ice,
Thou roseate dawn and light of Paradise!

Perdigon, among many worldly songs, wrote one to the _regina d'auteza e
de senhoria_, which might be translated thus:

Supreme ruler of the world,
Thy grace sustains
And maintains
The world.
Thou fragrant rose, thou fruitful vine,
Thou wert the chosen vessel of
Mercy divine.

Unsurpassed in the fusion of his earthly and his celestial lady was
Folquet de Lunel. Some of his poems cannot be classed with any
certainty.

The first poem which obtained a prize at the Academy of Mastersingers of
Toulouse was a hymn to Mary.

This very genuine sentimentalism appears strange to us; we cannot enter
into the feelings of that period. A modern philologist, Karl Appel,
regards Jaufre Rudel's pathetic songs, addressed by him to the Countess
of Tripoli:

Oh, love in lands so far away,
My heart is yearning, yearning....

as songs to the Madonna; but it is a matter of indifference to the lover
whether his heart's impulse, translated into metaphysic, is projected on
an unknown Countess of Tripoli, or a still more unknown Lady of Heaven.
It is not the loved woman who is of importance--what do we know of the
ladies who inspired the exquisite mediaeval poetry? They have long been
dust, and we may be sure that their perfection was no greater than is
the perfection of their grand-daughters. But the love of the poets is
alive to-day, an eternal document of the human heart, representing one
of the great phases through which the relationship between man and woman
has passed.

The following are a few stanzas by the German minnesinger, Steinmar,
which were later on adapted to the Holy Virgin:

In summer-time how glad am I
When over lea or down
A country lass mine eyes espy,
Of maidens all the crown.

Oh! Paradise! How glad am I
When o'er the heavenly down
God and God's Mother I espy,
Of women all the crown.

The Italian poets, far more profound than the Provencals, saw a goddess
in the beloved (whom they always addressed as Madonna), and humbled
themselves before her. Social differences, which played such a prominent
part in the North, are here ignored. The impecunious poet no longer
extols the princess, the wife of his lord and master. There is no
question of such a relationship; the poet is a free citizen of the town,
subject only to the emotion of the heart, and his song carries its own
re