charged against the whole love-poetry of the
Middle Ages, and which certainly does affect some of it. There is
nowhere the "cry" that we find in the best of Gottfried's
"nightingales"--the lyric poets as opposed to the epic. He does not
seem to have much command of trisyllabic measures, and is perhaps
happiest in the above-mentioned mono-rhymed quatrain, apparently a
favourite measure then, which he uses sometimes in octosyllables, but
often also in decasyllables. I do not know, and it would probably be
difficult to say, what was the first appearance of the decasyllable,
which in German, as in English, was to become on the whole the staple
measure of non-lyrical poetry and the not infrequent medium of
lyrical. But this must be fairly early, and certainly is a good
example. The "Gottesminne," or, as our own old word has it, the
"Divine" Poems, are very much better. Hartmann himself was a crusader,
and there is nothing merely conventional in his few lays from the
crusading and pilgrim standpoint. Indeed the very first words,
expressing his determination after his lord's death to leave the world
to itself, have a better ring than anything in his love-poetry; and
the echo is kept up in such simple but true sayings as this about
"Christ's flowers" (the badge of the cross):--

"Min froude wart nie sorgelos
Unz an die tage
Daz ich mir Krystes bluomon kos
Die ich hie trage."

[Sidenote: _The "booklets."_]

The two curious booklets or complaints (for each bore the title of
_Buechlein_ in its own day, and each is a _Klage_) and the _Gregorius_
touch the lyric on one side and the adventure poems on the other.
_Gregorius_, indeed, is simply a _roman d'aventures_ of pious
tendency; and there cannot be very much doubt that it had a French
original. It extends to some four thousand lines, and does not show
any poetical characteristics very different from those of _Erec_ and
_Iwein_, though they are applied to different matter. In size the two
"booklets" stand in a curiously diminishing ratio to _Erec_ with its
ten thousand verses, _Iwein_ with its eight, and _Gregorius_ with its
four; for _Die Klage_ has a little under two thousand, and the
_Buechlein_ proper a little under one. _Die Klage_ is of varied
structure, beginning with octosyllables, of which the first--

"Minne waltet grozer kraft"--

has a pleasant trochaic cadence: continuing after some sixteen hundred
lines (if indeed it be a continuation