1. The frost will bite us soon;

His tooth is on the leaves:

Beneath the golden moon

We bear the golden sheaves.

- JOHN DAVIDSON's Harvest-Home Song.

2. That Youth's sweet-scented manuscript should close!

- EDWARD FITZGERALD'S Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.

3. How they'll greet us! and all in a moment his roan

Roll'd neck and croup over, lay dead as a stone.

- BROWNING's How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix.

4. Fear death? to feel the fog in my throat,
The mist in my face,

When the snows begin, and the blasts denote
I am nearing the place,

The power of the night, the press of the storm,
The post of the foe. - BROWNING's Prospice.

5. The blessed damozel lean'd out

From the gold bar of Heaven.

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI's The Blessed Damozel.

6. And all the world was bright with her through him:
But dark with strife,

Like Heaven's own sun that storming clouds bedim,
Was all his life.

SWINBURNE's On the Monument erected to Mazzini at Genoa.

7. When at close of winter's night

All the insect world's a-wing.

WILLIAM JOHN COURTHOPE's Birdcatcher's Song.

8. In the heart of the white summer mist lay a green little piece of the world. - WILLIAM CANTON'S Karma.

9. Like a wakening wraith it rose from the grave of the buried sun. ROSAMUND MARRIOTT Watson's Le Mauvais Larron.

10. Wales England wed; so was I bred.

'Twas merry London gave me breath. I dreamt of love, and fame: I strove.

But Ireland taught me love was best:

And Irish eyes, and London cries, and streams of Wales, may
tell the rest.

What more than these I asked of life, I am content to have from
ERNEST RHYS' An Autobiography.

death.

11. I loved to hold my liquid way

Through floods of living light;

To kiss the sun's bright hand by day,

And count the stars by night.

- ERNEST CHARLES JONES' Earth's Burdens.

15. O Wind, thou hast thy kingdom in the trees.

- MICHAEL FIELD'S Wind of Summer.

16. The breaths of kissing night and day.

- FRANCIS THOMPSON'S Dream-Tryst.

17. O Child of Nations, giant-limbed,
Who stand'st among the nations now,
Unheeded, unadored, unhymned,
With unanointed brow.

18. On other fields and other scenes the morn

Laughs from her blue, but not such scenes as these.
-CHARLES G. D. ROBERT's Burnt Lands.

19. Hark the gossip of the grasses.

20. While the hob kettle sings,

CHARLES G. D. ROBERT'S Afoot.

Margery, Margery, make the tea.

-WILLIAM WILFRED CAMPBELL'S A Canadian Folk-Song.

SECTION VI

PROSODY

PROSE AND POETRY

Prose and poetry differ generally in two respects, form and content. In form, poetry is metrical and rhythmical; it usually rhymes and abounds in figures of speech. In subject matter or content, poetry is usually more exalted than prose because it deals with more emotional, more imaginative subjects. On the other hand, prose may deal with subjects just as elevated as those of poetry and it may be musical, figurative, and rhythmical. This is true of much of the prose of such writers as Ruskin, Pater, and De Quincey, and the name of Prose Poems has sometimes been applied to certain of their works. But, where prose has all these qualities of poetry, it nevertheless differs from it always in that it is not metrical; that is, its rhythm or lilt is not constant enough to allow of definite and regular measuring or "metering."

VERSE

Verse is low-grade poetry. It complies with only two of the essentials above given, meter and rhyme. It does not

deal with great subjects, but with trivial ones; it does not employ figures of speech except for the sake of humor or irony or anticlimax. It is never dignified or exalted. Doggerel is the name given it when it is especially trivial in its content and crude in its form. The best illustrations of it are the popular limericks and the "catch" advertisements in verse.

This word verse, however, has another significance in the study of poetry. A single line of poetry is a verse, and we must accustom ourselves to this name or we shall be confused. It is a mistake to call a group of lines a verse, as is so often done.

METER AND RHYTHM

Perhaps you like to keep step with your friend as you walk with him. This is the natural instinct in all of us for rhythm. Rhythm is one of the first principles of nature: it is the recurrence of emphasis or stress at certain intervals, more or less regular. We see it in the ocean waves, in the rising and setting of the sun, in the blossoming and death of the flowers, and in many other phases of nature. Meter is the measure of this emphasis or stress, the regulator of it. If, when you and I are walking down the street in perfect rhythmical step, some one should follow us and measure our steps, he would be taking the meter, so to speak. He would discover a certain regularity in our footfalls. This illustrates somewhat crudely the difference existing between rhythm and meter. When we apply a measure to poetry we accomplish what is known as Scansion; that is, we scan closely to ascertain the exact measure. The name of our unit of measure of scansion is the foot. The foot is that unit which contains one accented or emphasized or stressed syllable and one or two unstressed syllables. The method of mark

ing these parts of a foot varies with different writers. All of these:

for stressed

We shall make use of the last, the macron syllables; the breve (~) for unstressed syllables.

KINDS OF FEET

There are two general kinds of Feet; dissyllabic and trisyllabic. The dissyllabic consists of two syllables; the trisyllabic, of three syllables. In naming the different kinds of each of them, we shall give the noun first and the adjective form of it in the parenthesis immediately after it.

The Iambus (iambic), the most frequently used foot in English verse, is a dissyllabic foot whose accent is on the second syllable:

The Trochee (trochaic) is a dissyllabic foot accented on the first syllable:

happy

coming

gorgeous

Pressed the mob in fury.

WHITTIER'S Barclay of Ury.