which the narrowness of men's minds constantly tends to oppose
to each other, have a great stimulus for the intellect, and are
almost always worth understanding. It is so with this theory of a
Renaissance within the middle age, which seeks to establish a
continuity between the most characteristic work of that period,
the sculpture of Chartres, the windows of Le Mans, and the work
of the later Renaissance, the work of Jean Cousin and Germain
Pilon, thus healing that rupture between the middle age and the
Renaissance which has so often been exaggerated. But it is not
so much the ecclesiastical art of the middle age, its sculpture and
painting--work certainly done in a great measure for pleasure's
sake, in which even a secular, a rebellious spirit often betrays
itself--but rather its profane poetry, the poetry of Provence, and
the magnificent after-growth of that poetry in Italy and France,
which those French writers have in view when they speak of this
medieval Renaissance. In that poetry, earthly passion, with its
intimacy, its freedom, its variety--the liberty of the heart--makes
itself felt; and the name of Abelard, the great scholar and the
great lover, connects the expression of this liberty of heart with
the free [4] play of human intelligence around all subjects
presented to it, with the liberty of the intellect, as that age
understood it.

Every one knows the legend of Abelard, a legend hardly less
passionate, certainly not less characteristic of the middle age,
than the legend of Tannhauser; how the famous and comely
clerk, in whom Wisdom herself, self-possessed, pleasant, and
discreet, seemed to sit enthroned, came to live in the house of a
canon of the church of Notre-Dame, where dwelt a girl, Heloise,
believed to be the old priest's orphan niece; how the old priest