Page:The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).djvu/318

276 Here is a girl deploring the absence of her lover:

Here are words of consolation, addressed to a lover:

What gives these verses their abiding womanly charm is their spontaneous tenderness, their simplicity devoid of all pomp and pretension. Christine was content to follow the inspiration of her heart. But this is also the reason why her poems so often show the defect, characteristic of the poetry and music of all epochs of feeble inspiration, that of exhausting all their vigour in the opening lines. How many poems do we find with a fresh and striking theme, which begin like a blackbird’s song, only to lose themselves in thin rhetoric after the first stanza! The poet (or in music, the composer), after stating his theme, had