made the Spanish lady who shared this spirit a guerdon to be won by
toils and blood and constant purity, rather than a chattel to be
bought for pleasure and service.

Germany did hot need to _learn_ a high view of Woman; it was
inborn in that race. Woman was to the Teuton warrior his priestess,
his friend, his sister,--in truth, a wife. And the Christian statues
of noble pairs, as they lie above their graves in stone, expressing
the meaning of all the by-gone pilgrimage by hands folded in mutual
prayer, yield not a nobler sense of the place and powers of Woman than
belonged to the _altvater_ day. The holy love of Christ which
summoned them, also, to choose "the better part--that which could not
be taken from them," refined and hallowed in this nation a native
faith; thus showing that it was not the warlike spirit alone that left
the Latins so barbarous in this respect.

But the Germans, taking so kindly to this thought, did it the more
justice. The idea of Woman in their literature is expressed both to a
greater height and depth than elsewhere.

I will give as instances the themes of three ballads:

One is upon a knight who had always the name of the Virgin on his
lips. This protected him all his life through, in various and
beautiful modes, both from sin and other dangers; and, when he died, a
plant sprang from his grave, which so gently whispered the Ave Maria
that none could pass it by with an unpurified heart.

Another is one of the legends of the famous Drachenfels. A maiden, one
of the earliest converts to Christianity, was carried by the enraged