It was then that the domestic passion, love, rose into dignity.  Homage to woman assumed the potency of an idea, chivalry arose, and its truth, honor, and obeisance were the first social responses from mankind to Christianity.  The castle was the emblem and central figure of the time:  it was the seat of power, the arena of manners, the nursery of love, and the goal of gallantry; and around it hovered the shadows of religion, loyalty, heroism.  Domestic events, the private castellar life, were thus exalted; but they could hardly suffice to engross and satisfy the spirit of a warrior and crusader.  A new diversion and excitement were demanded, and soon, in response to the call, minstrels began to roam from castle to castle, from court to court, telling long stories of heroism and singing light songs of love.  A spark from the Saracenic schools and poets of Spain may have flitted into Provence to kindle the elements of modern literature into its first development, the songs of the Troubadours.  Almost contemporary were the lays of the Minnesingers in Germany and the romances of the Trouveres in Northern France.  Beneath the brooding spirit of a new civilization signs of life had at length appeared, and Europe became vocal in every part with fantastic poems, lyrical in the South, epical in the North.  They were wildly exuberant products, because severe art was unknown, but simple, naive, and gay, and suited to the taste of a time when the classics were regarded as superstitiously as the heavens.  Love and heroism, which somehow are the leading themes of literature in all ages, now assumed the chivalric type in the light hands of the earliest modern poets.

Yet these songs and metrical romances were most inadequate representatives of the undeveloped principles which lay at the root of Christian civilization.  Even Hellenic genius might here have been at fault, for it was a far harder task to give harmonious and complete expression to the tendencies of a new religion and the germs of new systems, than to frame into beauty the pagan clear-cut conceptions.  The Christian mind awoke under a fascination, and, for a time, could only ejaculate its meanings in fragments, or hint them in vast disproportions, could only sing snatches of new tunes.  Its first signs were gasps, rather than clear-toned notes, after the long perturbations and preparations of history.  The North and the South, the East and the West had been mingled together; the heated and heaving mass had been tempered by the leaven of Christianity:—­and had all this been done only to produce an octo-syllabic metre in praise of fantastic and semi-barbaric sentiments and exploits?  Had there been such commotions of the universe only for a song?  Surely these first creations of art, these first attempts at literature, these first carvings of a rude spiritual intensity, were only such as the Greeks may have forgotten any quantity of before Homer came, their first glory and their oldest reminiscence.