Even more modern in sentiment are the following stanzas:
This is love's measure:
Two hearts and one pleasure,
Two loves one love, nor more nor less,
And both right full of happiness.
In woe one woe,
And neither from the other go.
Though Walter von der Vogelweide adopted the contemporaneous conception
of love as the source of everything good and noble ("Tell me what is
Love?") he never quite accepted it:
Love is the ecstasy of two fond hearts,
If both share equally, then love is there.
More ancient evidence even is the definition of marriage by the
scholastic Hugo of St. Victor, who had leanings towards mysticism:
"Marriage is the friendship between man and woman," he says.
My knowledge of the subject cannot, of course, be unexceptional, but I
do not believe that personal love of the third stage, that is, the
blending of both erotic elements, was quite definitely expressed before
the second half of the eighteenth century.
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