210 SKETCH OF THE STATE OF LITERATURE 
into his rural retreat the poetic fictions and “ reminiscences” of his 
youth. Denmark was led thus to change the Scandinavian idiom, 
by her vicinity to Germany, and by intercourse with other people ; 
and, of all the branches sprung from the same original language, 
the Danish has undergone the greatest alterations. In different 
parts of the kingdom, in Zealand, in Jutland, according to the dif- 
ferences of position and the diversity of external relations, the par- 
ticular dialects arose which afterwards yielded to the Zealandic, in 
the same way as those of the several provinces in Germany were 
superseded by the “ High German.”’ From the day when this 
separation from Iceland became manifest, when the subjects of the 
kings of Roeskild, the inhabitants of Ripen and Odensee, began to 
speak a language which their brethren in Iceland did not under- 
stand, from that day commences the history of Danish literature. 
In its early development, this Language was languid and slow. It 
must be closely traced through many ages, before the light breath 
of its vitality can be distinguished, the whispering of its tremulous 
voice can be understood. Whilst the young muse of the Middle 
Age awoke, amid the orange-groves of Provence and the oak-forests 
of Normandy ; whilst, on either bank of the Loire, were heard the 
plaintive lays of the love-tale alternating with the lore of moral 
minstrelsy ; whilst the spirit of poetry extended from clime to clime, 
penetrating into the warrior’s dwelling-place and the priest’s abode ; 
whilst the minstrels, the “ minnesingers,”* the Castilian bards with 
* The first poetry—the Provencal or Limosin—among the European ver- 
nacular languages, was formed on either side of the Pyrenean mountains, 
near the delightful domains of the Arabs, the imaginative creators of chival- 
ry. Sonnets, canzonets, tenzonets, idyls, villanescas, sirventes, madrigals 
and other forms of metrical composition, invented for witty questions and 
dialogues and envelopes for amorous epistles, gave occasion for a singular tri- 
bunal—the corte de amor—wherein ladies and knights, princes and kings, were 
concerned as parties and judges. Betore this court, the “ Gaya Ciencia,” 
the science of the troubadours, was originally established, as a pursuit of the 
higher nobility ; but, on its afterwards falling into the hands of contadores and 
truanes and bufones, the story-tellers and jesters and court-buffoons, it be- 
came despised, neglected, inexistent. In the days of its early flourishing, 
the Provengal poésy had a softly harmonious and pathetic style which tended 
to refine the language and to polish the manners of its votaries. As has been 
said, it was the general parent of all modern European poetry: that of 
Spain, France and Italy, arose as its daughters: by it, Petrarch was tu- 
tored; and of it, he was emulous: the Minnesingers of Germany were its 
remote and harsh echoes, though the softest of her language is unquestion- 
ably theirs. Like other modes of minstrelsy, however, it ultimately dege- 
nerated : with the vagrant jonyleurs of France and the vagabond meistersingers 
