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4 the middle age, the poetry of Provence, and the magnificent aftergrowth of that poetry in Italy and France, which those French writers have in view when they speak of this Renaissance within the middle age. In that poetry, earthly passion, in its intimacy, its freedom, its variety—the liberty of the heart—makes itself felt; and the name of Abelard, the great clerk and the great lover, connects the expression of this liberty of heart with the free play of human intelligence round all subjects presented to it, with the liberty of the intellect, as that age understood it. Every one knows the legend of Abelard, that legend hardly less passionate, certainly not less characteristic of the middle age, than the legend of Tannhäuser; how the famous and comely clerk, in whom Wisdom herself, self-possessed, pleasant, and discreet, seemed to sit enthroned, came to live in the house of a canon of the church of Notre-Dame, where dwelt a girl Héloïse, believed to be his orphan niece, his love for whom he had testified by giving her an education then unrivalled, so that rumour even asserted that, through the knowledge of languages, enabling her to penetrate into the mysteries of the older world, she had become a sorceress, like the Celtic druidesses; and how as they sat together in that shadowy home, to refine a little further on