say that never has the human plaint been more agonized.

When we look through history, not to find accounts of battles or of the
succession of dynasties, but to try to grasp the evolution of ideas and
feelings, when we seek above all to discover the heart of man and of
epochs, we perceive, on arriving at the thirteenth century, that a fresh
wind has blown over the world, the human lyre has a new string, the
lowest, the most profound; one which sings of woes and hopes to which
the ancient world had not vibrated.

In the breast of the men of that time we think sometimes we feel the
beating of a woman's heart; they have exquisite sentiments, delightful
inspirations, with absurd terrors, fantastic angers, infernal cruelties.
Weakness and fear often make them insincere; they have the idea of the
grand, the beautiful, the ugly, but that of order is wanting; they fast
or feast; the notion of the laws of nature, so deeply graven in our own
minds, is to them entirely a stranger; the words possible and impossible
have for them no meaning. Some give themselves to God, others sell
themselves to the devil, but not one feels himself strong enough to walk
alone, strong enough to have no need to hold on by some one's skirt.

Peopled with spirits and demons nature appeared to them singularly
animated; in her presence they have all the emotions which a child
experiences at night before the trees on the roadside and the vague
forms of the rocks.

Unfortunately, our language is a very imperfect instrument for rendering
all this; it is neither musical nor flexible; since the seventeenth
century it has been deemed seemly to keep one's emotions to oneself, and
the old words which served to note states of the soul have fallen into