e world. For
the second time, and in far more humble and efficacious way, Christ had
been given to man.

To absorb the Eternal Love, to feed on the Life of the World, to make
oneself consubstantial therewith, these passionate joys of poor mediaeval
humanity are such as we should contemplate with sympathy only and respect,
even when the miracle is conceived and felt in the grossest, least
spiritual manner. That act of material assimilation, that feeding off
the very Godhead in most literal manner, as described in the hymn to
the Most Holy Sacrament, was symbolic of the return from exile of the
long-persecuted instincts of mankind. It meant that, spiritually or
grossly, each according to his nature, men had cast fear behind them,
and--O res mirabilis!--grown proud once more to love.

Of this new wonder--questionable enough at times, but, on the whole,
marvellously beneficent--the German knightly poets, so early in the
field, are naturally among the earliest (for the Provencals belonged to
a sceptical, sensual country) to give us a written record. Nearly all of
the Minnesingers composed what we must call religious erotics, in no
way different, save for names of Christ and the Virgin, from their most
impassioned secular ones. The Song of Solomon, therefore, is one of the
few pieces of written literature of which we find constant traces in the
works of these very literally illiterate poets. Yet the quality of their
love, if one may say so, is very different from anything Hebrew, or,
for the matter of that, Greek or Roman; their ardour is not a transient
phenomenon which disturbs them, like that of the Shulamite, or the lover
described by Sappho or Plato, but a chief business of their life, as in
the case of Dante, of Petrarch, of Francesca and Paolo, or Tristram and
Yseult. Indeed, it is difficult to guess whether this self-satisfied,
self-glorifying quality, which distinguishes mediaeval passion from the
passion (always regarded as an interlude, harmless or hurtful, in civic
concerns) of unromantic Antiquity--whether, I say, this peculiarity of
mediaeval love is due to its having served for religious as well as
for secular use, or whether the possibility of its being brought into
connection with the highest mysteries and aspirations was not itself a
result of the dignity in which mere earthly ardours had come to be held.
Be this as it may, these German devotional rhapsodies display their
essentially un-Hebrew, un-antique c