If minnesong had consisted simply of the crude sensualism of the Maysong, the gallantry of Ovid, and the compliments of a court-singer, it would not have survived to have a lasting effect on the literature of Europe. But a man did not live in the eleventh century or the twelfth for nothing: whether he were clerk or layman, he submitted to the feeling of the time that the 'eye of the heart' could see realities that the bodily eye could never find. St. Bernard and Bernard of Ventadorn were at one on this point. The thirtieth rule of Andreas Capellanus rested on it. The beautiful word Minne itself illustrates the history of the idea. The earliest singers of Germany do not use it; Friuntschaft and Liebe are their words for love. The root-meaning of minnen is to think of. Its gradual prevalence accompanies the transfer of sexual love into the spiritual life. The love of a lady whom the lover has never seen occurs in romantic literature every

where, from the Arabian Nights to the Nibelungenlied. In courteous love it became classic.

The dream was a glimpse of reality in the Middle Age. Monk or nun dreamed of salvation, often with an erotic tinge. Love in a dream was the lover's solace. The misery of waking life was felt alike by saint and by lover. The thought of death was familiar, and not unwelcome to both. Ovid had spoken in sheer rhetoric of dying for love; the mediaval lover was ready to die in earnest. The love of a dead lady was often sung, with a cast forward to Beatrice. Tears are an innovation of the courteous lover. They are shed not at all in Beowulf, but sparingly in the Nibelungenlied, and hardly oftener in the chansons and early epics. But St. Bernard and the troubadour weep freely. The mystic, whether in love or in religion, was subject to ecstasy. The Lancelot of Chrétien de Troyes was twice in great bodily peril because the sudden sight of his lady bereft him of attention to the rest of his environment. The way is being prepared for Dante's swoon at the marriage-feast. In a word, the mysticism of the troubadour, passing into Italy and there modified, was adopted by the dolce stil nuovo and reached its climax in the work of the great poet of the Middle Age.

I CAN remember very well the pang I felt when my mother first asked me if I would like to go to Germany.

What? Leave my school, my home, my friends, and go no one knew where? Why, Europe was a place you went to when you were grown up, or when you were at any rate through school, and no doubt then was very nice. Of course you would be glad to go there some time; just so you might like some day more distant to get to heaven; but I think any little girl might be disconcerted by so sudden a proposal. And then the vision flashed into my mind of that dear summer cottage on the great river, with the boats and the swimming and the picnics. I felt that I could not bear it.

'O mother, must I? Oh, please, not this summer!' I appealed.

'Well, dear,' said my mother, 'you could stay with grandmother, of course, you know.'

She was surprised, I think, and a little disappointed.

But the prospect of being left behind was too much for me, and I began to discover symptoms of a desire for Europe.

So in doubt and misgiving began the year that I must call beyond all others annus mirabilis, that long chapter of delight and wonder which, starting as a summer's outing, was to spread itself unaccountably over a whole delightful year. Reluctance had vanished with my first step on the great liner. We sailed for a port in Germany, but it was Fairyland that I set foot in when

we landed; surely in Fairyland, with its quaintly walled and towered cities, its princes and peasants, its black forests and enchanted mountains, that we traveled that summer. The Hartz, the Schwarzwald! No need to tell me that the fairy tales were born there; they were fairy tales of themselves. I have no space to dwell here on the vivid enchantment of those first few months abroad. I hardly knew that they were over when I knew also that they were to be followed by something yet more wonderful, a whole year in Germany.

--

My parents had decided to spend the winter in a great university town where my father wished to work in the libraries, and one of the minor questions to be decided was what should be done with me. I had been taught the violin at home, and of course I was to continue here at the famous Conservatory, or at least with one of its famous masters. This one proved to be Herr Konrad Ritter, youngest and not least brilliant of the reigning triumvirate of the violins; and I was soon running to and from the Conservatory with my violin tucked under my arm.

'Ritters sind doch reizend!' one of our German acquaintances had said to us; and charming they seem to my older judgment as they seemed to me then. He was not the blond Teuton of commonplace type. He was the type of South German that has, in common with Frenchman or Italian, a certain dark and fiery distinction. Mephistopheles they called him at the Conservatory, and the sobriquet was perhaps

invited by his dark good looks, his height, and his occasionally somewhat alarming irony. Indeed, with the red cap and feather, the mantle and sword, his tall figure would have been well suited to the famous rôle, - well suited if you had not seen the smile and the kind eyes that made the name so patently a misnomer.

