ey for sweetness that breathe desire,
Would that I were a sea-bird with limbs that never could tire,
Over the foam-flowers flying with halcyons ever on wing,
Keeping a careless heart, a sea-blue bird of the spring."

But our old captive, having said farewell to love, has yet a kindly
smiling interest in its fever and folly. Nothing better has he met, even
now that he knows "a lad is an ass." He tells a love story, a story of
love overmastering, without conscience or care of aught but the beloved.
And the _viel caitif_ tells it with sympathy, and with a smile. "Oh
folly of fondness," he seems to cry, "oh merry days of desolation"

"When I was young as you are young,
When lutes were touched and songs were sung,
And love lamps in the windows hung."

It is the very tone of Thackeray, when Thackeray is tender, and the world
heard it first from this elderly, nameless minstrel, strolling with his
viol and his singing boys, perhaps, like a blameless d'Assoucy, from
castle to castle in "the happy poplar land." One seems to see him and
hear him in the twilight, in the court of some chateau of Picardy, while
the ladies on silken cushions sit around him listening, and their lovers,
fettered with silver chains, lie at their feet. They listen, and look,
and do not think of the minstrel with his grey head and his green heart,
but we think of him. It is an old man's work, and a weary man's work.
You can easily tell the places where he has lingered, and been pleased as
he wrote. They are marked, like the bower Nicolete built, with flowers
and broken branches wet with dew. Such a passage is the description of
Nicolete at her window, in the strangely painted chamber,

"ki faite est par grant devisse
panturee a miramie."

Thence

"she saw the roses blow,
Heard the birds sing loud and low."

Again, the minstrel speaks out what many must have thought, in those
incredulous ages of Faith, about Heaven and Hell, Hell where the gallant
company makes up for everything. When he comes to a battle-piece he
makes Aucassin "mightily and knightly hurl through the press," like one
of Malory's men. His hero must be a man of his hands, no mere sighing
youth incapable of arms. But the minstrels heart is in other things, for
example, in the verses where Aucassin transfers to Beauty the
wonder-working powers of Holiness, and makes the sight of his lady heal
the palmer, as the shadow of the Apostle, falling