aster, but to the unknown knight,
the passionate lover, who would gladly give his life to win her. A
jongleur arrived with stories of the courts where love was the only
ruler; where the knights willingly suffered grief and want, if by so
doing they could serve their lady; where the lover, in the shape of a
beautiful blue bird, nightly slipped through the barred windows into the
arms of his mistress. But the jealous husband had drawn barbed wire
across the window, and the lover, flying away at dawn, bled to death
before the eyes of his grief-stricken lady. The jongleur would tell of
the knight who had fallen passionately in love with a beautiful damsel
of whom he had but caught a passing glimpse; month after month he worked
at digging an underground passage; every night brought him a little
nearer to her bower--she could distinctly hear the dull sounds of his
burrowing--until at last he rose through the ground and took her into
his arms. These and similar tales, doubtless all of them of Celtic
origin--preserved for us in the charming "Lais" of Marie de
France--brought tears to the eyes of many a lonely wife and gave shape
to her vague longing. There was no reason why a man, and a lover to
boot, should not transform himself nightly into a blue bird. Those
simple stories in verse fulfilled every desire of the heart; imagination
supplied in the north what the south offered in abundant reality. But
Marie de France, the first woman novelist of Europe (about the end of
the twelfth century), deserves to be remembered for another reason; she
was the first poet voicing woman's longing for love and
romance--woman's adventure. The charming _Lai du Chevrefoile_ ("The
Story of the Honeysuckle") relates an episode from the loves of Tristan
and Isolde, the famous lovers, legendary even at that time. Tristan and
Isolde, Lancelot and Guinevere, Fleur and Blanchefleur--these were the
admired and mythical lovers of whom the poets sang and dreamed. All the
world knew their adventures; all the world repeated them again and
again, reverently preserving the identical words and yet unconsciously
remoulding them. At the recital of their loves, hand clasped hand; "on
that day we read no more," confessed Dante's ill-fated lovers.

The longing, so characteristic of the North of Europe, to see the world
and meet with adventures, was in Provence and Italy less pronounced.
These favoured climes possessed so many of the things dreamed of and
desired by