his "poor boxes."[1] Walther's hatred of the foreign Pope is roused at every point And at last, in a Spruch full of implied meaning, he declares that Christ's word as to the tribute money meant that the emperor should receive his royal due.[2]
These utterances, considered in the light of the political and racial situation, seem to deny, at least implicitly, the secular power of the papacy. Yet in matters of religion Walther apparently was entirely orthodox, and a pious Christian. He has left a sweet prayer to Christ, with ample recognition of the angels and the saints, and a beautiful verse of penitent contrition, in which he confesses his sins to God very directly—how that he does the wrong, and leaves the right, and fails in love of neighbour. "Father, Son, may thy Spirit lighten mine; how may I love him who does me ill? Ever dear to me is he who treats me well!"[3] Walther's questing spirit also pondered over God's greatness and incomprehensibility.[4] His open mind is shown by the famous line: "Him (God) Christians, Jews, and heathen serve,"[5] a breadth of view shared by his friend Wolfram von Eschenbach, who speaks of the chaste virtue of a heathen lady as equal to baptism.[6]
The personal lot of this proud heart was not an easy one; homelessness broke him down, and the bitterness of eating others' bread. Too well had he learned of the world and all its changing ways, and how poor becomes the soul that follows them. Mortality is a trite sorrow; there are worse: "We all complain that the old die and pass away; rather let us lament taints of another hue, that troth and
- ↑ 115, 116.
- ↑ 133. My statement of the opposition to the papacy might be much more analytical, and contain further apt distinctions. But this would remove it too far from the anti-papal feeling of the common man; and the period, moreover, is not yet that of Occam and Marsilius of Padua—as to whom see Gierke, Political Theories of the Middle Age, trans, by Maitland (Cambridge, 1900).
- ↑ 88, 137.
- ↑ 158. Walter shared the crusading spirit. The inference that he was himself a Crusader is unsafe; but he wrote stirring crusading poems, one opening with a line that in sudden power may be compared with Milton's
"Avenge, O Lord, Thy slaughtered saints."
"Rich, hèrre, dich und dine muoter, megede kint."167. See also 78, 79. - ↑ 87.
- ↑ Parzival, i. 824.
