tion. Readers familiar with mediaeval poetry expect
to encounter moral platitudes and theological subtlety. Dogma takes
large and vital place in the sublimest cantos of Dante's "Paradise,"
and the English poet is consciously following his noblest master when
he puts a sermon into the lips of his "little queen." To modern ears
such exposition is at harsh discord with the simple human grief and
longing of the poet, but to the mediaevalist symbolic theology was a
passion. Precisely in the moment when she begins a discourse
concerning the doctrine of redemption, Beatrice turns upon Dante "eyes
that might make a man happy in the fire," and at its close he looks
upon her and beholds her "grow more beautiful."[3] If even Beatrice
has been considered mere personification, it is natural that the Pearl
should be so regarded, but the plain reader finds in the symbolic
maiden of the English poem, as in the transfigured lady of the
Italian, some record of a human being whose loss was anguish, and
whose presence rapture, to a poet long ago.

The lover of things mediaeval will find in this little book not only
the familiar garden of Guillaume de Lorris, of Boccaccio and of
Chaucer, but an unexpected and enchanting vision of great forest and
rushing water, of hillside and plain, of crystal cliffs and
flame-winged birds; of the Pearl among her white peers; of the
Apocalyptic Jerusalem, discovered to the poet, it may be, as a goodly
Gothic city, though its walls are built of precious stone, and its
towers rise from neither church nor minster.

If even a few readers turn from the modern to the original version,
the translation will have had fair fortune, for the author of "The
Pearl" is, though unknown and unnamed, a poet second only to Chaucer
in Chaucer's generation.

It is a pleasure to record my many debts of gratitude: to Professor
Frank H. Chase of Beloit, Professor John L. Lowes of Swarthmore, and
Dr. Charles G. Osgood of Princeton, for their careful reading of the
translation in manuscript, with invaluable assistance and suggestion;
to Professor Martha Hale Shackford, and Miss Laura A. Hibbard, for
constant aid while the work was in making, and, above all, to
Professor Katharine Lee Bates for a critical, line by line, comparison
of this version with the original.

[Footnote 1: Par. III.]

[Footnote 2: Pearl, stanza 71.]

[Footnote 3: Par. VII, II. 17-18; Par. VIII, I. 15.]

S.J.
WELLESLEY COLLEGE,
June, 1908.