Assonance, more than any other kind of rhyme, is a matter of taste and of ear. To one hearer at one time it may be a delicate delight; to another at another time or even at the same time and in the same country — it is either unpleasant or imperceptible. That, however, it still has its uses in English verse is proved by the last extract, and by the combination of assonance and alliteration in the first stanza of Tennyson's The Lotos Eaters: "Courage,' he said, and pointed toward the land, "This mounting wave will roll us shoreward soon.' All round the coast the languid air did swoon, Although assonance in English, as a single rhyme-mark, would be monotonous enough, it retained a place in other nineteenthcentury poems, from Keats to Morris, in which a peaceful idyllic effect was desired. It is usually combined with liquids and soft end-rhymes in such a way as to give new effects of tone-color. The well-known rhyme-waywardness of Mrs. Browning was largely due to her assonantal rhymes, expressing her belief that too close a fettering of similar sounds is a loss to freedom of thought and to richness of verbal effect. Many rhymes ordinarily called "poor" are simply good assonances. Here, as in other verbal uses, it is the poet, and not the critic, who has the final say-so. "Only free, he soars enraptured." 1 See page 185. V END-RHYME WHENCE came end-rhyme, the one great mark of modern verse, a thing so prominent that it is used by Dante and Milton as synonymous with poetry itself? George Saintsbury, the latest, fullest, and most important historian of English prosody,' dismisses the question promptly enough: "Rhyme appeared, no one knows quite how, or why, or whence, and at the same time." Courthope, in his History of English Poetry, does not develop the subject at length, but favorably considers the theory that rhyme passed from Arabia into Europe. It is of course difficult to disprove the conjecture that Arab poetry may have influenced bards in Charlemagne's court, or Sicilians before Dante; but definite proofs of connection between this or that Arabian source and any European result are not discoverable.2 It seems more reasonable to conclude that end-rhyme appeared early, in 1 A History of English Prosody, from the Twelfth Century to the Present Day. Vol. I: From the Origins to Spenser; Vol. II: From Shakespeare to Crabbe. London: 1906-8. 2 Under the predecessors of Frederick II (1194–1250), king of Naples and Sicily, Arabian poetry was still composed; "but in the earliest Italian poetry it is impossible to find any traces of Arabian influence, which could no longer maintain itself against the popularity of the Provençal love-poetry."- History of Early Italian Literature to the Death of Dante; translated from the German of Adolf Gaspary by Herman Oelsner (London, 1901), 58. "Su lo scorcio del secolo duodecimo, vale a dire quando i Saraceni perseguitati sgombraron Palermo, cercando ricovero in Val di Mazara, la voce triste ed ardente della poesia araba di Sicilia improvvisamente s'estinse."-G. A. Cesareo: La Poesia Siciliana sotto gli Svevi (Catania, 1894), 7. Arabia, in accordance with natural laws of language and poetry, manifesting themselves independently in different countries.1 George Ticknor, whose History of Spanish Literature enjoys the unusual honor of being authoritative sixty years after its appearance, dismisses the Arabian theory as undeserving of serious consideration, and says that both rhyme and romantic fiction "are now generally admitted to have been, as it were, spontaneous products of the human mind, which different nations at different periods have invented separately for themselves." Again, he quotes approvingly a remark by August Fuchs that "rhyme lies so deep in human nature and in human language that it is as little worth while to discuss the origin of rhyme as the origin of singing or dancing"; and adds: "All nations have shown a tendency to it, in alliteration or otherwise❞— a conclusion which summarizes the argument of the present volume. The influence of Latin, after it developed end-rhyme, was unquestionably so great that many scholars seek no farther. Their conclusion may be summarized in the curt statement of C. F. Abdy-Williams: "Christianity introduced two new things into its music: the rhyme, and the singing of the prose words of Scripture. The rhyme was invented in the early days, and was used to attract the vulgar; and the setting of prose words to music was a novelty unknown to the ancient Greeks, who only sang poetry.2 1 "We have in it the strange phenomenon of a literature as perfectly popular in origin and use as our ballads, which yet obeys rigid norms of metre, rhyme, and form, and has crystallized into narrow conventionalities of structure. The poetry of Arabia of to-day is the same in all essentials as the poetry of Arabia before Muhammad. From the sixth to the twentieth century the stream has flowed unchanging.". D. B. Macdonald: The Nation, 79: 518-19. Professor Macdonald adds these valuable points in a private letter, from which I am permitted to quote: "I know of no direct evidence connecting European rhyming with that in Arabic. While there was evidently considerable interchange of stories and especially of Märchen — between Islam and Christendom, the types of poetry seem to have been too essentially different for the one to have affected the other. . . . Everything suggests that it [Arabian rhyme] runs back to the most primitive times. There is much very chaotic rhyme mostly vowel only in the Hebrew Old Testament, and rhymed prose seems to have been the original form of poetry in Arabic." 