Page:Studies in the history of the renaissance (IA studiesinhistor01pategoog).djvu/35

Rh the moon which shone quietly in the sky. She walked as fast as she could until she came to the tower where Aucassin was. The tower was set about with pillars here and there. She pressed herself against one of the pillars, wrapped herself close in her mantle, and putting her face to a chink of the tower, which was old and ruined, she heard Aucassin crying bitterly within, and when she had listened a while she began to speak.'

But scattered up and down through this lighter matter, always tinged with humour, and often passing into burlesque, which makes up the general substance of the piece, there are morsels of a different quality, touches of some intenser sentiment, coming it would seem from the profound and energetic spirit of the Provençal poetry itself, to which the inspiration of the book has been referred. Let me gather up these morsels of deeper colour, these expressions of the ideal intensity of love, the motive which really unites together the fragments of the little composition. Dante, the perfect flower of that ideal love, has recorded how the tyranny of that 'Lord of terrible aspect' became actually physical, blinding his senses and suspending his bodily forces. In this, Dante is but the central expression and type, of experiences known well enough to the initiated, in that passionate