ENGLISH VERSE
SPECIMENS ILLUSTRATING ITS PRINCIPLES
AND HISTORY
CHOSEN AND EDITED
BY
RAYMOND MACDONALD ALDEN, PH.D.
Associate Professor in Leland Stanford Junior
University
NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
[Pg iii]Copyright, 1903,
BY
HENRY HOLT & CO.
[Pg iv]TO
my Father and Mother
WHO HAVE GIVEN
BOTH THE INSPIRATION AND THE OPPORTUNITY
FOR ALL MY STUDIES
PREFACE
The aim of this book is to give the materials for the inductive study ofEnglish verse. Its origin was in certain university courses, for whichit proved to be necessary—often for use in a single hour's work—togather almost numberless books, some of which must ordinarily beinaccessible except in the vicinity of large libraries. I have tried toextract from these books the materials necessary for the study ofEnglish verse-forms, adding notes designed to make the specimensintelligible and useful.
Dealing with a subject where theories are almost as numerous as thosewho have written on it, it has been my purpose to avoid the settingforth of my own opinions, and to present the subject-matter in a waysuited, so far as possible, to the use of those holding widely divergentviews. In the arrangement and naming of the earlier sections of thebook, some systematic theory of the subject—accepted at leasttentatively—was indeed indispensable; but I trust that even here thosewho would apply to English verse a different classification orterminology may be able to discard what they cannot approve and to makeuse of the specimens from their own standpoint. Even where (as in theseintroductory sections) the notes seem to overtop the text somewhatthreateningly, they are invariably intended—as the type indicates—tobe subordinate. Where it has been possible to do so, I have preferred topresent comments on the specimens in the words of other writers, andhave not confined these notes to opinions with which I wholly agree, but[Pg vi]only to those which seem worthy of attention. My own views on the moredisputed elements of the subject (such as the relations of time andaccent in our verse, the presence of "quantity" in English, and theterminology of the subject) I have reserved for Part Three, where Itrust they will be found helpful by some readers, but where they mayeasily be passed over.
To classify the materials of this subject is peculiarly difficult, andone who tries to solve the problem will early abandon the hope of beingable to follow any system with consistency. Main divisions andsubdivisions will inevitably conflict and overlap. For practicalpurposes, basing my arrangement in part on that found convenient inuniversity lectures (which it will be seen is not altogether unlike thatfollowed by Schipper in his Englische Metrik), I have divided thespecimens of verse into two main divisions, each of which is suggestedby a word in the sub-title of the book. Part One contains specimensdesigned to illustrate the principles of English verse, arranged in