Taylor, Edgar [Hrsg.]; Austin, Sarah [Hrsg.]: Lays of the minnesingers or German troubadours of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries: Illustr. by specimens of the contemporary lyric poetry of Provence and other parts of Europe ; With histor. and crit. notes, and engravings from the ms. of the minnesingers in the king's library at Paris, and from other sources (London, 1825)

CASTILLE. 35

and since adopted by MM. Ginguene and Sismondi,
—that the Provencal poetry owes its origin to the
Spanish Arabs. Nothing is more annoying, than the
perpetual efforts of so many writers to hunt out fan-
cied origins for all the products of the imagination of
the middle ages, and to pass them from port to port
and country to country, like a bale of merchandize
or a price current. " Sans doute," M. Schlegel ob-
serves, in his ' Observations sur la Langue et la Lite-
rature Provencales,' " dans l'histoire de la civilisation,
il faut suivre avec soin les traces des communications
qui ont eu lieu entre differens peuples ; mais il faut
bien se garder de confondre les analogies qui ont
leur source dans la nature humaine, avec les ressem-
blances derivees de l'imitation. Si vous refusez la
puissance creative a l'homme presque dans tous les
siecles et dans tous les pays, si vous faites pour ainsi
dire la genealogie de toute activite intellectuelle, vous
rendez la premiere invention d'autant plus inconceva-
ble ; et vous avez cree une difficulte au lieu d'en re-
soudre une. Tous les peuples bien doues ont eu le
besoin et le gout de la poesie, elle s'est developpee
partout ou les circonstances ont ete propices."

Nothing, however, will satisfy the majority of these
distrusters of the powers of nature, but hunting out
the genealogical pedigree of every thought and feel-
ing : and in pursuing the inquiry, it has been quite of
course to overlook the philosophic maxim of resting
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