s and pleasant, and many look upon her for her beauty,
and her heart Is all in loving loyally; alas, alas, the dawn! how soon
it: comes!--" "Oi deus, oi deus; de l'alba, tan tost ve!" The real _alba_
is the same as the German _Wachtlieder,_ the song of the squire or
friend posted at the garden gate or outside the castle wall, warning the
lovers to separate. "Fair comrade (Bel Companho), I call to you singing.
'Sleep no more, for I hear the birds announcing the day in the trees,
and I fear that the jealous one may find you;' and in a moment it will
be day, 'Bel Companho, come to the window and look at the signs in the
sky! you will know me a faithful messenger; if you do it not, it will be
to your harm" and in a moment it will be dawn (et ades sera l' alba)...
Bel Companho, since I left you I have not slept nor raised myself from
my knees; for I have prayed to God the Son of Saint Mary, that he should
send me: back my faithful comrade, and in a moment it will be dawn In
this _alba_ of Guiraut de Borneulh, the lover comes at last to the
window, and cries to his watching comrade that he is too happy to care
either for the dawn or for the jealous one. The German _Wachtlieder_ are
even more explicit. "He must away at once and without delay," sings the
watchman in a poem of Wolfram, the austere singer of Parzifal and the
Grail Quest; "let him go, sweet lady; let him away from thy love so that
he keep his honour and life. He trusted himself to me that I should
bring him safely hence; it is day ..." "Sing what thou wilt, watchman,"
answers the lady, "but leave him here." In a far superior, but also far
less chaste poem of Heinrich von Morungen, the lady, alone and
melancholy, wakes up remembering the sad white light of morning, the sad
cry of the watchman, which separated her from her knight. Still more
frankly, and in a poem which is one of the few real masterpieces of
Minnesang, the lady in Walther von der Vogelweide's "Under der linden an
der Heide" narrates a meeting in the wood. "What passed between us shall
never be known by any! never by any, save him and me--yes, and by the
little nightingale that sang _Tandaradei_! The little bird will surely
be discreet."

The songs of light love for another's wife of troubadour, trouvere, and
minnesinger, seem to have been squeezed together, so that all their
sweet and acrid perfume is, so to speak, sublimated, in the recently
discovered early Provencal narrative poem called "Flamenca