Say, Love—for didst thou see her tears, etc.
The stanza beginning with this line stands thus in the original:
"Dilo tu, amor, si lo viste;
¡Mas ay! que de lastimado
Diste otro nudo a la venda,
Para no ver lo que la pasado."
I am sorry to find so poor a conceit deforming so spirited a composition as this old ballad, but I have preserved it in the version. It is one of those extravagances which afterward became so common in Spanish poetry, when Gongora introduced the estilo culto, as it was called.
Page [148].
LOVE IN THE AGE OF CHIVALRY.
This personification of the passion of Love, by Peyre Vidal, has been referred to as a proof of how little the Provençal poets were indebted to the authors of Greece and Rome for the imagery of their poems.
Page [149].
THE LOVE OF GOD.—(FROM THE PROVENÇAL OF BERNARD RASCAS.)
The original of these lines is thus given by John of Nostradamus, in his Lives of the Troubadours, in a barbarous Frenchified orthography: