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Something that one still perceives
Vaguely present in the leaves;
Something from the worker lent,

Something mute-but eloquent.

In our country poets have contributed not a little to the graceful and spirited verse of culture. The wit of Dr. Holmes frequently played about social themes with good-humored sprightliness. The Last Leaf and Dorothy Q are all that society verse should be, and the Autocrat at the Breakfast Table is society verse in prose, if such a contradiction is admissible. Mr. William Allen Butler's Nothing to Wear is such kindly satire that, in spite of the moral earnestness of the close, it falls within the general definition. The author, too, seems thoroughly at home in the world he describes. Mr. Aldrich's poetry is always marked with distinction, polish, and urbanity. His Thalia is absolutely perfect, the acme of the poetry of culture. There is no poem in the language in which the contrast between worldliness and unsophisticated nature is more felicitously presented than in Mr. Stedman's Pan in Wall Street. Praed himself could not have touched the chord with more unerring perception, nor have put his rhymes. together with more delicate skill, albeit the meter is one which the English poet has made peculiarly his own. This and Dr. Holmes's Last Leaf touch high-water mark.

Our tendency to grotesque, ex

aggerated humor carries many of our lighter rhymes outside of the definition of society verse. Good-humored toleration of folly and readiness to catch the human features behind the mask of affectation and conventionalism is not a distinctive trait of men descended from Puritan ancestors. Consequently, the note of ridicule or of satire is sometimes heard instead of the kindly cynicism of one familiar with all the phases of society. Again, our past is not so picturesque as is that of England, and our social life lacks many of the class traditions that give perspective and color to an old civilization. Our "passing show" lacks longestablished associations, and it must be confessed is not so interesting and thought-provoking, nor amusing as is that of the mother country. A people which has originated the phrase the "strenuous life" and pronounces the word "hustle" with religious fervor, does not breathe the atmosphere of cultivated leisure in which delicate literary flowers bloom.

Nevertheless, an American anthology of fugitive verse might be compiled in which wit, sincerity, playfulness, and pathos should be commingled in just proportions. The compiler would draw on the work of Clinton Scollard and Walter Learned and George A. Baker and many others of less note, and could easily show that we are not unapt disciples of Prior and Praed and Austin Dobson.

CHAPTER VIII

THE FRENCH FORMS

THE rondel, the rondeau, the triolet, the villanelle, the ballade, and the chant royal are metrical schemes which were invented in France proper, that is in the northern part of what is now France, some of them as early as the thirteenth century. With them may be included the sestina invented in Provence in the first quarter of the thirteenth century. All of these are forms as strictly as is the Italian sonnet, indeed even more so, since the rhyme scheme is inflexible, although some latitude is allowed in the length of the lines. All except the last have been adopted by poets in the English language since the seventeenth century, although the number of rhyming words required is a serious obstacle to their general use. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Swinburne and Dobson in England, and Bunner and several other writers of light verse in our country, wrote a number of ballades, rondels, and rondeaux which have much of the grace and vivacity of the best French specimens. The allowance of identical terminals as rhymes in French poetry, as for instance all

words ending in té, like beauté, bonté, naïveté, etc., reduces materially the difficulty of finding the six or eight rhymes which several of the French forms require. All of these forms, especially the rondel, are well fitted to be the mold for light, gay sentiment. All of them are essentially French in character, artificial but not cumbrous, formal, but not stiff, graceful but not with the free unstudied grace of nature. All have the note of literary distinction, and are usually the vehicle of sentiment appropriate to vers de société or to the verse of culture.

The first mentioned, the rondel, contains like the sonnet, fourteen lines. Only two rhyming sounds are allowed, but as the first and second lines are used as a refrain, and repeated in the eighth and ninth and in the thirteenth and fourteenth, it is necessary to find two sets of five rhyming words only. Even this restricts the English writer to certain well-known groups. The refrain, which should be welded into the structure of the sentence, or at least not break the continuity of the thought, is a feature of all but one of the French forms, and frequently gives a very pleasing effect. The normal recurrence of the rhymes in the rondel is a-b-b-a-a-b-a-b-a-b-b-a-a-b, the first, the fourth, and the seventh a representing the same word, and the first, the fourth, and the seventh b, also standing for the same word, to which the others, represented by b, rhyme. Mr.

Dobson, who has succeeded better than any other modern in rendering these delicate forms in our language, deviates slightly from the French tradition in the arrangement of the rhymes, while retaining the refrain in the middle and end. His rhyme scheme is a-b-a-b-b-a-a-b-a-b-a-b a-b, involving two couplets less and more alternate. rhymes. One of his rondels will serve for an example:

Too hard it is to sing

In these untuneful times,
When only coin can ring,
And no one cares for rhymes.

Alas for him who climbs
To Aganippe's Spring:

Too hard it is to sing

In these untuneful times.

His kindred clip his wing,
His feet the critic limes;

If fame her laurel bring,

Old age his forehead rimes:
Too hard it is to sing

In these untuneful times.—

In some cases the first line only is repeated in · the refrain in the middle or even in both places, thus bringing the rondel down to thirteen or even to twelve lines. Mr. Swinburne's "roundel" is nearer to a rondeau than to a rondel. It consists of eleven lines rhyming a-b-a-b-b-a-b-a-b-a-b, lines

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