at the meeting of the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries are persons of very different calibre from the
translators of _Alexander_ and the other English-French romances, even
from those who with far more native talent Englished _Havelok_ and
_Horn_. If I have spoken harshly of German admiration of _Kudrun_, I
am glad to make this amends and to admit that Gottfried's _Tristan_ is
by far the best of all the numerous rehandlings of the story which
have come down to us. If we must rest Hartmann von Aue's chief claims
on the two _Buechlein_, on the songs, and on the delightful _Armer
Heinrich_, yet his _Iwein_ and his _Erec_ can hold their own even with
two of the freshest and most varied of Chrestien's original poems. No
one except the merest pedant of originality would hesitate to put
_Parzival_ above _Percevale le Gallois_, though Wolfram von Eschenbach
may be thought to have been less fortunate with _Willehalm_. And
though in the lyric, the debt due to both troubadour and _trouvere_ is
unmistakable, it is equally unmistakable what mighty usury the
minnesingers have paid for the capital they borrowed. The skill both
of Northern and Southern Frenchmen is seldom to seek in lyric: we
cannot give them too high praise as fashioners of instruments for
other men to use. The cheerful bird-voice of the _trouvere_, the half
artificial but not wholly insincere intensity of his brethren of the
_langue d'oc_, will never miss their meed. But for real "cry," for the
diviner elements of lyric, we somehow wait till we hear it in

"Under der linden
An der heide,
da unser zweier bette was,
da muget ir vinden
schone beide
gebrochen bluomen unde gras.
Vor dem walde in einem tal,
tandaradei!
schone sanc diu nahtegal."[114]

[Footnote 114: Walther's ninth _Lied_, opening stanza.]

At last we are free from the tyranny of the iambic, and have variety
beyond the comparative freedom of the trochee. The blessed liberty of
trisyllabic feet not merely comes like music, but is for the first
time complete music, to the ear.

[Sidenote: _The pioneers. Heinrich von Veldeke._]

Historians arrange the process of borrowing from the French and
adjusting prosody to the loans in, roughly speaking, three stages. The
first of these is represented by Lamprecht's _Alexander_ and Conrad's
_Roland_; while the second and far more important has for chief
exponents an anonymous rendering of the universally popular _Flo