pentameter couplet, which lends itself almost equally well to description. Four-stressed measures, in iambic movement, befit the varied portrayals and suggestions of the genre of L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, as well as heroic-descriptive poems like Marmion, and quieter presentations such as Snow-Bound.) The Cotter's Saturday Night, not less than The Faerie Queene itself, employs one of the most elaborate modifications of Chaucer's Troilus stanza. The Spenserian stanza has again and again been used as the vehicle for translations of works as far removed from Spenser's "phantasmagoria" as is the Eneid. Elegies, while generally following slow iambic measures, are ode-like in their variety of rhyme-arrangement. (The drama, when employing rhyme, finds place both for the most variant lyrics and for the most mechanical end-stopped lines at the close of scenes and significant paragraphs. Blank verse builds the epic, and also philosophical poems like Thanatopsis, which, had it been written in the eighteenth century, would probably have been rhymed (as it was, in part, in its original form); while, on the other hand, the two authors of the Lyrical Ballads ranged all the way, in their respective masterpieces, from the stanza of The Ancient Mariner to the freedom of line-length and rhymedistance shown in the Ode on Immortality. All that we can assert with confidence is that dignity comports with iambic slowness and the masculine rhyme; while fancy may trip it as it goes, in a freer use of trochaics and feminine terminations. VI THE SHAPING OF ENGLISH RHYME THE writings wherein Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, found expression are, of course, of relative rather than absolute value. In the long period between the first English invasion of England (449) and the Norman Conquest (1066) four works or groups of works stand out, two in verse and two in prose, namely the paraphrases of Genesis, Exodus, and Daniel, connected with the name of the half-mythical Cædmon; the anonymous brief epic narrating the deeds of Beowulf; the translations, adaptations, or suggestions of King Alfred; and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Of the two original works in this scanty list, Beowulf possesses a rugged strength and an occasional aptness of descriptive phrase, chiefly due to the concise alliterative scheme which was the principal mark of Old English verse; but it is too often obscure, abrupt, or amorphous. As a landmark of language and life it is highly interesting; as a piece of literature one would gladly exchange it for a single modern English poem such as Tennyson's Merlin and the Gleam. The Chronicle, however, has the perennial importance of being the first Teutonic history in folklanguage; and the student of poetry finds in its heterogeneous contents some welcome bits of early battle-verse. In the whole body of Old English literature there is, it should be said, no uniformity of spelling, or of accentuation to indicate long vowels or differences of meaning; for there was nothing to be called, in any sense, a critical public or body of scholarship. In the time between the cessation of the Chronicle (1154) and the birth of Chaucer, the two most significant writings are, from the linguistic point of view, the Ormulum (New Testament stories with intricate mathematico-philosophical applications, written in lilting, unrhymed, seven-stressed verse by an ecclesiastic named Ormin); and from the literary, the prose Ancren Riwle, or Nun's Rule of Life (anonymous, and principally interesting as the earliest successful attempt, in Old or Middle English, to introduce extended figures of speech). But even when we have reduced early English literature to this meagre result, we must never forget that it was the first to emerge from the intellectual chaos following the decline of Greece and Rome. It is easy to criticise; it is hard to be a pioneer. England led, when for dreary centuries there was no worthy follower. Cadmon, who "flourished" about 670,1 was probably an inmate of the abbey of Streaneshalch; he was of humble — perhaps Celtic descent, and was not highly educated. Alfred, in his translation of Bede's history of religion in Britain, gives the following as the original of the hymn which Bede says Cædmon produced when supernaturally commanded to sing: "nu sculan herigean heofonríces weard, hé ærest sceóp eorðan bearnum heofon tó hrófe, hálig scyppend: þá middangeard moncynnes weard, éce drihten, æfter téode firum, foldan, fréa