Page:The history of medieval Europe.djvu/464

 4 i4 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE Dante's Commedia is, as we have said, the greatest poem of medieval literature, but it is also one of the last, and we The last can see in it signs of decline. The troubadours medieval ^ a< ^ keen ^ °^ J°y * n this ^world and its birds literature and flowers and women; the chansons de geste had rung with the joy of battle and the vigor of manhood; the fabliaux had attested the crude vitality of the bourgeois. But Dante, deprived early of his beloved Beatrice, disap- pointed in the politics of his time, disgusted with the Papacy and despairing of the Empire of his day, and with no city that he can call his own, turns from this world to purify his own soul and to warn the society of his time by a picture of the consequences of sin and error, and to seek consolation in a survey of the great departed spirits of the past and of the glory of the world to come. He has lost the gaiety and self-confidence of the poets of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and in him the soul of the Middle Ages indeed "wears out the breast."