Wyatt wished this riddle at the bottom of the Bay of Portugal. All earlier solutions (among which we find a sow pregnant with five pigs) have in common that, far from explaining the number paradox in the first part of the poem, they even offend against it. But when in a riddle we hit upon a paradox, we may be sure that it has something to do with the solution.

Giraut de Bornelh liked to discuss the question of whether a poet should make the products of his muse understandable to everybody (trobar leu), or adhere to a more obscure, hermetic type of poetry accessible only to a few adepts (trobar clus). In none of his poems is he so positive about the preferability of a simple style as in the well-known tenso with Linhaure and the song A penas sai comensar (Gr. 242,11; ed. Kolsen, No. 4). It is probably the latter that caused his princely interlocutor to start a poetical controversy on this topic with the troubadour, the above-named tenso. In fact, three stanzas of Gr. 242,11 deal with this problem. It is the third of them that interests us here, because it contains the phrase ab so que. It runs thus in Kolsen's edition:

Ja, pos volrai clus trobar,
no cut aver man parer
3 ab so que ben ai mester
a far una leu chanso;
qu'eu cut c'atretan grans sens
6 es, qui sap razo gardar,
com los motz entrebeschar.

The Salbenkrämerspiel (Mercator Play) occupies a place of unique importance in the history and development of the secular drama in German literature. From almost the beginning of Western drama as it slowly emerged from the Easter Mass, through the Latin Festival Plays of the thirteenth century, to the complete secularization and nationalization of this play in the Fastnachtspiele of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the development of the Salbenkrämerspiel has been the subject of special investigation by many eminent scholars.

While learned investigation of Chaucer's text and background has illumined our knowledge of his sources and literary methods, one major mystery has remained unsolved: Who is the Lollius cited by Chaucer in three passages, and why did Chaucer refer to him?

Escasas son las noticias que alcanzamos a recoger de la vida de Diego de Morlanes. Perteneció a una familia distinguida de juristas zaragozanos. El más famoso de ellos fué el abuelo de nuestro poeta, Micer Diego de Morlanes, autor de importantes obras de jurisprudencia. El viejo Morlanes dejó dos hijos: Bartolomé y Agustín. El primero se dedicó a la iglesia; el segundo siguió las huellas de su padre en la magistratura. Este fué el padre del autor del romance que hoy sacamos a luz. Ocuparon todos ellos cargos de importancia en la administración civil del reinó de Aragon. El joven Morlanes murió un “sábado 26 de marzo de 1633, siendo consejero civil de Aragón.”

Un sort injurieux livra Gassendi au mépris de l'histoire, et déjà son contemporain Descartes l'a considérablement malmené. C'est qu'il est considéré d'ordinaire, non pas comme un philosophe, ni même comme un disciple, mais plutôt comme un compilateur, un commentateur purement philologique, dénué de tout esprit critique en matière de philosophie. Le préjugé courant sur Gassendi peut se résumer dans cette phrase de Fernand Papillon: “En fait, on pourrait supprimer.... Gassendi de l'histoire de l'esprit humain sans la mutiler, sans lui ôter de sa grandeur et de son éclat.”

In his successive revisions of the Hymn in the Nativity, Crashaw shows a growing sense of form, and the final version, posthumously published in 1652, has a conceptual unity that raises it to a level of poetry considerably above that of the 1646 version. He achieved this by substituting structural symbols for mere sense images, by emending a few lines, by dropping one stanza, and by adding two very important new stanzas that make the structural pattern of the poem much clearer. These changes had a considerable effect on the rest of the poem because they placed it in a new context. Miss Wallerstein, who notes the “steady pruning of the purely sensuous elements,” and who calls these additional stanzas “the great stanzas which transmute the whole,” describes the final version of the poem as one of Crashaw's “few perfectly realized poems.” A comparison of the text of 1646 with the texts of 1648 and 1652 enables us to study the poet in the process of this realization and to see how large a part clarification of structure played in it.

There has long existed a need for a full and definitive calendar of theatrical performances in London during the eighteenth century. If the modern scholar does not have access to the original sources—the theatrical advertisements, the playbills, and manuscript diaries and account books—he must turn to a number of modern histories, of the eighteenth century stage, no one of which is complete and all of which combined do not offer a full listing of day-to-day performances. The account of the stage published in 1832 by John Genest is still the most comprehensive for the entire century, but Genest made a selection, not a complete listing, of performances, and that fact alone makes it impossible to find in his pages the stage history of a play or its casting or the vogue of the works of a single dramatist. The handlists in Allardyce Nicoll's works are also very valuable, but they too have the limitation of recording only selected performances, primarily those of plays first performed in the century. Dougald MacMillan's calendar of Drury Lane offerings from 1747 to 1776 is a more complete listing, but it is a record of only one theater, and although it offers the casts, it does not reflect the rôle of the entertainments in the theatrical programs.

Wir sind heuté in der Lage, die Stimmen der bedeutenden Männer unserer Zeit auf Sprechplatte und Film der Nachwelt überliefern zu können, doch die Stimmen der großen Geister früherer Zeitalter sind fur immer mit dem letzten Atemzug ihrer Träger verstummt. So wenig die Nachwelt dem Mimen Kränze flicht, weil es ihr unmoglich ist, sich noch von seiner Darstellung hinreifien zu lassen, ebensowenig wird sie bewundernd oder gerührt der lebendigen Rede des großen Dichters lauschen können, der selbst ins Grab gesunken nur noch in seinen Werken lebt.

