And clinging lust the world in its embraces;
The other strongly sweeps, this dust above,
Into the high ancestral places.
Yet in each soul is born the pleasure
Of yearning onward, upward and away,
When o'er our heads, lost in the vaulted azure,
The lark sends down his flickering lay."
The fantastic devotion to woman and the love for her at the time of the Minnesingers thus changed the entire life of the Teutonic race. Woman became the centre of the rich animated social circle. The love of woman controlled the hearts of the ruling class and the imagination of the poets. Her power in state, court, and home was firmly rooted and remained great, even though the golden sheen and glimmer of the period of the minnesong vanished after a few generations. Her legal status, too, was raised; she became equal, and in many respects superior, to man. If the basis of her existence was the house, the family, she was the ruler of the units of which the fabric of the state is composed. The sacred flame of the hearth was nourished by her; the children were in her safekeeping; in her eye and heart rested the blessing or the curse of home and state.
The love of woman, the life of minne, during that epochal era shines most brightly, though idealized, in the greatest lyric and epic poets Germany ever produced.
True poetry is, after all, the highest truth. To describe woman's life and love in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, we cannot do better than view her reflection in the mirror of that poetry of which she is the almost exclusive subject. The minnesong is the especial history of women. Elevation and degeneracy appear as clearly in poetry as in life. Woman, wine, and the eternal laws of nature are the essence of poetry. Poetry, on the whole, is the history of love in all its aspects, and minne is especially the soul of the Middle High German poetry, which, in spite of its brilliancy, is, alas! too self-confined in this one, though supreme, all-pervading emotion.