ed with the
eternal oneness, of passion by variations of metrical form. In each
language these variations reflect national peculiarities--in Northern
French and German irregular bursts with a multiplicity of inarticulate
refrain, in Provencal and Italian a statelier and more graceful but
somewhat more monotonous arrangement and proportion.

And the differences of spirit are equally noticeable, though one must,
as always, be careful against generalising too rashly as to their
identity with supposed national characteristics. The innumerable
love-poems of the _trouveres_, pathetic sometimes, and sometimes
impassioned, are yet, as a rule, cheerful, not very deep, verging not
seldom on pure comedy. The so-called monotonous enthusiasm of the
troubadour, his stock-images, his musical form, sublime to a certain
extent the sensual side of love, but confine themselves to that side
merely, as a rule, or leave it only to indulge in the purely
fantastic.

Of those who borrowed from them, the Germans, as we should expect,
lean rather to the Northern type, but vary it with touches of purity,
and other touches of religion; the Italians to the Southern, exalting
it into a mysticism which can hardly be called devotional, though it
at times wears the garb of devotion.[192] Among those collections for
which the student of letters pines, not the least desirable would be a
_corpus_ of the lyric poets of Europe during the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries. We should then see--after a fashion difficult if
not impossible in the sporadic study of texts edited piecemeal, and
often overlaid with comment not of the purely literary kind--at once
the general similarity and the local or individual exceptions, the
filiation of form, the diffusion of spirit. No division of literature,
perhaps, would serve better as a kind of chrestomathy for illustrating
the positions on which the scheme of this series is based. And though
it is overshadowed by the achievements of its own pupils; though it
has a double portion of the mediaeval defect of "school"-work--of the
almost tedious similarity of different men's manner--the Italian
poetry, which is practically the Italian literature, of the
thirteenth century would be not the least interesting part of such a
_corpus_.

[Footnote 192: "Sacro erotismo," "baccanale cristiano," are phrases of
Professor d'Andrea's.]

[Sidenote: _Position of Spanish._]

The Spanish literature[193] with which we have to do is prob