von Eschenbach, and Gottfried
von Strassburg, we breathe again the pure German air; and we cannot but
regret that these men should have taken the subjects of their poems, with
their unpronounceable names, extravagant conceits, and licentious manners,
from foreign sources, while they had at home their grand mythology, their
heroic traditions, their kings and saints, which would have been more
worthy subjects than Tristan and Isold, Schionatulander and Sigune. There
were new thoughts stirring in the hearts and minds of those men of the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries. A hundred years before Dante, the German
poets had gazed with their eyes wide open into that infinite reality which
underlies our short existence on earth. To Wolfram, and to many a poet of
his time, the human tragedy of this world presented the same unreal,
transitory, and transparent aspect which we find again in Dante's "Divine
Comedy." Everything points to another world. Beauty, love, virtue,
happiness,--everything, in fact, that moves the heart of the poet,--has a
hidden reference to something higher than this life; and the highest
object of the highest poetry seems to be to transfer the mind to those
regions where men feel the presence of a Divine power and a Divine love,
and are lost in blissful adoration. The beginning of the thirteenth
century is as great an era in the history of German literature as the
beginning of the nineteenth. The German mind was completely regenerated.
Old words, old thoughts, old metres, old fashions, were swept away, and a
new spring dawned over Germany. The various branches of the Teutonic race
which, after their inroads into the seats of Roman civilization, had for a
time become separated, were beginning to assume a national
independence,--when suddenly a new age of migration threatened to set in.
The knights of France and Flanders, of England, Lombardy, and Sicily, left
their brilliant castles. They marched to the East, carrying along with
them the less polished, but equally enthusiastic, nobility of Germany.
From the very first the spirit of the Roman towns in Italy and Gaul had
exercised a more civilizing influence on the Barbarians who had crossed
the Alps and the Rhine, whereas the Germans of Germany proper had been
left to their own resources, assisted only by the lessons of the Roman
clergy. Now, at the beginning of the Crusades, the various divisions of
the German race met again, but they met as strangers; no longer