he long-linked mazes; while
the few and ever-repeated ideas, the old, stale platitudes of praise of
woman, love pains, joys of dancing, pleasure of spring (spring, always
spring, eternal, everlasting spring) seem languidly to follow the life
and movement of the mere metre. Poets, these German, Provencal, French,
and early Italian lyrists, essentially (if we venture to speak heresy)
not of ideas or emotions, but of metre, of rythm and rhyme; with just
the minimum of necessary thought, perpetually presented afresh just as
the words, often and often repeated and broken up and new combined, of a
piece of music--poetry which is in truth a sort of music, dance or dirge
or hymn music as the case may be, more than anything else.

As it is in mediaeval poetry with the seasons, so it is likewise with the
country and its occupations: as there is only spring, so there is only
the forest. Of the forest, mediaeval poetry has indeed much to say; more
perhaps, and more familiar with its pleasures, than Antiquity. There is
the memorable forest where the heroes of the Nibelungen go to hunt,
followed by their waggons of provisions and wine; where Siegfried
overpowers the bear, and returns to his laughing comrades with the huge
thing chained to his saddle; where, in that clear space which we see so
distinctly, a lawn on to which the blue black firs are encroaching,
Siegfried stoops to drink of the spring beneath the lime tree, and Hagen
drives his boarspear straight through the Nibelung's back. There is the
thick wood, all a golden haze through the young green, and with an
atmosphere of birds' song, where King Mark discovers Tristram and Iseult
in the cave, the deceitful sword between them, as Gottfried von
Strassburg relates with wonderful luscious charm. The forest, also, more
bleak and austere, where the four outlawed sons of Aymon live upon roots
and wild animals, where they build their castle by the Meuse. Further,
and most lovely of all, the forest in which Nicolette makes herself a
hut of branches, bracken, and flowers, through which the stars peep down
on her whiteness as she dreams of her Lord Aucassin. The forest where
Huon meets Oberon; and Guy de Lusignan, the good snake-lady; and
Parzival finds on the snow the feathers and the drops of blood which
throw him into his long day-dream; and Owen discovers the tomb of
Merlin; the forest, in short, which extends its interminable glades and
serried masses of trunks and arches of green