more words in the line with the same sound: this peculiarity he
has exaggerated: every line has as many words as possible commencing with
the same sound. In the first line, for instance,--and it must be
remembered that the author's line is much shorter than the Anglo-Saxon
line,--there are four words beginning with _p_; in the second, three
beginning with _cl_, and so on. This, of course, necessitates much not
merely of circumlocution, but of contrivance, involving endless
obscurity.

He has gone on to exaggerate the peculiarities of Norman verse as well;
but I think it better not to run the risk of wearying my reader by
pointing out more of his oddities. I will now betake myself to what is
far more interesting as well as valuable.

The poem sets forth the grief and consolation of a father who has lost
his daughter. It is called _The Pearl_. Here is a literal rendering, line
for line, into modern English words, not modern English speech, of the
stanza which I have already given in its original form:

Pearl pleasant to prince's pleasure,
Most cleanly closed in gold so clear!
Out of the Orient, I boldly say,
I never proved her precious equal;
So round, so beautiful in every point!
So small, so smooth, her sides were!

Wheresoever I judged gemmes gay
I set her singly in singleness.
Alas! I lost her in an arbour;
Through the grass to the ground it from me went.
I pine, sorely wounded by dangerous love
Of that especial pearl without spot.

The father calls himself a jeweller; the pearl is his daughter. He has
lost the pearl in the grass; it has gone to the ground, and he cannot
find it; that is, his daughter is dead and buried. Perhaps the most
touching line is one in which he says to the grave:

O moul, thou marrez a myry mele.
(O mould, thou marrest a merry talk.)

The poet, who is surely the father himself, cannot always keep up the
allegory; his heart burns holes in it constantly; at one time he says
_she_, at another _it_, and, between the girl and the pearl, the poem is
bewildered. But the allegory helps him out with what he means
notwithstanding; for although the highest aim of poetry is to say the
deepest things in the simplest manner, humanity must turn from mode to
mode, and try a thousand, ere it finds the best. The individual, in his
new endeavour to make "the word cousin to the deed," must take up the
forms his fathers have left him, and add to them, if he may, new forms o