y."

The fantastic devotion to woman and the love for her at the time of the
Minnesingers thus changed the entire life of the Teutonic race. Woman
became the centre of the rich animated social circle. The love of woman
controlled the hearts of the ruling class and the imagination of the
poets. Her power in state, court, and home was firmly rooted and
remained great, even though the golden sheen and glimmer of the period
of the minnesong vanished after a few generations. Her legal status,
too, was raised; she became equal, and in many respects superior, to
man. If the basis of her existence was the house, the family, she was
the ruler of the units of which the fabric of the state is composed. The
sacred flame of the hearth was nourished by her; the children were in
her safekeeping; in her eye and heart rested the blessing or the curse
of home and state.

The love of woman, the life of minne, during that epochal era shines
most brightly, though idealized, in the greatest lyric and epic poets
Germany ever produced.

True poetry is, after all, the highest truth. To describe woman's life
and love in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, we cannot do better
than view her reflection in the mirror of that poetry of which she is
the almost exclusive subject. The minnesong is the especial history of
women. Elevation and degeneracy appear as clearly in poetry as in life.
Woman, wine, and the eternal laws of nature are the essence of poetry.
Poetry, on the whole, is the history of love in all its aspects, and
minne is especially the soul of the Middle High German poetry, which, in
spite of its brilliancy, is, alas! too self-confined in this one, though
supreme, all-pervading emotion.

In this respect, German minnesong is quite different from that of the
Provencal troubadours, who sing also warlike strains of patriotism, of
the sweet and glorious death for the fatherland, of revolution against
an overbearing Church or political tyranny. Among the German
minnesingers, Walter von der Vogelweide alone, the greatest of all,
sings in the same strain.

One sided as the subject of that period is, its modulations are varied.
There is the language of the pensive heart, of the gay boundings of hope
and happiness, of cheerfulness and melancholy, of depth of feeling, of
buoyant spirits, and again there is a dirge bewailing a lover's fate in
tones that breathe mystic feelings.

We cannot, therefore, agree with the harsh judgment of the gr