Having been introduced to the worshipful order of vagrants both in
their collective and in their personal capacity, we will now follow
them to the woods and fields in spring. It was here that they sought
love-adventures and took pastime after the restraints of winter.
The spring-songs are all, in the truest sense of the word,
_lieder_--lyrics for music. Their affinities of form and rhythm are
less with ecclesiastical verse than with the poetry of the Minnesinger
and the Troubadour. Sometimes we are reminded of the French
_pastourelle_, sometimes of the rustic ditty, with its monotonous
refrain.
The exhilaration of the season which they breathe has something of the
freshness of a lark's song, something at times of the richness of the
nightingale's lament. The defect of the species may be indicated in a
single phrase. It is a tedious reiteration of commonplaces in the
opening stanzas. Here, however, is a lark-song.