writers, who for one moral or spiritual sentiment have a hundred
sensuous images. And so in those imaginative loves, in their highest
expression, the Provencal poetry, it is a rival religion with a [216]
new rival cultus that we see. Coloured through and through with
Christian sentiment, they are rebels against it. The rejection of
one worship for another is never lost sight of. The jealousy of that
other lover, for whom these words and images and refined ways of
sentiment were first devised, is the secret here of a borrowed,
perhaps factitious colour and heat. It is the mood of the cloister
taking a new direction, and winning so a later space of life it never
anticipated.

Hereon, as before in the cloister, so now in the chateau, the reign
of reverie set in. The devotion of the cloister knew that mood
thoroughly, and had sounded all its stops. For the object of this
devotion was absent or veiled, not limited to one supreme plastic
form like Zeus at Olympia or Athena in the Acropolis, but distracted,
as in a fever dream, into a thousand symbols and reflections. But
then, the Church, that new Sibyl, had a thousand secrets to make the
absent near. Into this kingdom of reverie, and with it into a
paradise of ambitious refinements, the earthly love enters, and
becomes a prolonged somnambulism. Of religion it learns the art of
directing towards an unseen object sentiments whose natural direction
is towards objects of sense. Hence a love defined by the absence of
the beloved, choosing to be without hope, protesting [217] against
all lower uses of love, barren, extravagant, antinomian. It is the
love which is incompatible with marriage, for the chevalier who never
comes, of the serf for the chatelaine, of the rose for the
nightingale, of Rudel for the Lady of Tripoli. Another element of
extravagance came in with the feudal spirit: Provencal love is full