He rode on through
the gates into the open plain beyond. But as he went, that great malady
of his love came upon him, so that the bridle fell from his hands; and
like one who sleeps walking, he was carried on into the midst of his
enemies, and heard them talking together how they might most
conveniently kill him.
One of the strongest characteristics of that outbreak of the reason and
the imagination, of that assertion of the liberty of the heart, in the
middle age, which I have termed a medieval Renaissance, was its
antinomianism, its spirit of rebellion and revolt against the moral and
religious ideas of the time. In their search after the pleasures of the
senses and the imagination, in their care for beauty, in their worship
of the body, people were impelled beyond the bounds of the Christian
ideal; and their love became sometimes a strange idolatry, a strange
rival religion. It was the return of that ancient Venus, not dead, but
only hidden for a time in the caves of the Venusberg, of those old pagan
gods still going to and fro on the earth, under all sorts of disguises.
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