Leaf and grass and blossom spring in Averil, I ween,
And love is to my herte gone with a spear so keen,
Night and day my blood it drinks my herte doth me tene."[5]

{27} Others are love plaints to "Alysoun" or some other lady whose
"name is in a note of the nightingale;" whose eyes are as gray as
glass, and her skin as "red as rose on ris." [6] Some employ a burden
or refrain.

"Blow, northern wind,
Blow thou me, my sweeting.
Blow, northern wind, blow, blow, blow!"

Others are touched with a light melancholy at the coming of winter.

"Winter wakeneth all my care
Now these leaves waxeth bare.
Oft I sigh and mourne sare
When it cometh in my thought
Of this worldes joy, how it goeth all to nought"

Some of these poems are love songs to Christ or the Virgin, composed in
the warm language of earthly passion. The sentiment of chivalry united
with the ecstatic reveries of the cloister had produced Mariolatry and
the imagery of the Song of Solomon, in which Christ wooes the soul, had
made this feeling of divine love familiar. Toward the end of the 13th
century a collection of lives of saints, a sort of English _Golden
Legend_, was prepared at the great abbey of Gloucester for use on
saints' days. The legends were chosen partly from the hagiology of the
Church Catholic, as the lives of Margaret, Christopher, and Michael;
partly from the calendar of the English Church, as the {28} lives of
St. Thomas of Canterbury, of the Anglo-Saxons, Dunstan, Swithin--who is
mentioned by Shakspere--and Kenelm, whose life is quoted by Chaucer in
the _Nonne Presto's Tale_. The verse was clumsy and the style
monotonous, but an imaginative touch here and there has furnished a
hint to later poets. Thus the legend of St. Brandan's search for the
earthly paradise has been treated by Matthew Arnold and William Morris.

About the middle of the 14th century there was a revival of the Old
English alliterative verse in romances like _William and the Werewolf_,
and _Sir Gawayne_, and in religious pieces such as _Clannesse_
(purity), _Patience_ and _The Perle_, the last named a mystical poem of
much beauty, in which a bereaved father sees a vision of his daughter
among the glorified. Some of these employed rhyme as well as
alliteration. They are in the West Midland dialect, although Chaucer
implies that alliteration was most common in the north. "I am a
sotherne man," says the parson in the _Canterbury Tales_. "I canno