ight go forth
and fetch her green water which has washed the setting sun, salamanders
snatched from the flame, the stars out of heaven; so would it seem as if
this new power in the world, this poetically worshipped woman, had sent
forth mankind to seek wonderful new virtues, never before seen on earth.
Nay, rather, as the snowflakes became green leaves, the frost blossoms
red and blue flowers, the winter wind a spring-scented breeze, when
Bernard de Ventadorn was greeted by his mistress; so also does it seem
as if, at the first greeting of the world by this new love, the mediaeval
winter had turned to summer, and there had budded forth and flowered a
new ideal of manly virtue, a new ideal of womanly grace.

But evil is evil, and evil is its fruit. Out of circumstances hitherto
unknown, circumstances come about for the first time owing to the
necessities of illegitimate passion, have arisen certain new and nobler
characters of sexual love, certain new and beautiful conceptions of
manly and womanly nature. The circumstances to which these are owed are
pure in themselves, they are circumstances which in more modern times
have characterized the perfectly legitimate passion of lovers held
asunder by no social law, but by mere accidental barriers--from Romeo
and Juliet to the Master of Ravenswood and Lucy Ashton; and pure so far
have been the spiritual results. But these circumstances were due, in
the early Middle Ages, to the fact of adultery; and to the new ideal of
love has clung, even in its purity, in its superior nobility, an element
of corruption as unknown to gross and corrupt Antiquity as was the
delicacy and nobility of mediaeval love. The most poetical and pathetic
of all mediaeval love stories, the very incarnation of all that is most
lyric at once and most tragic in the new kind of passion, is the story,
told and retold by a score of poets and prose writers, of the loves of
Yseult of Ireland and of Sir Tristram who, as the knight was bringing
the princess to his uncle and her affianced, King Mark of Cornwall drank
together by a fatal mistake a philter which made all such as partook of
it in common inseparable lovers even unto death. Every one knows the
result r: how Yseult came to her husband already the paramour of
Tristram; how Brangwaine, her damsel, feeling that this unhallowed
passion was due to her having left-within reach the potion intended for
the King and Queen of Cornwall, devoted herself, at the price