similarities of sound between whole feet occurring in the body of a line." He also perceived that the refrain was a kind of rhyme, alliterative or other. To some ears, however, alliteration is an intrusive discordance. "As soon," says Tom Hood the younger (in The Rhymester), "as alliteration attracts the reader's attention as a tour de force it is a blot. . . machinery instead of matter." The same rhymer thinks that the chief drawback of English as a poetical language is the preponderance of consonants; while, on the contrary, another critic assures us that likeness of neighboring consonant sounds, if not too frequent, is an element of beauty. Who shall decide? Meanwhile, the general public holds to alliteration in many a pun or proverb, book-title, or newspaper head-line. One hears daily such expressions as "neither chick nor child"; "without fear or favor"; "to have and to hold"; "house and home"; "kith and kin"; "neither rhyme nor reason"; "safe and sound"; "time and tide"; "watch and ward"; "wind and weather”; “wit and wisdom," etc. There is also a survival of pleasure, a thousand years after the Anglo-Saxon time, in any mere vowel alliteration, such as "end and aim"; "ever and aye," etc. "How dear to humanity," says John Earle, "is the very jingle of his speech; and how he loves, even in his riper age, to keep up a phantom of that harmony which in his infancy blended sound and sense in one indistinguishable chime!" IV ASSONANCE ASSONANCE, to the English ear, is but half-rhyme, and is likely to be either imperceptible or intrusive. Notwithstanding its effective use by a few of our poets, it plays so small a part in English verse that any discussion of it must be brief. To some extent assonance is common to all languages, and is bound to appear accidentally. When it is used consciously, as a means of increasing the hearer's poetic pleasure, it becomes a rhyme-art. "Vowel-rhyme" is a better synonym for assonance than "middle-rhyme," for the latter term is sometimes applied to “internal rhyme," i. e., a syllabic group in the middle of a line rhyming with one at the end. Assonance was common to all early Romance tongues, and, in particular, is a distinguishing mark of Spanish. To some extent it took the place, in Romance poetry, of alliteration in Teutonic. In general, it differed from Teutonic vowel-correspondence in that corresponding rhyming vowels were usually both preceded and followed by consonants, as in the English height: shine. An interesting specimen of twelfth century Latin assonance is cited by D. Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo in Vol. XI of the Antología de Poetas Líricos Castellanos (Madrid, 1903). It was, he says, first noted in 1827 by the "ilustre humanista hispano-americano D. Andrés Bello," who found it in a Vida de la Condesa Matilde, of monastic authorship: "Auxilio Petri jam carmina plurima feci, Paule, doce mentem nostram nunc plura referre, Ticknor, in his History of Spanish Literature, rejects attempts to trace assonance to Latin or Anglo-Norman sources, but calls it, like end-rhyme, an indigenous development. He thinks early assonance, in other than Spanish tongues, due to accident (like occasional end-rhyme in Virgil, etc.), or caprice, or unsuccessful attempts at end-rhyme. The Spanish consonante was our English end-rhyme; the asonante something between our blank verse and rhyme. Castilian abounds in vowels, and always gives the same values to the same vowels. Thus even Spanish prose is easily turned into an eight-syllabled assonant ballad measure, which is a natural and obvious verse-form in the language. In the older ballads, as for the most part since, assonance appeared in every other line. After the first, u and o, i and e, ui and u, etc., were considered proper assonances. Ticknor takes as characteristic the following from a ballad by Gongora (which he accompanies by a translation from The Retrospective Review not worth reprinting here; it reads like a poor paraphrase from Hiawatha, and the assonance would not be noticed, without explanation, by one English ear in a thousand): "Aquel rayo de la guerra, De la fortuna y el tiempo," etc. In general, Ticknor considers futile the attempt to transfer Spanish assonance into English or German, for the Teutonic ear does not apprehend it, like the Castilian. But he singles out for special praise Dennis Florence McCarthy's assonant translations of two plays and an auto of Calderon's: Love the Greatest Enchantment, The Sorceries of Sin, and The Devotion of the Cross, calling them the boldest attempts ever made, in English verse, and remarkably successful: "Nothing, I think, in the English language will give us so true an impression of what is most characteristic in the Spanish drama-perhaps I ought to say, of what is most characteristic of Spanish poetry generally." To poet and hearer in Spanish, Provençal, or Old French, assonance sounded sufficiently strong to bind together this or that portion of the verse. Saintsbury calls it a fore-echo of rhyme; but the statement is chronologically inaccurate, as assonance was insignificant in classical prosody, delicately attuned as it was to a fine quantity lost to modern ears; while alliteration was in full vigor before assonance made any large mark. Indeed, regular Castilian assonance was preceded by sporadic cases of endrhyme. To Mitford, the earliest important English writer on the melody of language, considered comparatively, Italian and Spanish seemed "the fairest daughters of the Latin." But assonance is of little importance in Dante and his followers; so that of all modern tongues Spanish alone retains it as the distinguishing mark of poetry. In early abandonment in French-the oldest French metrical romances were assonanced — is a sign of its lack of catholic adaptability. But of its charm in Spanish many have spoken. "Spanish lyric poetry," said the delighted Mitford, "wants less assistance from that coarse ornament [end-rhyme] than other modern European tongues." In early English verse assonance was never important. In the border ballads, as in nursery jingles and crude careless verse to-day, it was either incidental or used as a substitute for more finished rhyme by 'prentice hands. In ballads and morality-plays the pronunciation was forced, for the sake of the rhyme, in almost every way; any similarity answered the purpose. Whether contemporary hearers of "Merie sungen the muneches binnen Ely Roweth cnihtes neer the land And here we thes muneches sang " thought that the two last lines were assonance or end-rhyme cannot now be told. It is hard to tell why some assonances are agreeable, like "The lowing herd winds slowly o'er the lea," while "The breezy call of incense-breathing morn," in the same poem, is disagreeable to many modern ears, grown increasingly fastidious in this matter. Assonances in adjoining lines, as in Keats' Ode to Psyche, evidently aroused no objection in the poet's mind, but do not seem admirable to most critics to-day: "And in the midst of this wide quietness With the wreath'd trellis of a working brain, With buds, and bells, and stars without a name, Who breeding flowers, will never breed the same." A similar assonance may be found in the closing lines of Wordsworth's sonnet on the sonnet: "a glow-worm lamp, It cheered mild Spenser, called from fairy-land The thing became a trumpet, whence he blew Whatever may be said for assonance, this line in William Watson's Lachrymae Musarum can hardly be called felicitous: "Bright Keats to touch his raiment doth beseech;" while in the following, from The Hidden Servants, by Francesca Alexander, where identity is added to assonance, the fault becomes unendurable: "Our Master said that a service done Is done to himself in very deed And is with love by himself received! A good example, in English, of the intentional use of unaided assonance is to be found in the lyric by George Eliot in The Spanish Gypsy, where she experimented with the Spanish national form of rhyme. The song undoubtedly gives pleasure to the English ear, which catches its melody before analyzing the source of satisfaction: |