And halesome herbis upon stalkis greene;
Yet leaf nor flowr find could I none of rew.
I doubt that Merche, with his cauld blastis keene,
Has slain this gentil herb, that I of mene;
Whose piteous death does to my heart such paine
That I would make to plant his root againe,—
So comforting his leavis unto me bene.
And along with the influx of Anglo-French words further semantic changes were, of course, taking place in the more important Old English words. If there are occasions when a single word seems to throw more light on the workings of men’s minds than a whole volume of history or a whole page of contemporary literature, the Middle English love-longing is certainly one of them.
A new element had entered into human relationships, for which perhaps the best name that can be found is ‘tenderness’. And so—at any rate in the world of imagination—children as well as women gradually became the objects of a new solicitude. We do not find in all literature prior to the Middle Ages quite that pathetic sense of childhood which Chaucer has expressed so delicately in the story of Ugolino of Pisa in his Monk’s Tale:
But litel out of Pize stant[34] a tour