The Bridegroom stood in the open door,

And he was clad in white,

And far within the Lord's supper

Was spread so long and bright.

The Bridegroom shaded his eyes and looked,
And his face was bright to see;
"What dost thou here at the Lord's supper
With thy body's sins?" said he.

'Twas the soul of Judas Iscariot
Stood black, and sad, and bare,

"I have wandered many nights and days, There is no light elsewhere."

'Twas the wedding guests cried out within, And their eyes were fierce and bright; Scourge the soul of Judas Iscariot

66

'Twas the Bridegroom stood at the open door,

And beckoned smiling sweet;

'Twas the soul of Judas Iscariot
Stole in, and fell at his feet.

"The Holy supper is spread within,
And the many candles shine,
And I have waited long for thee
Before I poured the wine."

The supper wine is poured at last,
The lights burn bright and fair;
Iscariot washes the Bridegroom's feet,
And dries them with his hair.

As the ballad is a Teutonic form and has grown up among English-speaking people, it is germane to our race. A versified incident told with directness, simplicity, and rapidity, and appealing to the primitive emotions only, is sure to please even the modern generation. It has more affinity to our spiritual natures than descriptive or reflective verse has. Bret Harte's John Burns at Gettysburg and Whittier's Barbara Frietchie are ballad-like in form, and in them poetry has its true character as a social force, something not confined to the cultured, but appealing to the people through an ancestral form. It must be a matter of regret that ballad composing and singing is not more general than it is among our people. With us the production of oral, popular poetry has largely taken the form of composing and singing hymns, which being confined to a narrow range of emotion, lack the germinal and developing power of ballads. For this very reason the study of the old ballads is especially valuable to Americans.

The impulse which a true poet feels to speak directly to his fellow-men and not merely through books to the few, the consciousness that poetry is a broadly human expression, inspired the following sonnet by Hartley Coleridge:

Could I but harmonize one kindly thought,
Fix one fair image in a snatch of song

Which maids might warble as they tripped along,

Or could I ease the laboring heart o'erfraught
With passionate truths for which the mind untaught
Lacks form and utterance, with a single line;

Might rustic lovers woo in phrase of mine,
I should not deem that I had lived for naught.
The world were welcome to forget my name,

Could I bequeath a few remembered words
Like his, the bard that never dreamed of fame
Whose rhymes preserve from harm the pious birds,
Or his, that dim full many a star-bright eye
With woe for Barbara Allen's cruelty.

CHAPTER III

THE SONNET

THE sonnet is in every regard different from the ballad. It is of a fixed length and meter, fourteen iambic pentameters. It is a foreign importation and has been used exclusively by the literary class; the ballad is indigenous and belongs primarily to the people. The sonnet is never recited or sung, though its Italian original, "sonnetto," means little song, and there are no anonymous sonnets. But as the sonnet form has been used with brief intermissions in our language since the sixteenth century and since the thirteenth century in Italy, it, too, has stood the test of time, and if it does not contain any popular quality, must have in itself an element of artistic perfection.

The rules of the construction of a pure or Italian sonnet are: Ist. As said above, it must consist of fourteen five-accent lines of ten syllables each. 2d. It must be divided metrically into two parts; the first or octave - or octette — is made of eight lines, rhyming a-b-b-a-a-b-b-a, the remaining six lines, the sextette, rhyming in any fashion on either two or three terminals, as, c-d-c-d-c-d, or c-d-e-e-d-c.

There are several other admissible arrangements in the octave, but the pure sonnet must be as above. The rules for the logical construction are less positive. They are: The octave should terminate with a period. It should make the statement or contain the description from which the sextette draws the conclusion or reflection. Many of Milton's and Wordsworth's sonnets do not observe this last rule; the conclusion is sometimes confined to the two or three closing lines or left to the reader. But the best effect is attained when the logical divisions correspond nearly to the metrical divisions. The following sonnet by Blanco White illustrates the principle, and was ranked very high by Coleridge:

NIGHT

Mysterious Night! when our first parent knew
Thee from report divine and heard thy name,
Did he not tremble for this lovely frame,
This glorious canopy of light and blue?
Yet 'neath a curtain of translucent dew,

Bathed in the rays of the great setting flame,
Hesperus with the host of heaven came,

And, lo! creation widened in man's view.

Who could have thought such darkness lay concealed Within thy beams, O Sun! or who could find Whilst flower and leaf and insect stood revealed

That to such countless orbs thou mad'st us blind! Why do we then shun death with anxious strife? If Light can thus deceive, wherefore not Life?