Spontaneous, genuine love, untainted by speculations and metaphysics, is found in the songs of the earlier troubadours. The greatest among all of them, Bernart of Ventadour, was the first to praise chaste love. If any champion of civilisation deserves a monument, it is this poet.
Dead is the man who knows not love, A sweet tremor in the heart.
Love's rapture fills my heart With laughter and sighs. Grief slays me a hundred times, Joy bids me rise.
Sweet is love's happiness, Sweeter love's pain. Joy brings back grief to me, Grief, joy again.
Guillem Augier Novella expressed the feeling of being "elated with exaltation and grieved to death" as follows:
Lady, often flow my tears, Glad songs in my mem'ry ring, For the love that makes my blood Dance and sing. I am yours with heart and soul, If it please you, lady, slay me....
Aimeril de Peguilhan is of opinion that the pain of love is no less sweet than the joy of love:
For he who loves with all his heart would fain Be sick with love, such rapture is his pain.
God keep my lady fair from grief and woe, I'm close to her, however far I go; If God will be her shelter and her shield, Then all my heart's desire is fulfilled.
My mind was erring in a maze, That hour I was no longer I, When in your eyes I met my gaze As in a mirror strange and shy. Oh, mirror sweet, reflecting me, Sighing I fell beneath your spell; I perished in you utterly As did Narcissus in the well.
In the same poem he goes on to say that he will ask for no reward, but finally concludes:
My fervent kisses her sweet lips should cover, For weeks they'd show the traces of her lover.
The German minnesinger, Heinrich of Morungen, called woman "a mirror of all the delights of the world," and sang:
Blessed be the tender hour, Blest the time, the precious day, When my brimming heart welled over, When my secret open lay. I was startled with great gladness, And bewildered so with love, I can hardly sing thereof.
The sensuous element still dominated Bernart and his contemporaries to some extent. In their poems, all of which are genuine and sincere, the longing for kisses, sometimes for more, is frankly expressed, but the tendency towards the not sensuous and super-sensuous is already apparent. The lover loves one woman only, and would rather love in vain, patiently enduring every pang she causes him, than receive favours from another woman, were she beautiful as Venus her self.