Herr Ritter's wife was one of the most beautiful women I have ever known. She was tall and fair and slender, with hair like pale gold and eyes like blue stars, as a German poet might have put it, and she was very gentle and lovely. She might have stood for the Princess out of some German fairy tale. I have since supposed that she was very young (I knew of course that she was younger than mother, who was very old thirty-five at least), but to fifteen she seemed immeasurably remote, set in a starry heaven of her own.

It was through her and fortune that I was sent to my German school.

'Give her to Fräulein Schmidt,' said the beautiful lady when October was drawing on, and my mother asked her advice about the city schools. 'It is one of the greatest good fortunes of a girl's life to have come under her influence.'

'Is the school so fine?' asked my mother.

'Yes; but even if she learned nothing in the classes, she would have a liberal education in being with Fräulein Schmidt.'

My mother laughed a little. "That is saying a great deal,' she said. 'But if you are a sample of her products, I think she must try her hand on my little girl too.'

So presently, one golden September day, we went to see Fräulein Schmidt. There was nothing prepossessing, certainly, about a first view of her little domain. We entered an old house in

the Nordstrasse, climbed three flights of gloomy stairs, passed by the open doors of worn and dingy schoolrooms, and were shown at last into a quaint, sunny German salon, where a woman tall and large, a colossal woman, who might have weighed two hundred pounds, I thought, old, kindly, with a deep, sweet voice, welcomed us and talked with my mother. In earlier days she must have been of heroic mould. She had eyes black as sloes, eyes that could be sunshine or lightning, cheeks like a winter apple, and a great organ voice which could roll like thunder a terror to evil-doers! or soften to a caress. But this is what I learned afterwards. Now she patted me kindly on the head, asked me a few questions, and when I went away I was enrolled in the Höhere Töchterschule' of Fräulein Auguste Schmidt, and due to appear there next Monday morning at eight o'clock.

The ministrations of the German nurse whom I had had at home and detested heartily detested heartily-mea culpa, poor Helga!-made it possible now for me to enter a class with girls of my own age; and in the first class accordingly I presently found myself, to my mingled discomfiture and satisfaction, the only foreigner in a group of girls who seemed to me formidably big and tall and clever. Here I spent a silent and unhappy morning, spoken to pleasantly indeed by my neighbors and then promptly forgotten. How quickly and readily they recited! Then, when the books were opened and the pens came out, what terrifying speed of dictation! How well they spoke French! And how many things they knew that I had never even heard of! Could I ever, ever, keep up with them? My only ray of comfort was a momentary feeling of superiority in the English class. After all, they too were mortal.

Noon came at last, and the girls

poured out chattering and laughing, and I went out, too, hardly daring to hope that any of them would speak to me, much less walk with me. But they were merry, kindly souls for the most part, and two of the very nicest, two that I had looked at longingly during my lonely morning, fell in with me at once as I started off, and walked home with me all the way.

Dear Else and Grete! I wish across all the years these pages might bring you any sense of the grateful love of your little American friend. For thus began the friendship that was to be so happy during all that happy year, and so many years afterwards. From that day all was well with me at school. I was no longer alone: I had friends, I was accepted as a comrade. Fräulein Schmidt and the other teachers were 'sehr rücksichtsvoll mit dem kleinen Fremdling,' and all was very good and very happy.

My new friends, as it turned out, lived only a few doors from me, and we used almost daily to walk the two miles to and from school together. This was all very well in the pleasant autumn weather, but not so pleasant in the bleak North German winter, with its short days, its cold and snow and fog. We lived across the city from the school, in the new quarter, and walking, as we always did, even by the shortest cut through the Altstadt, meant starting at half-past seven, often with the streetlamps still lighted and no sign of dawn in the sky. How often there would be no time to sit down to the table and I would have to run off with a buttered roll in my hand, my only breakfast! My father would butter that 'Brödchen,' and have it ready for me when I was late, and I would nibble it as I ran down the street, for was not Else waiting under the street-lamp at the corner? Or, if it were lighter, the heavy fog would perhaps shut down so close that people

in the streets would seem like shadows walking, and crossing the great Markt one would plunge into a gray, shoreless sea of mist, with the gables of the old Gothic Rathhaus standing out, gray, too, and weatherbeaten, like rocks in the storm.

