Again, the minstrel speaks out what many must have thought, in those incredulous ages of Faith, about Heaven and Hell, Hell where the gallant company makes up for everything.  When he comes to a battle-piece he makes Aucassin “mightily and knightly hurl through the press,” like one of Malory’s men.  His hero must be a man of his hands, no mere sighing youth incapable of arms.  But the minstrels heart is in other things, for example, in the verses where Aucassin transfers to Beauty the wonder-working powers of Holiness, and makes the sight of his lady heal the palmer, as the shadow of the Apostle, falling on the sick people, healed them by the Gate Beautiful.  The Flight of Nicolete is a familiar and beautiful picture, the daisy flowers look black in the ivory moonlight against her feet, fair as Bombyca’s “feet of carven ivory” in the Sicilian idyll, long ago. {4} It is characteristic of the poet that the two lovers begin to wrangle about which loves best, in the very mouth of danger, while Aucassin is yet in prison, and the patrol go down the moonlit street, with swords in their hands, sworn to slay Nicolete.  That is the place and time chosen for this ancient controversy.  Aucassin’s threat that if he loses Nicolete he will not wait for sword or knife, but will dash his head against a wall, is in the very temper of the prisoned warrior-poet, who actually chose this way of death.  Then the night scene, with its fantasy, and shadow, and moonlight on flowers and street, yields to a picture of the day, with the birds singing, and the shepherds laughing, in the green links between wood and water.  There the shepherds take Nicolete for a fairy, so bright a beauty shines about her.  Their mockery, their independence, may make us consider again our ideas of early Feudalism.  Probably they were in the service of townsmen, whose good town treated the Count as no more than an equal of its corporate dignity.  The bower of branches built by Nicolete is certainly one of the places where the minstrel himself has rested and been pleased with his work.  One can feel it still, the cool of that clear summer night, the sweet smell of broken boughs, and trodden grass, and deep dew, and the shining of the star that Aucassin deemed was the translated spirit of his lady.  Romance has touched the book here with her magic, as she has touched the lines where we read how Consuelo came by moonlight to the Canon’s garden and the white flowers.  The pleasure here is the keener for contrast with the luckless hind whom Aucassin encountered in the forest:  the man who had lost his master’s ox, the ungainly man who wept, because his mother’s bed had been taken from under her to pay his debt.  This man was in that estate which Achilles, in Hades, preferred above the kingship of the dead outworn.  He was hind and hireling to a villein,

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It is an unexpected touch of pity for the people, and for other than love-sorrows, in a poem intended for the great and courtly people of chivalry.