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terrors of the tilt and the excitement of victory; her blue eyes were full of liquid glittering, and she bent forward in order to see the hero who had stirred her pity and terror, who had aroused within her the noble emotions of the mimic war. Next to her stood an old man, in the dress of a simple burgher. As the duke's long and admiring glance reached her eyes, she dropped them modestly, and blushing deeply, drew her hood over her fair auburn hair, and turned to the old man, taking his arm, and clinging closely to him. The duke felt in that brief moment a sensation strange and sweet. A something in the maiden's soul looked through her eyes, and struck upon his heart a spark of fine love. But many eyes were upon the royal victor of the tournament, and turning away with a sigh, he knelt mechanically, with abstracted thought, before the Queen of Beauty, and received the chaplet. Escaping as quickly as he could from the congratulations and compliments of lady and of knight, Duke Albrecht called to him his squire, Conrad, and bade him find out who the maiden was. The squire found many willing informants. The young girl was called Agnes Bernauerin, and was the daughter of a barber, or barber-surgeon. She was well known in Augsburg, and was popularly termed Angela," on account both of her rare goodness and surpassing beauty. Agnes was one of those women who are such perfect ideals of womanhood that they stand abstracted above rank, or position, or surroundings. Innate purity, delicacy, nobleness, shone through her beauty. Manner is the expression of inner grace and tenderness of feeling and of thought, and the pure and gentle Agnes might well have been a princess masquerading for the nonce in the kirtle and dress of

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a lowly burgher maiden. Her fame was spotless, and all Augsburg knew and respected the simple barbersurgeon's child. The Duke Albrecht visited her. In Agnes he found his ideal of womanhood; he found the one woman created for his heart to love. He understood why he had hitherto felt it impossible to love; he comprehended the miserhood of feeling which had compelled him to hoard affection until fate should show him the one being on earth created for his high idealising nature. He loved, according to his nature, with a strange, intense mixture of passion and of thoughtfulness. His fondness was blended with and intensified by analysis till thought only elevated impulse, and the impulses alike of soul and of sense were at once ennobled and deepened by sublimated thinking. To him, heir to a crown, came, in angel woman's guise, the highest happiness accorded to man—the happiness of a love worthy and perfect; of a love which blended into harmony the instincts of the heart and the dream of the imagination.

He, too, continued to Agnes her name of Angela. His love was rewarded by the deeper, if blinder, love of woman. She gave to him-not to the Duke Albrecht, but to the knightly ideal of her maiden dreamings-the whole love of her entire being. They were married privately. The happy duke bore his bride to his castle, and there, unmindful of court intrigues, or of his father's coldness, indifferent to the whole world without, the duke and duchess lived entirely for themselves and for their entrancing dream of joy-lived a life too near to the ideal of human bliss to be lasting. But they recked not of that. Each was all to the other. The present was so fair and so absorbing, that they blotted out the past and

heeded not the future. All excess of human joy is, generally, the forerunner of the extremity of human misery. Excess of the one is intended, perhaps, as a counter-balance to the other extreme, which, veiled as yet, is nevertheless approaching silently but surely. Meanwhile, hunting, singing, and loving ever, surrounded by Minnesänger and knightly friends, few but choice, the happy lovers turned the old Schloss into the home of love, of romance, of charm, and of a happiness which, if it could but last, would leave for humanity but little to hope for in the heaven to which human sorrow and human aspiration transfer their dreams of perfect beauty and unfading joy.

In the summer mornings, fresh and joyous, when the sun, that divinest of alchemists, turned all things to gold, and dewdrops into diamonds, there was tramp of horse, and bay of hound, and sound of horn, in the castle courtyard; and early rose the wedded lovers for the health-giving, exciting pleasures of the chase. Together rode the fair young duke and duchess, their fleet horses bearing them rushing through the morning breeze, while the blood bounded free through pulse and veins, and flushed the cheek and sparkled in the eye. They were young, joyous, happy. Noontide, and the soft languor of warm, still, windless, golden hours, brought their own pleasures; and then,

"When evening descended from heaven above,

And the earth was all rest, and the air was all love;
And delight, if less bright, was far more deep,
And the day's veil fell from the world of sleep;

then came the highest, tenderest, and most solemn joy, as, watching from the castle terrace moon and stars, and the dark blue heavens, Albrecht and Agnes felt something of the great mystery of great love. The

heart of man, when stirred to its depths, feels alike in every age and time. The feelings which take hue and form from the special and temporary surroundings of life, are but shallow and superficial. The disturbance of the waves extends but to a slight depth of the ocean; below that, remains ever

"Central peace,

Subsisting at the heart of endless agitation.”

And so the influences of our age affect our natures only to a limited depth: beneath that, man remains in all ages the same in essence and essentials.

It chanced, sometime after the marriage of Albrecht and Agnes, that a great tournament was held at Regensburg. The duke resolved to be present. It was the first occasion upon which he quitted his happy retirement; and he went, accompanied by his beautiful wife. Living entirely in seclusion, and wholly happy in her husband's love, Agnes had never yet felt the evils of her ambiguous position. Light tongues had been busy with her fair fame. In an age in which gallants, and especially royal ones, loved much par amours, it was not unnatural that her connection with the duke should be supposed to be an illicit one. Few believed her to be his wife, but although there was but little real indignation excited by the idea that he lived with a fair leman, his enemies at the court of Baiern-München were not unwilling to wound the duke through his love; and they determined to take advantage of his first appearance with her in public.

Innocent and happy, Agnes joyfully accompanied her lord to the jousts at Regensburg, believing fully that she went there as his wife, even if not recognised as his duchess. It was at another tournament, at

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that one held at Augsburg, in 1428, that they had first met and loved; and the fond young wife may have looked forward with delighted pride to the opportunity of again seeing her knight the victor of the lists. In those ages of war, women had to school their hearts to "buckle the spurs upon the heel" of warrior husband, or lover, and to send those whom best they loved forth to fame and to danger.

The morning of the tournament arrived. It was in spring, and the sun shone brightly, and the breeze blew merrily through the listed space. Tier over tier rose the seats for the highborn and the noble, for statesmen, courtiers, and for ladies; thickly swarmed the expectant people; royalty lent to the assembly the glitter of a crown; and womanhood displayed its fairest diadem in the Queen of Beauty and of Love.

Duke Albrecht, one of the most famous knights of his land and time, appeared in his golden armour, and displayed his well-known cognisance. Looking up to the bench at which sat his Angela, he rode through the barriers, and took his lance from his squire. While she was looking on he felt sure of victory, and he longed eagerly for the trumpet blast which would loose him upon his foe. As he sat thus upon his eager horse, the marshal of the lists approached, and in the name of the most high and puissant prince, his master, declared Duke Albrecht excluded from the tournament, wegen seiner Gemeinschaft mit einer Dirne, "because he came there companioned by a quean." The blow was unexpected, and for a moment seemed to paralyse the proud duke. He cast a hasty glance at the place where his Angela sat, and saw her cowering beneath the malicious glances of the

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