These Latin poems of wandering clerks probably belong to the twelfth century, and though no doubt a product in which the whole of Europe had a share, their best pieces must be ascribed to a French hand.  Latin poetry lives again in them, with a freshness the Carlovingian Renaissance never reached; they are mediaeval in form, but full of a frank enjoyment of life and its pleasures, which hardly any northerner of that day possessed.  Often enough this degenerated into frivolity; but the stir of national awakening after the long sleep of the Middle Ages is felt like a spring breeze through them all.

It is a far cry from the view of Nature we saw in the Carlovingian monks, to these highly-coloured verses.  The dim light of churches and bare cell walls may have doubled the monks’ appreciation of blue skies and open-air life; but they were fettered by the constant fight with the senses; Nature to them must needs be less a work of God for man’s delight, than a dangerous means of seduction.  ’They wandered through Nature with timid misgiving, and their anxious fantasy depicted forms of terror or marvellous rescues.[3] The idyllic pleasure in the simple charms of Nature, especially in the monastery garden of the Carlovingian time, contrasts strikingly with the tone of these very mundane vagantes clerici, for whom Nature had not only long been absorbed and freed from all demoniac influence, but peopled by the charming forms of the old mythic poems, and made for the joy and profit of men, in the widest and naivest sense of the words.

Spring songs, as with the Minnesingers, take up most of the space; but the theme is treated with greater variety.  Enjoyment of life and Nature breathes through them all.

One runs thus: 

    Spring cometh, and the earth is decked and studded with vernal
    flowers.  The harmony of the birds’ returning song rouses the
    heart to be glad.  It is the time of joy.

Songs 98 to 118 rejoice that winter is gone; for instance: 

Now in the mild springtime Flora opens the lap which the cold frost had locked in cruel time of winter; the zephyr with gentle murmur cometh with the spring; the grove is clad in leaves.  The nightingale is singing, the fields are gay with divers hues.  It is sweet to walk in the wooded glens, it is sweeter to pluck the lily with the rose, it is sweetest of all to sport with a lovely maiden.

Another makes a similar confession, for Nature and amorous passion are the two strings of these lyres: 

Beneath the pleasant foliage of a tree ’tis sweet to rest, while the nightingale sings her plaintive song; sweeter still, to sport in the grass with a fair maiden....  O, to what changeful moods is the heart of the lover prone!  As the vessel that wanders o’er the waves without an anchor, so doth Love’s uncertain warfare toss ’twixt fear and hope.

The beauties of Nature are drawn upon to describe the fair maiden; her eyes are compared to stars, her colour to lilies and snow, her mouth to a rose, her kiss ’doth rend in sunder all the clouds of care.’