It is strange how those mornings impressed me, for I suppose they were not so very many out of the year. In the afternoons, however, I remember no fog or snow, though the dusk fell early, but clear bright skating weather, with all the world on the ice in the Johanna Park, the band playing on the Island, the ring and whirr of skates, and the gay crowd of skaters swinging round and round beneath the bridges. Here around a curve a group of tall officers and pretty ladies would be dancing a quadrille or waltzing on the ice; here some students, with the colored caps above their scarred faces and the Corps ribbons crossing their breasts, would skate swiftly, four or five in line; there again some long-haired musicians, with brigandish slouch hats and wrapped in Italian-looking cloaks, would sweep gravely by,- old and young, children and their grandparents making one party often in the simple, happy enjoyment that the Germans know so well, and that our nation has lost the secret of. And then perhaps

oh joy! - would come Frau Ritter, the beautiful lady, tall and queenly, looking like the Snow Princess in her white furs, with her tall foreign-looking husband, Mephistopheles indeed, but for the smile and the friendly eyes. And perhaps for a crowning happiness, while Frau Ritter was claimed by some handsome officer, Herr Ritter, a wonderful skater, would take me once or twice around the ice, or show me strange curves and figures that I would try in vain to imitate; for our relations with the Ritters were growing more and more friendly.

'Is n't Mariechen enchanted with Fräulein Schmidt?' said Frau Ritter to my mother, when my mother was one day taking tea with her in her charming apartment.

'Ah, but is n't she enchanted with Herr Ritter?' my music-master had cut in mischievously; and truth compelled my mother to declare that whatever my feeling was for Fräulein Schmidt, I was certainly entzückt' with Herr Ritter.

I can still remember my hot embarrassment when mother repeated this anecdote at home.

From the first I had regarded him with a dog-like devotion, and as I look back I can only be grateful to him for so much patience and kindness with a stupid child. Docile I was and plodding, quick enough to understand and to feel, sometimes with a dash of something mysteriously called temperament; but some obstacle seemed to be set between brain and fingers; there could have been little enough reward even on the best days for the pains of an ambitious teacher, and reward of other sorts (for American prices had not yet invaded Germany) was almost ludicrously small. Some days indeed that obstacle seemed to vanish; all would go well, and Herr Ritter's 'Na, liebes Kind, es war gar nicht schlecht,' would send me home walking on air. But other days everything would go wrong, and that kind patience would give way. He would sit back wearily with his arms folded while I blundered through my carefully practiced exercises, his black eyes sparkling dangerously, his moustache curling like a great cat's.

'Aber, lieber Himmel, das ist ja bodenlos! das ist zur Verzweiflung!' he would cry, springing up and towering furiously over me, when with stolid exterior but growing terror I had repeated the same mistake for perhaps the tenth time. I would struggle on for

a moment desperately; then came the frightful climax, 'Sapperlot, Mariechen, was machst du denn?' And with a savage, 'Schau' doch mal her!' he would snatch the violin out of my guilty hands and mimic with terrible veracity what I had done. I draw the veil over such horrors. If I were asked to specify the worst moments of my life, I should undoubtedly have to include those imitations. Then, softening at my evident distress: 'So war's nicht? Und jetzt höre!' And the violin would sing under his hands, beautiful, clear, true tones that made the commonest exercise pure music.

But I would go away sounding black depths of despair that I did not know existed; not so much, I think, because I had been stupid at my lesson as because forsooth I had displeased Herr Ritter.

Luckily that valley of humiliation could be trodden at most only twice a week, and there was time between for recovery. And I was not stupid for Fräulein Schmidt. The rapid dictation that had seemed so terrifying the first day, I grew to take with mechanical ease and accuracy. I had a quick verbal memory, and I could memorize the lesson as fast and as well as anybody.

'So, mein Kind, es war recht gut,' Fräulein Schmidt's deep, kind voice had said after my first much-dreaded little recitation. 'Willst du weiterfahren, Else?'

Grete patted me under the desks, and the ordeal was over. After that everything was easy; and with my mind freed from anxiety over myself and my limitations, I was able to throw myself into the interest, keen always, often absorbing, of those wonderful literature lessons, the lessons of one of the most inspired and inspiring teachers it has ever been my fortune to know.

Her methods, I suppose, would sound strange to American ears. About