That bright candle mark, my son, While it burns, it wastes away; So from thee thy life doth run, (I say true) from day to day. In thy memory let this dwell, And life here so rule, that then With thy soul it may be well. What though wealth exalt thy name? Only this shall follow thee-- A linen cloth to hide thy shame.
These gnomic writings, running into a developed didacticism, are illustrated by the song of Walther von der Vogelweide on the restraint of eye, ear, and tongue. Whether this poet was the teacher of the young King Henry, as some have thought, or gained his experience in humbler ways, he evidently knew the trials of the pedagogue. "Oh, you self-willed boy," he cries, "too small to be put to work in the field and too big to whip, have your own way and go to sleep." As for flogging, this prince of the minnesingers took the side of the Matthew Feildes against the Boyers: "No one can switch a child into education; to those whom you can bring up well, a word is as good as a blow." Apropos of the teacher's view, we also find the pupil's feeling for his teacher recorded in that little poem of the English school-boy, who was late in the morning, and explained to the master that his mother told him to stop and milk the ducks. The boy recounts the details of what follows, and afterwards, instead of taking up his interrupted studies, he words out a day-dream in which the master is turned into a hare, his books into hounds, and the boy goes hunting.
There is a grain of humor, too, at least for the modern reader, in a much more sentimental child-play of the minnesinger Hadlaub. Though he mainly echoes the love singers who wrote a hundred years before him, one of the first songs in the collection of his poems raises a hope of something more than the ordinary, though this only leads us on to disappointment through the rest of his fifty-odd pieces. There is something very natural about this picture of the lover catching sight of his disdainful fair one playing with a little child. "She reached out her arms and caught it close to her, she took its face between her white hands, and pressed it to her lips and mouth and lovely cheek; ah, how deliciously she kissed it!" What did the child do? "Just what I should have done; threw its arms around her, and was so happy." When she let the little one go, the lover went after it and kissed it just where her lips had been, "and how that went to my heart!" Poor fellow! "I serve her since we both were children," and this is the nearest apparently that he ever came to the seals of love.