Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Lay of Our Lady
Among the men who stood between the two last periods as con meeting links, most of them already of the citizen class and men of learning - whereas, the Minnesinger of former times was an unlettered knight, with knowledge of little but the laws of rythm, rhyme, and metre and the games, sports and rules of his profession, but filled with unlimited devotion to woman - ranks foremost in the eyes of our own times no less than he ranked in those of his own age, which fairly worshipped him, Henry von Meissen, more generally known as Frauenlob, the Algernon Swinburne of his time, and the last of the Minnesingers. For, although he was neither a knight nor an adherent to the old form of the Minnesong, he yet retained the power of singing that old Minnesong in all its original simplicity and while in the might of his learning he, like the other poets of his time, preferred the regions of mystical lore or re?ective contemplation, as affording a wider scope for the display of his marvelous powers of versification and riches of mind, - the inimitable grace of that knight-minstrel's love-song would haunt his soul and peep out with strange bewilderment amid the im agery and lore of a new time. This new time was verily to it, the simple and clear, most strange and enigmatical. For it is a note worthy fact, to be verified also in the modern school of poetry - aye, and in the music of Richard Wagner as well, who in his art bears about a similar relation to Mozart, Gluck, and Beethoven, as the later Min nesinger did to the predecessors-that the third period of art-develop ment is usuallynccompanied by a tendency to mystical diction as wellas mystical imagery and lore. We find this exemplified even in the later times of Goethe's art-life. Thus that deep religious feeling of the Crusades, which had found so grand and charming a knightly Minnesinger expression in Eschenbach's famous romance of Sir Par rival, was clad by the later school of Frauenlob's time in all the subtleties, trickeries, seeming profundities, though often also marvel ously beautiful and appropriate figures, tropes and alliterated word plays of mysticism.
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