To a subtle handling of the refrain is due also much of the charm of the villanelle. This structure possesses a singularly graceful and soothing harmony, and is adapted to themes of serious and reminiscent mood, sometimes plaintive. It consists of five stanzas of three lines apiece concluded by a quatrain. The tercets run aba. The first line of the first tercet becomes the third, or refrain, of the second and fourth tercets; the third line of the first tercet reappears as the third line, or refrain, of the third and fifth tercets. Thus, in Dobson's exquisite verses For a Copy of Theocritus:

The two refrains compose the final lines of the quatrain. They are the burden of the whole. The scheme may be represented as follows: A1bA2, abA1, abA2, abA1, abA2, abA1A2.

Ballade, Chant-Royal, and Pantoum. - The ballade, chant-royal, and pantoum are poems of greater length than the preceding, and they employ more than two rhymes. The refrain is still the characteristic feature. The ballade has greater potentialities than any other of the French fixed forms: it is sublime or humorous, subtle or naïve, stately, solemn, or ironical, but always graceful and melodious. It is capable of varied imagery and of rich and unexpected, but dignified, harmony. It consists of three stanzas of eight lines each, and a quatrain, called the envoy. The rhyme-scheme is ababbcbC for the first three octaves, and bcbC for the envoy. This last, according to former custom, was

addressed to some person of high degree, king or prince. An amusing example is Andrew Lang's

BALLADE OF MIDDLE AGE

"Our youth began with tears and sighs,
With seeking what we could not find;
Our verses all were threnodies,

In elegiacs still we whined;

Our ears were deaf, our eyes were blind,
We sought and knew not what we sought.

We marvel, now we look behind:

Life's more amusing than we thought!

Oh, foolish youth, untimely wise!

Oh, phantoms of the sickly mind!

What? not content with seas and skies,
With rainy clouds and southern wind,
With common cares and faces kind,
With pains and joys each morning brought?
Ah, old, and worn, and tired we find
Life's more amusing than we thought!

"Though youth 'turns spectre-thin and dies,'
To mourn for youth we're not inclined;
We set our souls on salmon flies,
We whistle where we once repined.
Confound the woes of human-kind!
By Heaven we're 'well deceived,' I wot;
Who hum, contented or resigned,
'Life's more amusing than we thought!

ENVOY

"O nate mecum, worn and lined

Our faces show, but that is naught;

Our hearts are young 'neath wrinkled rind:
Life's more amusing than we thought!"

Another instance is the Ballade of Heroes which may be found at the beginning of Gayley and Flaherty's Poetry of the People, where it has been used as a Prologue. It will be noted that the envoy or message in those poems gathers up the thought and impresses the moral upon the person addressed. Three other forms of the ballade obtain, but they are not frequently employed: (1) Three ten-line stanzas with four rhymes each, ababbccdcD, and an envoy of five lines ccdc D, e.g. Swinburne's François Villon; (2) the ballade of double refrain running aba BbcbC three times, with envoy bBcC, e.g. Dobson's Prose and Rhyme; (3) the double ballade of six stanzas, the envoy sometimes omitted.

An elaboration of the ballade is found in the chant-royal, examples

of which appear in the work of Dobson, Gosse, and Bunner. The scheme of this stately but infrequent form is 5 ababccddede, with envoy ddede, and refrain as in the single ballade. Of it no example can be reproduced here, but of the pantoum (singularly adapted to the dryly humorous treatment of a monotonous subject) the following will furnish a taste. It is from Mr. Dobson's In Town:

"June in the zenith is torrid

(There is that woman again!)

Here, with the sun on one's forehead,
Thought gets dry in the brain.

"There is that woman again;

'Strawberries! fourpence a pottle!'
Thought gets dry in the brain;
Ink gets dry in the bottle," -

and so on, ad indefinitum, the second and fourth lines of one stanza recurring as the first and third of the next. For these, and for other French forms of verse not so frequently used in English, the student may refer to Alden's English Verse.

II. THE KINDS OF POETRY

The movement common to all poetry is determined by that mental ordering of the natural current of the subject which is rhythm. The different kinds of poetry, on the other hand, are determined by differences of subject-matter and of the channels through which that matter must pass in order to issue in expression. The subject-matter may be of objects, events, feelings, actions, or thoughts; and if these five dictated each its special poetical form, we should have to say that there were respectively these kinds of poetry: the descriptive, the narrative, the presentative or lyrical, the dramatic, and the reflective. But since we can express ourselves only by one or more of three ways, singing, saying, and acting, it follows that no matter how many kinds of subject there may be, the main divisions of literary expression are, and must always be, Song (the early or the modern lyric, especially of feeling), Recital (the poem of events in time, narrative; or of objects in space, descriptive; or of thoughts, reflective), and Drama. The ballad, the pastoral, and the idyll combine qualities of two or more of these kinds. As for satirical, didactic, and philosophical verse, they are on the border line between poetry and practical literature.

