DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.3825#0101
GERMANY. 93
That God creating gave,
Save the two latest born,
Whom noblest, best, he framed ;
They spurn his high command,
And turn to folly's course.
In all this period it can hardly be supposed but
that the taste for popular poetry remained uneffaced
by the attempts made to divert it, and that it was
not confined to themes of martial enterprise. As
early as the reign of that gloomy monarch whom,
with the French, we have honoured with the title of
" Debonnaire," but whom the Germans more charac-
teristically called " the pious," it appears to have been
necessary to address a formal edict (see M. Schlegel's
lectures) to the German nuns, restraining the indul-
gence of their passion for myne-lieder, or love-songs.
Thus was the ground gradually preparing for that
bright harvest of lyric poetry which was so abun-
dant in the 12th and 13th centuries. That the seed
had been long and deeply sown, we cannot doubt:—
"II n'appartient qua Jupiter de faire sortir de sa
tete une Minerve toute armee," as M. Roquefort ob-
serves in the preface to his Glossary: yet we are
sometimes told that this early school of German
poetry was merely imitative, as arising out of the
alliance between the Suabianemperors and the princes
of Provence. It is easy, however, to see that the
same causes which aroused the mind in other coun-
tries, operated as powerfully in Germany (we might
That God creating gave,
Save the two latest born,
Whom noblest, best, he framed ;
They spurn his high command,
And turn to folly's course.
In all this period it can hardly be supposed but
that the taste for popular poetry remained uneffaced
by the attempts made to divert it, and that it was
not confined to themes of martial enterprise. As
early as the reign of that gloomy monarch whom,
with the French, we have honoured with the title of
" Debonnaire," but whom the Germans more charac-
teristically called " the pious," it appears to have been
necessary to address a formal edict (see M. Schlegel's
lectures) to the German nuns, restraining the indul-
gence of their passion for myne-lieder, or love-songs.
Thus was the ground gradually preparing for that
bright harvest of lyric poetry which was so abun-
dant in the 12th and 13th centuries. That the seed
had been long and deeply sown, we cannot doubt:—
"II n'appartient qua Jupiter de faire sortir de sa
tete une Minerve toute armee," as M. Roquefort ob-
serves in the preface to his Glossary: yet we are
sometimes told that this early school of German
poetry was merely imitative, as arising out of the
alliance between the Suabianemperors and the princes
of Provence. It is easy, however, to see that the
same causes which aroused the mind in other coun-
tries, operated as powerfully in Germany (we might