r
husband never to mind if she stays with her lover that night, for the
night is very short, and he, the husband, shall have her back
to-morrow!

And besides the morality, perverse or touching, the quaint manners,
the charming unusual names or forms of names, Oriour, Oriolanz,
Ysabiaus, Aigline,--there are delightful fancies, borrowed often
since:--

"Li rossignox est mon pere,
Qui chante sur la ramee
el plus haut boscage;
La seraine ele est ma mere,
qui chante en la mer salee
el plus haut rivage."

Something in the very sound of the language keeps for us the freshness
of the imagery--the sweet-briar and the hawthorn, the mavis and the
oriole--which has so long become _publica materies_. It is not
withered and hackneyed by time and tongues as, save when genius
touches it, it is now. The dew is still on all of it; and, thanks to
the dead language, the dead manners, it will always be on. All is just
near enough to us for it to be enjoyed, as we cannot enjoy antiquity
or the East; and yet the "wall of glass" which seven centuries
interpose, while hiding nothing, keeps all intact, unhackneyed,
strange, _fresh_. There may be better poetry in the world than these
twelfth and thirteenth century French lyrics: there is certainly
higher, grander, more respectable. But I doubt whether there is any
sweeter or, in a certain sense, more poignant. The nightingale and
the mermaid were justified of their children.

It is little wonder that all Europe soon tried to imitate notes so
charming, and in some cases, though other languages were far behind
French in development, tried successfully. Our own "Alison,"[131] the
first note of true English lyric, is a "romance" of the most genuine
kind; the songs of Walther von der Vogelweide, of which we have also
spoken, though they may rise higher, yet owe their French originals
service, hold of them, would either never or much later have come into
existence but for them. An astonishing privilege for a single nation
to have enjoyed, if only for a short time; a privilege almost more
astonishing in its reception than even in itself. France could point
to the _chansons_ and to the _romances_, to Audefroy le Bastard and
Chrestien of Troyes, to Villehardouin and Thibaut, to William of
Lorris and John of Meung, to the _fabliaux_ writers and the cyclists
of _Renart_, in justification of her claims. She shut them up; she
forgot them; she sneered at them whenever the