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And seem to understand
The distant in the near;
In sweet Champagne I stand, No longer here.
This paraphrase, indeed, is unworthy of the charming simplicity of the original. Surely, when Matthew Arnold made his sweeping characterization of mediaeval poetry as grotesque, he forgot what a straightforward evolution of narrative or of quiet sentiment, and what a transparent expression, we find in some of these minor poets. They are as direct and unadorned, as they are graceful. It is almost impossible to translate them without substituting for the fresh and delicate touch, some metaphysical warping of the idea, or some rhetorical consciousness in words. What for instance could be more elegantly remote from the grotesque than this literal
translation of Brulles' expression of his sensibility to the song-birds of his home: "The birds of my country I have heard in Brittany;
by their song I know well that in sweet Champagne I heard them of old." We may sum up