ing all over France, Provence, Italy, Spain,
Germany, England; spring, spring, nothing but spring even in the
mysterious countries governed by the Grail King, by the Fairy Morgana,
by Queen Proserpine, by Prester John; nay, in the new Jerusalem, in the
kingdom of Heaven itself, nothing but spring; till one longs for a bare
twig, for a yellow leaf, for a frozen gutter, as for a draught of water
in the desert. The green fields and meadows enamelled with painted
flowers, how one detests them! how one would rejoice to see them well
sprinkled with frost or burnt up to brown in the dry days! the birds,
the birds which warble through every sonnet, canzone, sirventes, glosa,
dance lay, roundelay, virelay, rondel, ballade, and whatsoever else it
may be called,--how one wishes them silent for ever, or their twitter,
the tarantarantandei of the eternal German nightingale especially,
drowned by a good howling wind J After any persistent study of mediaeval
poetry, one's feeling towards spring is just similar to that of the
morbid creature in Schubert's "Muellerin," who would not stir from home
for the dreadful, dreadful greenness, which he would fain bleach with
tears, all around:

Ich moechte ziehn in die Welt hinaus, hinaus in die weite
Welt,
Wenn's nur so gruen, so gruen nicht war da draussen in
Wald und Feld.

Moreover this mediaeval spring is the spring neither of the shepherd, nor
of the farmer, nor of any man to whom spring brings work and anxiety and
hope of gain; it is a mere vague spring of gentle-folk, or at all events
of well-to-do burgesses, taking their pleasure on the lawns of castle
parks, or the green holiday places close to the city, much as we see
them in the first part of "Faust;" a sweet but monotonous charm of
grass, beneath green lime tree, or in the South the elm or plane; under
which are seated the poet and the fiddler, playing and singing for the
young women, their hair woven with chaplets of fresh flowers, dancing
upon the sward. And poet after poet, Provencal, Italian, and German,
Nithart and Ulrich, and even the austere singer of the Holy Grail,
Wolfram, pouring out verse after verse of the songs in praise of spring,
which they make even as girls wind their garlands: songs of quaint and
graceful ever-changing rythm, now slowly circling, now bounding along,
now stamping out the measure like the feet of the dancers, now winding
and turning as wind and twine their arms in t