El cuento septenario es de grant santidad.—Berceo, Loores 143a. There are in Berceo's verses besides the prevailing Alexandrine half-lines of seven syllables a few hemistichs of five, six, eight, nine, and even ten syllables. These may be considered as due to the alterations and mistakes of the copyist. Such is the position taken by Fitz-Gerald in his critical edition of La Vida de Santo Domingo de Silos and in his treatise on the versification of the same work. He is supported by Henríquez Ureña, who finds the regularity of Berceo quite exceptional in Old Spanish poetry, and who believes him to be the only versifier we can call correct from the Cid to D. Pero López de Ayala. Others, not finding credible this unique position of the poet, may care to see in his lines traces of the tendency to ametric verse that is supposed to have influenced all the other writers of the cuaderna vía stanza. A third position has been championed by Lang, who, remaining silent about the odd lengths other than those of eight syllables, affirms “that no convincing argument has as yet been advanced against the thesis that Gonzalo de Berceo admitted the native octosyllable quite as much as the other authors of the cuaderna vía.”

By the end of the fourteenth century the institution of chivalry seemed more brilliant than ever before. It had covered itself with glory during the long years of the struggle between France and England, numbering among its heroes such exemplars of knighthood as the Black Prince and King John of France, Sir John Chandos and Bertrand du Guesclin. During the lull that occurred in the last years of the century, monarchs and princes, freed from the galling restrictions of war, vied with one another in the great mediæval pageant, the tournament; court life under the youthful Charles VI in extravagant reaction to the bourgeois régime of Charles le Sage, was once more aristocratic and magnificent; knights rode gaily forth on expeditions against the infidels or wandered off to foreign lands to join in jousts and tourneys.

In British Museum Addit. MS. 34360 on folio 22 occurs one stanza of rime royal entitled “The question of halsam.” It is smooth in meter, well-balanced in thought, and practically perfect in stanza form, comparing very favorably in these respects with other minor lyrics of the early fifteenth century. The popularity of this poem is attested by its presence in many manuscripts of that century and by the fact that Caxton printed it together with a second seven-line stanza also ascribed to Halsham. Both of these lyrics are found in Bodley 3896, f. 195a (MS. Fairfax 16), which affords not only the earliest, but the most authentic text of these pieces:

The worlde so wide / thaire so remuable
The sely man / so litel of stature
The grove and grounde / of clothinge so mutable
The fire so hoote / and subtil of nature
The water neuer in oon / what creature
That made is of these foure / thus flyttyng
May stedfast be as here / in his lyving

The more I goo / the ferther I am behinde
The ferther behinde / the ner my wayes ende
The more I seche / þe worse kan I fynde
The lighter leve / the lother for to wende
The bet y serve / the more al out of mynde
Is thys ffortune not I / or infortune
Though I go lowse / tyed am I with a Lune

Some time during the first half of the fifteenth century there came into being a new type of sonnet the existence of which writers of Italian manuals of versification have either overlooked, ignored, looked upon as an isolated phenomenon, or connected with other devices that bear to it but a remote historical relationship. The most immediate model of this new form is the sonetto equivoco—a favorite artifice from the first century of Italian literature to the end of the Trecento—in which the rime equivoche of the simple variety are extended to all of the fourteen verses. Petrarch's Quand'io son tutto … is the best known example of a sonnet with equivocal rime words.

The question I propose to discuss is that of the autobiographical element in Sidney's sonnet sequence, Astrophel and Stella. The discussion appears in all the older important studies of Sidney: those of Grosart, Symonds, Pollard, Fox-Bourne, Lee, Drinkwater, and Wallace, as well as in the two recent biographies by Miss Denkinger and Mrs. Wilson, and the study by Dr. Purcell. But the verdict of these critics is divided. Also in my belief I have found certain new and valid arguments that the sonnets are not autobiographical; that is, that they do not record a deeply felt love of Sidney for Stella.

Students of Elizabethan sonnet literature have been aware of general resemblances between Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophel and Stella and Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke's Cælica, but no one has ever printed a full comparison of the two sonnet sequences. That we might expect to find some resemblances between the works of Greville and Sidney could be implied from what we know of the close relationship of the two men. The title-page of the 1633 edition of Greville's works describes them as “written in his youth and familiar exercise with Sir Philip Sidney.” Greville and Dyer were Sidney's closest literary friends, both sharing equally Sidney's books at his death. Greville was a member of the Areopagus, whatever its nature might be; and he and Sidney entered Shrewsbury School on the same day, and left college and went up to Court together. One of Greville's greatest boasts was his friendship with Sir Philip. It is not surprising, therefore, that when Sidney started to write a sonnet sequence Greville should follow suit, for the two men's interests were much the same. The similarities of Astrophel and Stella and Cœlica are the natural results of the poets' friendship.

The teasing sense of mystery felt by the student of the biography of Spenser is nowhere more noticeable than with regard to the Shepheardes Calender. C. H. Herford's statement is still too near the truth:

Except that the authorship is absolutely certain, posterity knows very little more about the circumstances in which the Shepheardes Calender was composed than “E. K.” has chosen to tell us.

