The Flower of the Mind

								

given with the restorations of both, those restorations being severally
beautiful; and the burden, ‘Hame, hame, hame,’ is printed with the
Jacobite song that carries it; this song seems so mingled and various in
date and origin that no apology is needed for placing it amongst the
bundle of Scottish ballads of days before the Jacobites.  Sir Patrick
Spens is treated here as an ancient song.  It is to be noted that the
modern, or comparatively modern, additions to old songs full of
quantitative metre—‘Hame, hame, hame,’ is one of these—full of long
notes, rests, and interlinear pauses, are almost always written in
anapæsts.  The later writer has slipped away from the fine, various, and
subtle metre of the older.  Assuredly the popularity of the metre which,
for want of a term suiting the English rules of verse, must be called
anapæstic, has done more than any other thing to vulgarise the national
sense of rhythm and to silence the finer rhythms.  Anapæsts came quite
suddenly into English poetry and brought coarseness, glibness,
volubility, dapper and fatuous effects.  A master may use it well, but as
a popular measure it has been disastrous.  I would be bound to find the
modern stanzas in an old song by this very habit of anapæsts and this
very misunderstanding of the long words and interlinear pauses of the
older stanzas.  This, for instance, is the old metre:



   ‘Hame, hame, hame!  O hame fain wad I be!’
and this the lamentable anapæstic line (from the same song):



   ‘Yet the sun through the mirk seems to promise to me—.’
It has been difficult to refuse myself the delight of including A Divine
Love of Carew, but it seemed too bold to leave out four stanzas of a
poem of seven, and the last four are of the poorest argument.  This
passage at least shall speak for the first three:



               ‘Thou didst appear

      A glorious mystery, so dark, so clear,

            As Nature did intend

   All should confess, but none might comprehend.’
From Christ’s Victory in Heaven of Giles Fletcher (out of reach for its
length) it is a happiness to extract here at least the passage upon
‘Justice,’ who looks ‘as the eagle



            that hath so oft compared

   Her eye with heaven’s’;
from Marlowe’s poem, also unmanageable, that in which Love ran to the
priestess



   ‘And laid his childish head upon her breast’;
with that which tells how Night,



            ‘deep-drenched in misty Acheron,

   Heaved up her head, and half the world upon

   Breathed darkness forth’;
from Robert Greene two lines of a lovely passage:



   ‘Cupid abroad was lated in the night,

   His wings were wet with ranging in the rain’;
from Ben Jonson’s Hue and Cry (not throughout fine) the stanza:



   ‘Beauties, have ye seen a toy,

   Called Love, a little boy,

   Almost naked, wanton, blind;

   Cruel now, and then as kind?

   If he be amongst ye, say;