sits sighing in sight of her prison bower,
and faints like a hero of the Arabian Nights at her name, and has
visions of her as St. Francis has of Christ; this younger and brighter
Sir Launcelot, is an ideal little figure, whom you might mistake for
Love himself as described in the "Romaunt of the Rose;" Love's avatar or
incarnation, on whose appearance the year blooms into spring, the fruit
trees blossom, the birds sing, the girls dance at eve round the
maypoles; behind whom, while reading this poem, we seem to see the corn
shine green beneath the olives, the white-blossomed branches slant
across the blue sky. For is he not the very incarnation of chivalry, of
beauty, and of love? So much for this King Love while but quite young.
Unfortunately he is speedily weaned of his baby food of mere blushing
glances and sighed-out names; and then his aspect, his kingdom's aspect,
the aspect of his votaries, undergoes a change. The profane but charming
game of the loving clerk and the missal is exchanged for the more
coarse hide-and-seek of hidden causeways and tightened bolts, with
jealous husbands guarding the useless door; Guillems becomes but an
ordinary Don Juan or Lovelace, Flamenca but a sorry, sneaking
adulteress, and the gracious damsels mere common sluts, curtseying at
the loan (during the interview of nobler folk) of the gallant's squires.
For the scent of May, of fresh leaves and fallen blossoms, we get the
nauseous vapours of the bath-room; and, alas, King Love has lost his
aureole and his wings and turned keeper of the hot springs, sought out
by the gouty and lepers, of Bourbon-les-Bains; and in closing this book,
so delightfully begun, we sicken at the whiff of hot and fetid moral air
as we should sicken in passing over the outlet of the polluted hot
water.

"But where is the use of telling us all this?" the reader will ask;
"every one knows that illicit passion existed and exists, and has its
chroniclers, its singers in prose and in verse. But what has all this
poetry of common adultery to do with a book like the 'Vita Nuova,' with
that strange new thing, that lifelong worship of a woman, which you call
mediaeval love?" This much: that out of this illicit love, and out of it,
gross as it looks, alone arises the possibility of the "Vita Nuova;"
arises the possibility of the romantic and semi-religious love of the
Middle Ages. Or, rather, let us say that this mere loose love of the
_albas_ and _Wachtlieder_ and "Flam