sputoisons" or debates, to which kind belongs the well-known song of
"transformations" introduced by Mistral in his "Mireio," and set to
music by Gounod; "aube" songs, telling the complaint of lovers, parted
by dawn, and in which, long before Shakespeare, the Juliets of the time
of Henry II. said to their Romeos:

It is not yet near day;
It was the nightingale and not the lark.

Il n'est mie jors, saverouze au cors gent,
Si m'ait amors, l'aloete nos ment.[199]

"It is not yet near day, my sweet one; love be my help, the lark lies."
In these songs, the women are slight and lithe; they are more gentle
than doves; their faces are all pink and white: "If the flowers of the
hawthorn were united to the rose, not more delicate would be their
colour than that on my lady's clear face."

Si les flurs d[el] albespine
Fuissent a roses assis,
N'en ferunt colur plus fine
Ke n'ad ma dame au cler vis.[200]

With these songs, Love ventures out of castles; we find him "in cellars,
or in lofts under the hay."[201] He steals even into churches, and a
sermon that has come down to us, preached in England in the thirteenth
century, has for text, instead of a verse of Scripture, a verse of a
French song: "Fair Alice rose at morn, clothed and adorned her body; an
orchard she went in, five flowers there she found, a wreath she made
with them of blooming roses; for God's sake, get you gone, you who do
not love!" and with meek gravity the preacher goes on: Belle Alice is or
might be the Virgin Mary; "what are those flowers," if not "faith, hope,
charity, virginity, humility?"[202] The idea of turning worldly songs
and music to religious ends is not, as we see, one of yesterday.

Tristan has led us very far from Beowulf, and fair Alice leads us still
farther from the mariner and exile of Anglo-Saxon literature. To sum up
in a word which will show the difference between the first and second
period: on the lips of the conquerors of Hastings, odes have become
_chansons_.

V.

Nothing comes so near ridicule as extreme sentiments, and no men had the
sense of the ridiculous to a higher degree than the new rulers of the
English country. At the same time with their chivalrous literature, they
had a mocking one. They did not wait for Cervantes to begin laughing;
these variable and many-sided beings sneered at high-flown sentiments
and experienced them too. They sang the Song of Roland, and read wi