Thrushes, nightingales, we hear them singing; With their loud music mount and dale are ringing: For the dear summer is their jubilee: To you and me, It brings bright sights and pleasures without number; The heath is a fair thing to see.
"Dewy grow the meadows," cried a maiden, "Branches lately bare are greenly laden: Listen! how the birds are crowning May: Come and play, For, Wierat, the leaves are on the linden; Winter, I ween, has gone away.
"This year, too, we'll dance till twilight closes; Near the wood is a great mass of roses, I'll have a garland of them, trimly made; Come, you jade, Hand in hand with a fine knight you'll see me Dance in the linden shade."
"Little daughter, heed not his advances; If thou press among the knights at dances, Something not befitting such as we There will be Trouble coming to thee, little daughter-- And the young farmer thinks of thee."
"Nay, I trust to rule a knight in armor; How then should I listen to a farmer? What! you think I'd be a peasant's bride!" She replied: "He could never woo me to my liking, He'll never marry me," she cried.
At first Neidhart seems to have maintained friendly relations with the young men of the district, for we find him addressing in amicable terms even Engelmar, who later became his worst enemy, complimenting him upon his room, in a song apparently designed for a dance at his house. But it is difficult to believe that his critical genius would have gone long without expression, and he presently began amusing himself, and courting the admirations of others, by original snatches of songs that were imitated from the _trutzstrophen_ of humorous, rustic, and often roughly personal verses, that were evidently in vogue among the country people before Neidhart's day. Such jeering, gibing bits of peasant fun-making would grow out of the custom of songs at these rural gatherings, like the parallel practice sometimes found with us of country valentine-parties, where personalities are touched off with the freedom of anonymous and privileged license. We can readily imagine him beginning with hits at one and another, that contained no deeper offence than an inevitable tone of his amused sense of the ridiculous. But the country gallants, already jealous of their elegant rival, whose gentlemanly prestige and courtly accomplishments would naturally make him attractive to their sweethearts, would be quick to take umbrage, and boorishly ready to manifest their displeasure. Neidhart certainly enjoyed at least as much of the poetic dower as "the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn," and must have answered their sullenness and rudeness with the contempt that falls with such a sting from gentility. Then stung himself by their bad manners, he naturally composed sharper and more direct stanzas, holding those who had offended him up to the laughter of other men, and of the tittering damsels. It does not seem probable that the most cutting and individualized of these attacks were written to be sung at dances where the victims of the satire were present. When we consider the violence and recklessness that historically marked this whole class in the thirteenth century, we are sure that the poet would hardly have survived some of the recitations. Many of them he probably composed to gratify his possibly irritated mood; for, as we shall presently see, his displeasure was deeper than the vexation of wounded social pride. But they strayed easily to the objects of their ridicule. As he strolled along the street, carrying his fiddle, and stopping to amuse himself at one house or another with any of the pretty girls whom he found idle like himself, he may have played and sung the piece over which he had just been working, or the minor singers who must have haunted him as he grew better known, would catch up and repeat far and wide the witty verses. The piece at which he was working, I said, for in an important sense the poems were professional labor. The natural comparison of the minnesinger on his farm to Ovid among the Goths, loses most of its force when we reflect that Neidhart's absences from his various little Romes were in some sense at his own pleasure, and that he must have kept riding about from castle to castle, and have made frequent sojourns at his patron's court, in the exercise of his now established musical vocation. The better his songs, the surer his hold on the Duke's favor, and as his prestige might rise throughout the country, the more cordial his greeting would be, and the more generous his dismission whenever he chose to go. These mediæval poets were more than careless rhymsters: painstaking labor was assumed as necessary for success.