and hardships of the ladies shut up in
the castles; and thence will arise a double current of attraction and
of sympathy between the oppressed women who suffer, and the generous
men who long to deliver them.

But causes far deeper and wider than that of minstrelsy wrought in
the favorable influence of chivalry on the condition of women, causes
psychological, physiological, and social. The exalting effect of love
is well known; its inciting and glorifying power is seen even in
birds and beasts at the pairing-time, in a new brilliancy of plumage,
and a wonderful increase of courage. Love produces a greater
secretion of force in the brain and other nervous centres. This
exuberance of spirit, or exaltation of function, is usually a
transient phenomenon, the gratification of its impulses bringing its
cause to a termination. It may, however, be made permanent by such an
appropriation of the product as will re-act to keep the cause alive.
That is to say, materialize a passion, and you destroy its power, its
flame dies in the damps of indulgence; but spiritualize a passion,
and you perpetuate its power, its flame becomes a spur, pricking the
sides of intent.

The love of woman has in all ages given birth in man to passionate
desires, poetic dreams, deferential attentions, persuasive forms of
politeness; but only once in the whole of history has this softening,
quickening, exalting power restrained from a destructive outlet, and
stimulated to an unparalleled richness of manifestation, stamped with
chastity by the dominant conscience and imagination of the time
broken out in one great swell as an inspiration to glorious deeds,
illuminating the world, and making an immortal epoch. Such, in one of
its aspects, is the significance of chivalry, whose crest-wave broke
into bloom in the Provencal literature; whose consummate flower,
lifted far aloft, was Dante's homage to Beatrice. The inspiration of
chivalry was the love of woman; but that love was spiritual. It aimed
not at a personal union, to die away in marriage, but at a deathless
fruition in heroic achievements. This ideal appropriation of love, to
engender self-abnegating valor and beneficent deeds, originated from
the meeting of the two currents of martial history and the Christian
religion in a prepared people and period.

War was the chief institution and experience of man down to the
Middle Age; Christianity had then become sovereign of the common
beliefs and fears. The