hands; and like one who sleeps walking, he was carried on into
the midst of his enemies, and heard them talking together how
they might most conveniently kill him.

One of the strongest characteristics of that outbreak of the reason
and the imagination, of that assertion of the liberty of the heart, in
the middle age, which I have termed a medieval Renaissance,
was its antinomianism, its spirit of rebellion and revolt against
the moral and religious ideas of the time. In their search after the
pleasures of the senses and the imagination, in their care for
beauty, in their worship of the body, people were impelled
beyond the bounds of the Christian ideal; and their love became
sometimes a strange idolatry, a strange rival religion. It was the
return of that ancient Venus, not dead, but only hidden for a time
in the caves of the Venusberg, of those old pagan gods still going
to and fro on the earth, under all sorts of disguises. And this
element in the middle age, for the most part ignored by those
writers who have treated it pre-eminently as the [25] "Age of
Faith"--this rebellious and antinomian element, the recognition of
which has made the delineation of the middle age by the writers
of the Romantic school in France, by Victor Hugo for instance in
Notre-Dame de Paris, so suggestive and exciting--is found alike
in the history of Abelard and the legend of Tannhauser. More
and more, as we come to mark changes and distinctions of temper
in what is often in one all-embracing confusion called the middle
age, that rebellion, that sinister claim for liberty of heart and
thought, comes to the surface. The Albigensian movement,
connected so strangely with the history of Provencal poetry, is
deeply tinged with it. A touch of it makes the Franciscan order,
with its poetry, its mysticism, its "illumination," from the point of