2 The Story of Notation. London, 1903. Guest is inclined to trace end-rhyme through Gothic and Latin back to Celtic Welsh, say of the sixth century; but Archbishop Trench says that it was autochthonic, at first with poor assonances instead of full consonances; the happy chances at length becoming an attainment. Ampere concludes that, beginning with St. Ambrose, it triumphed in the eleventh century; "Ce qui n'etait d'abord qu'une fantaisie de l'oreille a fini par devenir un besoin impérieux et par transformer en loi. Il n'est donc pas nécessaire de chercher d'autre origine à la rime; elle est née du sein de la poésie latine dégénerée." The Elizabethan critics of whom we shall see more in a later chapter- copied each other in saying that the "Goths and Huns" brought in end-rhyme; that is, Northerners given to alliteration spread end-rhyme before they had adopted it themselves. Omne ignotum pro magnifico. Guess-work concerning the origin of end-rhyme might easily be made to fill the remainder of this volume. A single illustration will show the extent to which theorizing has gone. On the basis of a few doubtful and a few unquestionable rhymes in Latin verse of presumably Irish authorship, George Sigerson makes the vast claim that St. Sedulius (Siadal), who is assigned to the middle of the fifth century, introduced from the Irish the terminal sound-echo or rhyme into Latin verse; and that the influence of his Carmen Paschale "must have been immense. The systematic adoption by its author of rhyme, assonant and consonant, and of alliteration, must have moulded the forms of subsequent literary production in all the nascent languages of Europe, north and south, as it taught them the art of alliteration, of assonant and of consonant rhymes." The whole field of literary criticism can hardly show so sweeping an assumption on so slight a basis. Sedulius was not even a significant pioneer. More sensible, because purely local, is Sigerson's statement, in the same article, that "In the Dan direach, or direct metre, of Old Irish, the lines had to have a certain number of syllables; in each quatrain of two couplets the sense might be complete in the couplet, but must be in the quatrain; two words in each line must begin with a vowel or the same consonant; the termination 1 The Contemporary Review, 62:510. required the final word of each couplet to be one syllable longer than the final word in the preceding line; and the final word of one line chimes with a central word in the next." What solid ground, if any, can be found in these shifting sands? I believe that rhyme, broadly defined as similarity of stressed sounds in significant places in verse, and followed as a natural evolution of man's desire for rhythmical expression, was certain to appear, and did appear, independently in many places, before and after the time when classical quantity was recognizable. Was rhyme a proof of a finer ear, or of the need of emphasizing thought by ruder means than those employed by the classical poets? It is certain that we know something about classical quantity, and it is equally certain that we do not know exactly how Homer or Horace sounded to a Greek or Latin hearer. Mitford, declaring that the harmony of quantity had vanished from all modern languages and that the harmony of quality had been substituted in most of them, said that it was absurd to pretend to a perfect pronunciation of a language no longer to be known but from books. Saintsbury doubts whether we really know anything about the pronunciation of Chaucer. Yet both quantity and rhyme are surely matters of pronunciation, and if they mean nothing, or are but miscellanies of uncertainties, we may as well throw all prosodies into the fire. What are the facts in the case? As regards modern rhyme, the conclusion of the best scholarship is as follows: There are, and always have been, three kinds of rhyme: alliteration, where initial consonant or vowel sounds are similar; assonance, where stressed included vowels are similar; and endrhyme, where the stress falls on final vowels, followed, if by any, by identical consonants. All have the same function, that of an agreeable emphasis upon important ideas, in accordance with a desire that is innate and universal, and independent of conditions of time or place. These three kinds of rhyme, then, are inherent in any language, and necessarily bound to appear, separately or in combination. In the ancient languages little was made of any one of them, though alliteration appeared in the oldest Latin verses; while, |