Beginnings of Poetry: The Choral. - Poetic kinds or types have originated in all countries, but not necessarily all in each; nor have all the stages of each kind persisted in any one country up to the present. The choral song cannot be produced in a civilized community,

with the characteristics which it possessed in days when a primitive community met to celebrate some event affecting all alike. Such an event was the outburst of war, a victory, a defeat, the propitiation of the gods, the completion of the harvest, the return of spring-tide, marriage, the initiation of the stripling into the order of warriors, or the funeral of a hero, and then with dance and music, mimicry, gesticulation, and song, all gave utterance in unison to the feeling common to all. Nowadays the song or lyric is the utterance of personal and highly specialized emotion - more often the allusive suggestion of it than its definite relation in expression. In those days the crowd felt and moved and spoke as one person; the emotion was not highly spiritual, to be sure, but broad, readily understood, and universally felt, because it sprang from simple physical and social necessities common to all. Now one and now another voice would improvise a shout, a yell of communal joy or grief, in which all might join. Or, for the tune to which they danced and sang some monotonous refrain, formerly improvised, new words would here and there be suggested, to be caught from the lips by the chanting assembly; and so were added new verses to the choral song. Such chorals were characterized by infinite repetition of both words and melody; and by means of this infinite and nerveracking round the crowd would, on occasion, work itself into some such frenzy as to-day marks the climax of a negro camp-meeting.

In the course of time one or another factor of the choral dance would, however, be separately emphasized. The mimicry, for instance, might drop away, and some individual would lead the crowd in a better ordered and more stately, if less spontaneous, psalm or hymn of praise. The medicine man or priest - or the college of priests - would add new words to the old incantation; perhaps, in time, largely recompose it. But since it was originally intended for the singing or listening crowd, though it finally might reach, by conscious artistry, the excellence of a psalm such as we find in the bibles of many races, it would still express the feeling of the folk and appeal to the folk as a whole.

Poetry of Recital: Ballad, Hero-saga, Gest. — In similar fashion the song-element and the rhythmic evolutions of the crowd might at times sink into abeyance, because somewhere in the assemblage some one had begun the recital of the deeds of the god or hero whom all were celebrating. Here, probably, was the birth—at any rate the germ of hero-saga and popular ballad. These derived from the mother-choral qualities of lyric and drama, as well as of recital; but the narrative element was from the beginning to the fore. Just as in the case of the ceremonial hymn, and of the priest who recomposed and chanted it, the primitive recital would slowly develop into independent

existence by the instrumentality of well-fitted reciters, story-tellers, and mimics, probably also singers, the forefathers of the race of minstrels. If, at an early date, it passed under the influence of some chieftain's house, in celebration of whose ancestor it had been originally composed, it would survive as a hero-saga. If it celebrated men of humbler fame or less persistent descendants, it was more likely to vanish from memory, or to survive merely as a local ballad. But a ballad of merely local interest might naturally develop into something heroic, if the minstrel of later day saw its adaptability to the interests or "powers" of his generation. That the germs of hero-saga and ballad dated from primitive days we have evidence; and crude song-recitals of the kind are, even now, in the making among primitive peoples in various parts of the world.

Until the end of the fifteenth century English ballads could have been handed down only by word of mouth, and the word of mouth had been continually changing with the development of the language. Thousands of them may have run their course and dropped into oblivion before the invention of printing. Of course many of the ballads that survive from the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries betray the association of the maker with listening Knights and Ladies, or the country “Laird” and the learned “Clerk"; but others, even of late date, retain the characteristics of provincial life,--for the popular or 'folk' ballad is characterized by its naïve way of thought, mood, and expression, whether it be produced in pagan antiquity or in the seventeenth century after Christ. Artistic ballads, on the other hand, are made by individual poets. We have them from Coleridge and Macaulay, Rossetti and Dobson. But they display few of the qualities of the primitive or the minstrel ballad, qualities that could not outlive the conditions which gave them tang and currency.

The traditional ballad, then (traditional because popular), like Sir Patrick Spens, or Otterbourn, or Lord Randal, is a bit of history or romance or even myth, or a combination of them, in simple verse fitting a simple tune. It frequently possesses lyrical and dramatic qualities. Its subject is ordinarily local in interest, and its treatment is marked by naïve accumulation of particulars, repetition of statement, colloquial conversation, question and answer, set phrases and refrain. It appeals by pictorial images rather than by the poetic figure (or image consciously constructed); not by emotional analysis or refined suggestion, but by wave after wave of detail. It is the production of a civilization near the soil, dominated by common social, emotional, and artistic sympathies; and it is founded upon some interest that is permanent and universal in the heart of the community. Some primitive recitals have survived as simple and separate ballads; others, clustering, in the course of time, about a theme or hero of more abiding fame, have coalesced