Waltharius et Hiltgunde, or simply Waltharius, a Latin poem of the tenth century in hexameter verse, and consisting of between fourteen hundred and fifteen hundred lines. Its authorship is unknown.
Walther von der Vogelweide, the greatest German poet of the Middle Ages. He was born about 1160, and died about 1230. He was of a knightly family, though poor, and much of his life was spent at the courts of several German princes and emperors. He wrote not only love-poems, but in the contest that went on between the imperialists and the papacy, he supported the side of the former in patriotic verses which had no slight influence upon contemporary opinion. Both for matter and manner he stood at the head of the poets called minnesingers.
Wernher the Gardener, a German poet of the thirteenth century, who composed, between 1234 and 1250, the story of Meier Helmbrecht. Nothing is known with certainty of his life.
Wolfram von Eschenbach, a German poet, of noble birth, of the latter half of the twelfth century and the beginning of the thirteenth. He died about 1220. His greatest work is the Parzival, which was completed about 1210. It was founded, according to his own statement, partly upon the Conte del Graal of Chrestien de Troyes, but more particularly upon the work of a poet whom he calls Kyot, who is supposed by some to be Guyot de Provins, whose romance of Perceval, not extant, is assumed to be the original of Wolfram's poem. Another of his poems was the unfinished Titurel, which contains the tale of the love of Schionatulander and Sigune.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Lit. Fam., iv., 1.
[2] Since this passage was written, I have met with the following extract from a letter of Tennyson's, dated in 1874, though with no direct reference to the experience being associated with nature: "All at once, as it were out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, the individuality itself has seemed to dissolve and to fade away into boundless being; and this not a confused state, but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, utterly beyond words, where death was an almost laughable impossibility, the loss of personality (if so it were), seeming no extinction, but the only true life."
[3] Any student of Dante, who recalls his lovely early sonnet, Guido, vorrei che tu e Lapo ed io, and compares it with Shelley's almost parallel conception of lovers sailing away in indivisible companionship, in the latter part of Epipsychidion, will obtain an excellent illustration of this same difference of feeling about the natural setting for a happy love. In Dante the sentiment is vague, and only what is peaceful, while Shelley's ideal haunt of lovers admits owls and bats with the ring-dove, an "old cavern hoar" left unadorned, mossy mountains, and quivering waves.
[4] We recall his great countryman's modern cry: "Wohin es geht, wer weiss es? Erinnert er sich doch kaum, woher er kam."