Note 144 — Chapter II · RHYTHM AS THE ESSENTIAL FACT OF POETRY

There is often in these prose-poems, so much praised now, a startling reminder of the golden style of certain despised folk who wrote cadenced and coloured prose in their romances three centuries ago. And not only in romances; Tom Nash tried rimed prose, both with alliteration and with actual rime, by way of helping the antithetical clause. See the “Anatomy of Absurdity,” in Nash’s Works, ed. Grosart, I. 6 ff., 24: inferre: averre; praise: daies; nose: rose: and the lilt of “to play with her dogge, than to pray to her God.” The Arcadia is not so much a rimed or rhythmical prose, as swelling and sonorous. For mediæval rimed prose, see Wackernagel, Gesch. d. deutsch. Lit., 2d ed., I. 107 ff., and Sievers, Altger. Metrik, p. 49,—the latter for Germanic relations.