As in instrumental music, so in poetry: lesser details of pleasure-giving change with the centuries, but the aesthetic sense, and even the general methods by which it is addressed, remain the same. So, for twelve hundred years, the Englishspeaking world has been made better and more beautiful by the manifold service of rhyme.

APPENDIX

EXPERIMENTS IN RHYME

1

AMONG the many examples of rhyme-arrangement in stanzas considered in the present study, I have found none in which (1) only the first syllables of the lines rhyme; (2) only the middle syllables; (3) rhymes run down through the first and middle syllables, as well as the final; (4) the first and last syllables of the lines rhyme. For lack of illustrations of the effect of such arrangements I have made a few verses of my own, which the reader will please consider experiments, not poems.

The first, if read aloud, will probably leave on the hearer's ear an effect scarcely different from blank verse:

LOON LAKE

All the children of the northern wood
Call across the lonely inland lake:
Moose and caribou and deer and fox,
Goose and bittern, grouse and duck and jay.
Life is theirs, and days of forest joy,
Strife and love, and sunshine after rain.

Mark you that clear cry a mile away?
Hark! the loon, in laugh Aristophanic:
Ha ha ha ha! ha ha ha ha!

Who would not be glad on such a day?
Blue the sky, and fair the western wind,
Not a care to trouble bird or beast,

Spot that never knew the thought of woe.
Yet what wail of anguish do I hear,
Set to all the agony of the world?

Mark you that clear cry a mile away?
Hark! the loon, in chorus Eschylean:
Aaooa! aaooa!

1 See p. 73.

In the second, the rhymes at the strong caesural pauses are obvious enough, but the remainders of the lines seem like rather abrupt prose:

BOOKS IN THE DARK

I sit amid my books, as twilight deepens fast;

I know them by their looks, though now I cannot see
The titles that they bear, for who that loves his friends
Need have them always wear their names upon their backs?

That worn and rusty calf, how well I still recall

The dollar and a half it cost a Freshman's purse!

'T was thirty years last June, but Shakespeare's woodnotes wild Lose something of their tune in any book but that.

My Kelmscott Chaucer, bound by Cobden-Sanderson,
Sheds a pale glow around its regal rosewood shrine;
And yet I'd rather part with all its splendid state
Than tear from out my heart that Golden Treasury!

It was my noontide friend, you see, in schoolboy days,
When I had made an end of the Franconia books;
And if you chanced to see my pocket bulge still more,
The podgy cause would be Poe's poems, and my lunch.

And now the room is dark, save for a little glow
That shows a smouldering spark of life within the grate;
Just light enough to tell that on Ruth's table, there,
The book she loves so well, her pocket Browning, lies.

Yet very well I know, my thousand shelf-ranged friends,
That I could quickly go to each one in the dark.

You've lived with me so much that if, when eyesight fails,

I greet you by the touch you all will understand!

In the third, the ear catches both the internal- and the endrhymes, and may or may not perceive the rhyming of the first syllables:

NE PLUS ULTRA

Under the slope at the top of the hill,
Wonder and hope and expectancy still;

When on the height the whole view is revealed,
Then is the sight but of woodland and field.

In the fourth, I have found the result the most doubtful of all, some intelligent listeners failing to catch any rhyme, while others

have perceived it here and there, but without system. The four illustrations perhaps sufficiently show why none of the arrangements has ever approved itself to the poets:

THE FLOWER OF TIME

Primal chaos, ere the dawn of time,
Knew the law of order pulsing through;
Sun and star were severed, one by one,
World and moon on spheral pathways hurled.

Heaven and earth divided, and the seven
Days of God marched down the eternal ways;
Here the ocean shrank away in fear,
There the mountains climbed into the air.

When the grass and flowers were growing, then
Bird and beast in wildwood cry were heard;

Last of all, beneath the forest vast,
Man and maid in sportful joyance ran.

So the years of life began to flow,

Years of love and hate, of hopes and fears,

All the human happenings that fall,

Peace and war, and birth, and death's release.

Yet for one thing, one, earth waited, set
Longingly to look with yearning strong,

Flower that bloomed in time's last radiant hour,
You, all life's perfection, only you!