Page:History of the German people at the close of the Middle Ages vol1.djvu/264

252 HISTORY OF THE GERMAN PEOPLE CHAPTER VI POPULAE POETRY As we have shown, the fine arts, particularly music, were in their prime in Germany at the close of the Middle Ages. Poetry, however, in its limited sense must be excepted, although we should be wrong in concluding that all poetic inspiration had died away. A creative imagination, which is the fundamental prin- ciple of the poetic art, had already been at work in the soul-stirring impressions made by the masterpieces of the plastic art and in the wonderful musical compo- sitions. The material and form were alone different. Poetry at that time asserted her sway not in words, but in marble, in metal, in wood, in colour and in tone ; so when music, the forerunner of poetry in the gradual development of a people (inasmuch as it is the necessary accompaniment and inspirer of the drama and the epic), had reached such perfection, it left the hope that a new springtime of poetry as an art was at hand. 1 This hope had still firmer grounds. In the first blossoming time of literature the poetic art had been born of popular song ; in particular the grand, heroic epics of the native sagas had grown out of the national songs. National poetry, however, had been suppressed and arrested in its development by the learned and artistic poetic circles among the ecclesiastics and the 1 See Gervinus, li. p. 249.