as gelf, roet unde bla,
grueen, in dem walde und anderswa
kleine vogele sungen da.
nu schriet aber den nebelkra.
pfligt s'iht ander varwe? ja,
s'ist worden bleich und uebergra:
des rimpfet sich vil manic bra."

Similar stanzas in _e_, _i_, _o_, _u_ follow in order.]

But to go through the nearly two hundred pieces of Walther's lyric
would be here impossible. His _Leich_, his only example of that
elaborate kind, the most complicated of the early German lyrical
forms, is not perhaps his happiest effort; and his _Sprueche_, a name
given to short lyrical pieces in which the Minnesingers particularly
delighted, and which correspond pretty nearly, though not exactly, to
the older sense of "epigram," seldom, though sometimes, possess the
charm of the _Lieder_ themselves. But these _Lieder_ are, for probable
freedom from indebtedness and intrinsic exquisiteness of phrase and
rhythm, unsurpassed, perhaps unequalled. To compare Walther to
Petrarch, and to talk of the one being superior or inferior to the
other, is to betray hopeless insensibility to the very rudiments of
criticism. They are absolutely different,--the one the embodiment of
stately form and laboured intellectual effort--of the Classical
spirit; the other the mouthpiece of the half-inarticulate,
all-suggesting music that is at once the very soul and the very
inseparable garment of Romance. Some may like one better, others the
other; the more fortunate may enjoy both. But the greatest of all
gulfs is the gulf fixed between the Classical and the Romantic; and
few there are, it seems, who can cross it.

[Sidenote: _Personality of the poets._]

Perhaps something may be expected as to the personality of these
poets, a matter which has had too great a place assigned to it in
literary history. Luckily, unless he delights in unbridled guessing,
the historian of mediaeval literature is better entitled to abstain
from it than any other. But something may perhaps be said of the men
whose work has just been discussed, for there are not uninteresting
shades of difference between them. In Germany, as in France, the
_trouvere-jongleur_ class existed; the greater part of the poetry of
the twelfth century, including the so-called small epics, _Koenig
Rother_ and the rest, is attributed to them, and they were the objects
of a good deal of patronage from the innumerable nobles, small and
great, of the Empire. On the other hand, though some men of
conseq