ælmihtig." Richard Garnett speaks of this famous bit as "Cadmon's undoubted poem"; and at least its genuineness has never been disproved. We are not here concerned with the question or the many questions as to Cædmon's part in the composition of the 1 Those who wish to hunt oldest English verse farther back into its fastnesses may turn to the gnomic verses in Brooke's Early English Literature, 10; or read the alliterative earth-charm which, according to Garnett (History of English Literature, I, 6–7) is "probably the oldest specimen of English extant": "Hal wes thu, folde, fira modor; Beo thu growende on godes faethma; tenth-century manuscript written by at least three scribes, and containing paraphrases of Genesis, Exodus, and Daniel, together with stories of the fall of the angels, Christ's temptation in the wilderness, his descent into hell, his resurrection and ascension, and the last judgment. Parts of these may have been based on Cadmon's work; some are poor enough; others have a native strength which has led enthusiastic scholars to find in them anticipations of Milton. The orthography is West-Saxon, not Northumbrian; the alliterative and other poetic marks are of the Anglo-Saxon, that is, of the early Teutonic, kind. Henry Bradley (in the Dictionary of National Biography) calls fragments 235-370 and 421-851 of Grein's edition - on the temptation and fall of man-essentially the product of Cadmon's genius. Perhaps this and the Old Saxon Heliand are translations and amplifications of lost verses by Cadmon. Some parts of the manuscript are rough, others smooth to the extent of monotony. Evidently we have in Cædmon an Old-English library of biblical tales, as confused with "sources" and "redactions" as the Bible itself, in the opinion of later critics. Meanwhile the student of poetics notes that the verse is trochaic rather than iambic; that it is often, as Saintsbury says, little more than a "sort of halfprose recitative"; and that alliteration compels a good deal of explosive parallelism. In Anglo-Saxon the half-line preferably, but by no means always, ends in a short syllable, aided by case-endings and verbforms. This end-mark, like that of the hexameter in classic languages, makes a good termination-sign. Some scholars, it will be remembered, think that the hexameter was originally an indefinitely long dactylic line closed by a trochee. The regular Anglo-Saxon four-measure line is 2:2, two measures in each half-line, with two letter-stresses in the first half and one in the second, the third letter-stress being the strongest, the first next, and the second weakest. Sometimes there is only one stress in the first half-line. Slurs always come at the beginning of the line or half-line; Cædmon puts them after the line-pause. Vigfusson, in the Corpus Poeticum Boreale, tabulates the descent of "Cadmon's Old Long Line" with impossible minuteOf course, in stressed alliterative verse there may be al ness. most every possible combination of stresses of identical or similar sounds, in lines long or short, repetitious or different, poetically exact or mere loose half-prose. Sometimes extra alliterations are not stressed; sometimes repeated words answer the alliterative purpose. Now and then a sort of two-line or couplet effect is given by the endings of sentences; this comes chiefly in dramatic or sententious verse. Perhaps two average lines, in any literature, are about enough for the full expression or turning of a thought. Like a trumpet-call was the outburst of the first lines of Beowulf (about 700 A. D.): "Hwæt! we Gâr-Dena in geâr-dagum gomban gyldan: pæt wæs gôd cyning! geong in geardum, pone god sende folce tô frôfre. fyren-pearfe ongeat, lange hwîle. Him pæs líf-freá, wuldres wealdend, worold-âre forgeaf. Beowulf was breme, (blæd wide sprang) Professor John Leslie Hall's excellent translation of Beowulf, which is alliterative but not line-for-line, retains much of the spirit as well as the form of the original, and may well be read by those unfamiliar with Anglo-Saxon. But I will give here Professor John Earle's prose version of the above nineteen lines of this "English epic of the fourteenth century," because of his rendering of the very first word: "What ho! we have heard tell of the grandeur of the imperial kings of the spear-bearing Danes in former days, how those ethelings promoted bravery. Often did Scyld of the Sheaf wrest from harrying bands, from many tribes, their convivial seats; the dread of him fell upon warriors, whereas he had at the first been a |