In modern English usage, the term elegy bears a distinct connotation of threnody: broadly, it indicates any funeral poem or lament for the dead; more precisely, it describes a lengthened, dignified poem which either mourns reflectively for a deceased person or broods with a more inclusive sorrow over the tragedy men encounter in living. In this narrower sense, the elegy is a reflective lyric, suggested by the fact or fancy of death. The emotion, personal or public, finds utterance in keen lament, to be allayed, however, by tranquil consideration of the mutability of life, the immutability of Something which justifies life and death;

or, in the words of Edmund Gosse, it is a poem of lamentation and regret, called forth by the decease of a beloved or revered person, or by a general sense of the pathos of mortality…. It must be mournful, meditative, and short without being ejaculatory.

The documentary value of the Mercure galant, the review founded in 1672, which La Bruyère considered to be “directement au-dessous de rien,” has not ceased to increase with the passage of time. Interspersed among frivolous poems, conundrums, descriptions of festivals and of styles, one finds announcements of new books, of military campaigns, and (what interests us here particularly) accounts, often filled with picturesque detail, of the foundation and the sessions of literary bodies organized in the provinces in the seventeenth century, in imitation of the French Academy. Some of these still have vigorous existence. In most instances, the Mercure is the chief source of information on these early years, and, strangely enough, has been neglected by the historians of the provincial academies.

One of the most puzzling of literary problems is the fact that John Milton, though unquestionably one of the world's great poets, spent the prime of his life in writing chiefly prose. By 1640 he had written some poems which the world has not willingly let die. But with the exception of a few sonnets (many of which are occasional poetry or mere society verse) he wrote hardly any poetry from 1640 to 1658—that is, roughly, between the ages of thirty and fifty. A careful reading of his History of Britain, however, sheds some light on this situation and reveals an important trait of Milton's which is seldom fully recognized. Coming to the History of Britain with no preconceived notion of Milton's character or purpose, one is increasingly impressed with the idea that for Milton the writing of poetry was unusually difficult, and that his mind tended more naturally to prose criticism. (I hope soon to publish a study of Milton's satire which will support this view.) To say that Milton was no poet or that poetry can be defined only as the product of un trammeled fancy is ridiculous; it is a bent, a matter of degree rather than of kind. But there is some justification for thinking of Milton as a reluctant poet.

A comparative study seems to show that Castiglione's Latin pastoral elegy, Alcon, is more closely related to Milton's Epitaphium Damonis than to Lycidas, which has often been mentioned in connection with the Italian poem. This paper undertakes only to set forth the parallels between Alcon and the Epitaphium, not to reach any absolute conclusions as to the extent of Milton's dependence.

Something of a literary sensation in its day (1737), as well as a mystification, Gaudentio di Lucca has fallen into a state of progressive neglect that threatens to become oblivion. Students of utopian schemes of social organization seem to have forgotten its existence. Recent historians have either ignored it entirely or have accorded it only cursory attention. “Interesting from a certain oddity and air of ‘key’ about it rather than from much merit as literature,” is the verdict of Professor Saintsbury; while Professor Elton concedes that its author had some invention and color, and that his “ ‘news from nowhere, ‘unlike many fictions of the kind, includes adequate police intelligence.”

The good ship Rosamond first appeared in an account of Burns's life in the spring of 1828, when Constable & Co. issued a Life of Robert Burns, by J. G. Lockhart, LL.B., as Volume XXIII of their Miscellany of Original and Selected Publications. Inevitably Lockhart had based his biography upon Dr. Currie's, which since its appearance in 1800 had run through many editions, and had carried Burns's fame to virtually all parts of the English-speaking world. But Lockhart, working under the eye of his distinguished father-in-law, was not content merely to rehash old material. Though modestly stating that his purpose was “no more than to compress, within the limits of a single small volume, the substance of materials already open to all the world,” he admitted that “little touches of novelty” might be discovered in his narrative, particularly in the chapters dealing with Burns's later years. Robert Chambers, whom Lockhart characterized as a “diligent local antiquary of Edinburgh, to whom I owe many obligations,” had passed on to the biographer whatever he had gleaned from conversation with Burns's surviving acquaintances; William M'Diarmid, editor of the Dumfries Courier, had supplied other “particulars”; Allan Cunningham, who shared with James Hogg the honor of Lockhart's dedication, was the authority for still more new matter; various unpublished journals and letters were also laid under contribution. The total result was a picture of Burns recognizably like Dr. Currie's, but tricked out with such a wealth of anecdotal novelty that the subscribers to Constable's Miscellany must have been well aware that here in truth was an “original” and not merely a “selected” publication. And in this original publication everything concerning the Rosamond was new.