It was inevitable that sooner or later the Wandering Jew, probably the most celebrated of all parcoureurs du monde, should come to be regarded as omniscient as well as ubiquitous. After all, he had been alive since the beginnings of the Christian era, and there was no spot in the generally known world of the Occident where he had not at one time or another passed by or spent his allotted period of residence. In his privileged condition of one who was all-wise, it would be easy for him, if he were so disposed, to assume the mantle of teacher and prophet, with a particular liking for history and geography; but he need not confine himself to those two subjects. The neo-classical age, which developed his didactic powers, sometimes appealed to him for social comment, criticism, and satire.

After The Tempest, The Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan are now the happiest hunting-ground for the symbolist. Mr. Wilson Knight's interpretation of both poems, but particularly of the latter, in The Starlit Dome (1941), is, to say the least, extraordinary; still more so than the similar one of Mr. Robert Graves in The Meaning of Dreams (1924), though not so entangled with inaccurate biography and irrelevant psychoanalysis. “We may imagine a sexual union,” says Mr. Knight, between life, the masculine, and death, the feminine. Then our “romantic chasm” and “cedarn cover,” the savage and enchanted yet holy place with its “half intermitted burst” may be, in spite of our former reading, vaguely related to the functioning of man's creative organs and their physical setting and, too, to all principles of manly and adventurous action; while the caverns that engulf the sacred river will be correspondingly feminine with a dark passivity and infinite peace. The pleasure-dome we may fancy as the pleasure of a sexual union in which birth and death are the great contesting partners, with human existence as the life-stream, the blood-stream, of a mighty coition [p. 95].

In spite of the wide range of topics and techniques in the poetry of Tennyson, a reader is apt to become aware of certain recurrences which eventually assume an air of familiarity. The present study deals with one of the most persistent of these recurrences, which is especially significant because of a process of change that affected it over a period of years, symptomatic of a gradual shift in the poet's outlook.

In most of Wagner's music dramas the source material, generally deep-rooted in Germanic or Celtic tradition, is well known, and Wagner's ndebtedness is transparent. The four works composing Der Ring des Nibelungen, for example, are based chiefly on the Volsunga saga and the Nibelungenlied. Similarly, Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival was the inspiration for Wagner's Parsifal, and the Tristan of Gottfried von Strassburg was followed closely in Tristan und Isolde. These mediaeval works are epic monuments of western European legend or chefs d‘œuvre of the Minnesingers’ art. Wagner has thus ambitiously concerned himself with subjects of impressive grandeur, drawn from sources of no inconsiderable importance.

John Townsend Trowbridge, though one of Whitman's earliest and oldest friends, has not received adequate recognition for his loyal yet discriminating service. Passing reference, it is true, is meted out to him in critical biographies of Whitman or in an occasional article. But even the latest Whitman study accords to Trowbridge only a few pages in which he is associated with the English critic, Edward Carpenter. In consequence the following survey is an attempt to throw added light upon the nature and extent of this relationship.

Studies of the total work of a dramatic author are likely to be mainly in terms of his subject-matter, ideas, portrayal of character, and literary style. In analyzing and evaluating these, the critic seeks those elements of unity throughout the author's work which will best characterize his art. Less frequently is the same element of unity sought in his plots: sometimes, no doubt, the critic considers them a mere vehicle for the expression of ideas and the presentation of character, although they have certainly had more importance than this to most playwrights; more often the critic assumes that each play has its separate plot, and that while certain comparisons can be made and certain structural tendencies noted there is no reason to seek basic unity in the plots of most dramatists. If by plot we mean the total and frequently complex dramatic action, it is of course true that a competent playwright does not repeat it from one play to another. But if we seek the plot beneath the plot, the type of action on which the writer depends to give him the motivation, movement, and climax needed to hold the attention of the spectator, we shall find that he well can, and sometimes does, create an extensive series of plays on a single pattern of dramatic action and that this has revelatory significance for his personality and art.

There are poets whose art is an accumulating cluster of images that become more and more identified with specific ideas. I believe Yeats to have been such a poet, in whom a cluster of images grew in significance to produce the great poems of the period from the first World War to the second. Generally accepted as one of Yeats' finest lyrics is The Second Coming. I believe that the poem gains in richness by being considered in the light of associations that had long preoccupied Yeats, and that are frequently found together in his writings: Shelley, and especially his Prometheus Unbound; the Great Memory; and the Second Coming.

Although hundreds of books and articles have been written on the subject, there is still no agreement upon the question: What is the basis of English metre? There have been three schools of metrics: that of a strict count of syllables; that of accent; and that of equal times. The latest work which I have found to consider a strict count of syllables the sole basis of English metre was published in Heidelberg in 1902. But both of the other schools have their representatives today. It is my purpose to raise the question once more, and to throw light upon it from a hitherto unexplored source of unusual value, The English School of Lutenist Song Writers. I hope to show that the theory of equal times marked by stress best explains the varying phenomena of modern English verse, and especially the inclusion in metrical verse of such extremely irregular poems as “The Listeners” by De la Mare. And I hope also to clarify several metrical terms: the so-called “trochaic substitution” in iambic metre, the “caesura,” and the “run-on line.”