and not a new poem) in curious
long _laisses_, rather than stanzas, of eights and sevens rhymed on
one continuous pair of single and double rhymes, _cit unde: ant
ende_, &c. The _Buechlein_ proper is all couplets, and ends less
deplorably than its beginning--

"Owe, Owe, unde owe!"--

might suggest. It is, however, more serious than the _Klage_, which is
really a _debat_ (as the technical term in French poetry then went)
between Body and Soul, and of no unusual kind.

[Sidenote: Der Arme Heinrich.]

Fortunately for Hartmann, he has left another work, _Der Arme
Heinrich_, which is thought to be his last, and is certainly his most
perfect. It is almost a pity that Longfellow, in his adaptation of it,
did not stick closer to the original; for pleasant as _The Golden
Legend_ is, it is more of a pastiche and mosaic than _Der Arme
Heinrich_, one of the simplest, most direct, and most touching of
mediaeval poems. Heinrich (also Von Aue) is a noble who, like Sir
Isumbras and other examples of the no less pious than wise belief of
the Middle Ages in Nemesis, forgets God and is stricken for his sin
with leprosy. He can only recover by the blood of a pure maiden; and
half despairing of, half revolting at, such a cure, he gives away all
his property but one farm, and lives there in misery. The farmer's
daughter learns his doom and devotes herself. Heinrich refuses for a
time, but yields: and they travel to Salerno, where, as the sacrifice
is on the point of completion, Heinrich sees the maiden's face through
a crack in the doctor's room-wall, feels the impossibility of allowing
her to die, and stops the crime. He is rewarded by a cure as
miraculous as was his harm; recovers his fortune, and marries the
maiden. A later termination separates them again; but this is simply
the folly and bad taste of a certain, and only a certain, perversion
of mediaeval sentiment, the crowning instance of which is found in _Guy
of Warwick_. Hartmann himself was no such simpleton; and (with only an
infinitesimal change of a famous sentence) we may be sure that as he
was a good lover so he made a good end to his story.

[Sidenote: _Wolfram von Eschenbach._]

[Sidenote: Titurel.]

Although German writers may sometimes have mispraised or over-praised
their greatest mediaeval poet, it certain that we find in Wolfram von
Eschenbach[119] qualities which, in the thousand years between the
Fall and the Renaissance of classical literature, can be