Page:Studies in the history of the renaissance (IA studiesinhistor01pategoog).djvu/27

Rh the nature of abstract ideas, 'Love made himself of the party with them.' You conceive the temptations of the scholar in that dreamy tranquillity, who, amid the bright and busy spectacle of 'the Island,' lived in a world of something like shadows; and how for one who knew so well to assign its exact value to every abstract idea, those restraints which lie on the consciences of other men had been relaxed. It appears that he composed many verses in the vulgar tongue; already the young men sang them on the quay below the house. Those songs, says M. de Rémusat, were probably in the taste of the Trouvères, of whom he was one of the first in date, or, so to speak, the predecessor; it is the same spirit which has moulded the famous 'letters' written in the quaint Latin of the middle age. At the foot of that early Gothic tower, which the next generation raised to grace the precincts of Abelard's school on the 'mountain' of Saint Genevieve, the historian Michelet sees in thought 'a terrible assembly; not the hearers of Abelard alone, fifty bishops, twenty cardinals, two popes, the whole body of scholastic philosophy: not only the learned Héloïse, the teaching of languages and the Renaissance; but Arnold of Brescia,—that is to say, the revolution.'

And so from the rooms of that shadowy house