Abelard and Heloise write their letters--letters with a wonderful
outpouring of soul--in medieval Latin; and Abelard, though he composes
songs in the vulgar tongue, writes also in Latin those treatises in
which he tries to find a ground of reality below the abstractions of
philosophy, as one bent on trying all things by their congruity with
human experience, who had felt the hand of Heloise, and looked into her
eyes, and tested the resources of humanity in her great and energetic
nature. Yet it is only a little later, early in the thirteenth century,
that French prose romance begins; and in one of the pretty volumes of
the Bibliotheque Elzevirienne some of the most striking fragments of it
may be found, edited with much intelligence. In one of these
thirteenth-century stories, Li Amitiez de Ami et Amile, that free play
of human affection, of the claims of which Abelard's story is an
assertion, makes itself felt in the incidents of a great friendship, a
friendship pure and generous, pushed to a sort of passionate exaltation,
and more than faithful unto death.
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