Joseph Ritson's antiquarian interest was of early inception. From his school days in Stockton, he had been interested in history, old songs, and ballads. This interest continued throughout his life. It resulted in a series of publications ranging from the history of certain legal offices, through British topography and royal geneology, to old English and Scottish songs and ballads. In all this work he was careful to use the oldest manuscripts and sources he could find: he showed amazing diligence in searching out original documents. His editing was in accord with modern practice: it did not suffer from the misleading procedure of such editors as Percy. He was extremely critical of the treatment of texts by his contemporaries, and justly deserves to be called the watchdog of English scholarship.

In Box 18 of the “Ludwig Tieck-Nachlass” in the Preussische Staatsbibliothek, Berlin, we find, in Tieck's hand, on six quarto leaves, an unfinished essay entitled Über das Erhabene, dated 1792. It has never been published and is barely touched upon in the voluminous literature on Tieck, although it is not without significance in the long series of critical works for which its author is famed.

In an article Poetry of Sensation or of Thought? I attempted to show how Endymion and Hyperion: A Fragment are related to the æsthetic problem that Keats first analyzed in Sleep and Poetry. At that time I suggested that the Odes and Lamia, following as they do the abandoning of Hyperion: A Fragment, are the outpourings of a mind released at last from the self-imposed duty of writing a poetry of humanitarian philosophy and allowed to indulge its creative genius for the poetry of sensation. It was my contention (and still is) that Keats had been trying to force himself, like his own Apollo, to accept “Knowledge enormous” as Beauty—knowledge “of the agony and strife of human hearts”; whereas at least one half of his being was affirming passionately that Feeling, particularly that which passes through the refinery of the creative imagination, is Beauty. It was his acceptance of this side of his nature that produced most of the poems written in the spring of 1819. But during the summer of 1819 Keats plunged once more into the old conflict. It will be the purpose of this paper to show how Lamia and The Fall of Hyperion are related to it.

Mrs. Shelley in her preface to her husband's collected poems remarked:

There are others, such as the “Ode to the Sky Lark,” and “The Cloud,” which, in the opinion of many critics, bear a purer poetical stamp than any other of his productions. They were written as his mind prompted, listening to the carolling of the bird, aloft in the azure sky of Italy; or marking the cloud as it sped across the heavens, while he floated in his boat on the Thames.

The centenary of the death of Arthur Hallam, noted in England by a leading article in The Times Literary Supplement (September 14, 1933) and in America by an exhibition of Hallam's works in the Yale University Library (January, 1934), served as a reminder not so much of what we know of the youth who was so important an influence on Tennyson as of what we do not know fully, a partial ignorance which results from the difficulty with which the study of Hallam is attended. The “lost” poem here reprinted after more than a century is lost only in the sense in which nearly half the printed poems of Hallam are unknown because they are missing from the editions commonly available. When Hallam died in 1833 in his twenty-third year, he left behind him one small and now very scarce volume, privately printed in 1830, and other poems and essays, some of which were collected by his father, Henry Hallam the historian, and privately issued as the Remains of 1834. Most of this material, also edited by Henry Hallam, was privately printed in 1853, and this volume is the basis of such subsequent collections of Arthur Hallam's work as have appeared.

Yesterday Margaret Fuller returned home after making us a visit of three weeks,“ Emerson noted in his Journal on August 12, 1836. To this brief statement of fact he added these few words of characterization: ”A very accomplished and very intelligent person.“ She had sought for two years to make Emerson's acquaintance. On October 6, 1834, she had written that the Rev. Frederick Henry Hedge

While Francis James Child was preparing the manuscript for the publication of The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, Svend Grundtvig sent to him, in the form of enclosures with letters dated August 25, 1877 and January 29, 1880, a numbered list of English and Scottish ballads arranged in the order which Grundtvig, at Child's earlier request, meant to propose as a proper sequence for publication. This list is printed in full in my Ballad Books and Ballad Men under the designation of the “Grundtvig-Child Index.” This index was prepared by Grundtvig mainly from two other manuscript indexes which he had drawn up many years before for convenient reference in his work with the Danish ballads. The first of the two, named Index A by Grundtvig himself, contained what he regarded at the time as a standard list of English and Scottish ballads. The second, named by him Index B, comprised ballads which he regarded for various reasons as questionable. Index A began in 1850; Index B appears to belong to approximately the same period. Between twenty and thirty years afterward, when Grundtvig prepared for Child's guidance the Grundtvig-Child Index, he admitted into it many ballads from Index B. In the interval he had obviously changed his mind or resolved his doubts as to the merits of a group of ballads originally regarded by him as distinctly secondary in value. It is to be observed, however, that, in his classifications for Child in the Grundtvig-Child Index, Grundtvig admits no ballad from Index B into his First Class, in his opinion the most ancient poems; on the other hand, he places a large number of pieces from Index B in his Fourth Class, “consisting of imitations of the old ballad style.” Whether, then, we take into account Grundtvig's earlier or his later judgment, Index B represents a secondary order of merit. Careful attention should be paid, meanwhile, to the variety of reasons which led Grundtvig, according to his own introductory note, to the formation of Index B. This index was to him in effect a sort of ballad purgatory, from which in the course of time he released such of the numbers as appeared to him worthy of liberation.