ic piece of Anglo-Saxon poetry and
"Alison," place them side by side, read them aloud together, scan them
carefully with the eye, compare each separately and both together with
as many other examples of poetic arrangement as he likes. He must, I
think, be hopelessly blinded by prejudice if he does not come to the
conclusion that there is a gulf between the systems of which these two
poems are examples--that if the first is "accentual," "sectional," and
what not, then these same words are exactly _not_ the words which
ought to be applied to the second.[103] And he will further see that
with "Alison" there is not the slightest difficulty whatever, but
that, on the contrary, it is the natural and all but inevitable thing
to do to scan the piece according to classical laws, allowing only
much more licence of "common" syllables--common in themselves and by
position--than in Latin, and rather more than in Greek.

[Footnote 103: Of course there is plenty of alliteration in "Alison."
That ornament is too grateful to the English ear ever to have ceased
or to be likely to cease out of English poetry. But it has ceased to
possess any _metrical_ value; it has absolutely nothing to do with the
_structure_ of the line.]

[Sidenote: _The gain of form._]

Yet another conclusion may perhaps be risked, and that is that this
change of prosody was either directly caused by, or in singular
coincidence was associated with, a great enlargement of the range and
no slight improvement of the quality of poetry. Anglo-Saxon verse at
its best has grandeur, mystery, force, a certain kind of pathos. But
it is almost entirely devoid of sweetness, of all the lighter artistic
attractions, of power to represent other than religious passion, of
adaptability to the varied uses of lyric. All these additional gifts,
and in no slight measure, have now been given; and there is surely an
almost fanatical hatred of form in the refusal to connect the gain
with those changes, in vocabulary first, in prosody secondly, which
have been noted. For there is not only the fact, but there is a more
than plausible reason for the fact. The alliterative accentual verse
of indefinite length is obviously unsuited for all the lighter, and
for some of the more serious, purposes of verse. Unless it is at
really heroic height (and at this height not even Shakespeare can keep
poetry invariably) it must necessarily be flat, awkward, prosaic,
heavy, all which qualities are the wor