rd came forth which was bidden, the crying of one that cried:

The sides of the two-edged sword shall be bare, and its mouth shall
be red,
For the breath of the face of the Lord that is felt in the bones of
the dead.

All this is indeed very grand compared with anything in the "Kalevala" or
in Longfellow's rendering; but do you not see that the grandeur is also
the grandeur of parallelism? Here is proof of what a master can do with a
method older than Western civilization. But what is the inference? Is it
not that the old primitive poetry contains something of eternal value, a
value ranging from the lowest even to the highest, a value that can lend
beauty equally to the song of a little child or to the thunder of the
grandest epic verse?

CHAPTER XIII

THE MOST BEAUTIFUL ROMANCE OF THE MIDDLE AGES

The value of romantic literature, which has been, so far as the Middle
Ages are concerned, unjustly depreciated, does not depend upon beauty of
words or beauty of fact. To-day the immense debt of modern literature to
the literature of the Middle Ages is better understood; and we are
generally beginning to recognize what we owe to the imagination of the
Middle Ages, in spite of the ignorance, the superstition and the cruelty
of that time. If the evils of the Middle Ages had really been universal,
those ages could not have imparted to us lessons of beauty and lessons of
nobility having nothing to do with literary form in themselves, yet
profoundly affecting modern poetry of the highest class. No; there was
very much of moral goodness as well as of moral badness in the Middle
Ages; and what was good happened to be very good indeed. Commonly it used
to be said (though I do not think any good critic would say it now) that
the fervid faith of the time made the moral beauty. Unless we modify this
statement a great deal, we can not now accept it at all. There was indeed
a religious beauty, particularly mediaeval, but it was not that which
created the romance of the period. Indeed, that romantic literature was
something of a reaction against the religious restraint upon imagination.
But if we mean by mediaeval faith only that which is very much older than
any European civilization, and which does not belong to the West any more
than to the East--the profound belief in human moral experience--then I
think that the statement is true enough. At no time in European history
were men more sincere believe