Description as commonly understood is portrayal in language; specifically, poetical description is the esthetic representation of objects through the medium of speech. I shall assume for the purposes of the following discussion that such representation is possible, that poetry is, though not exclusively, a “representative” art. Such an assumption does not equate poetry and painting, since the media of an art determine the substance and form of that art. Now the media of poetic representation, mental images, have indeed many points of likeness to the actual sense perceptions through which the painter affects us, since mental images have their origin in percepts; otherwise they would be poor means of representing objects. But there exist also many obvious differences between images and percepts, such as different degrees of intensity, permanence, specificness. These differences condition differences between poetry and painting. There are other differences. The formative artist, for example, is confined to an appeal to the sense of sight, while the poet knows no such limitation. I shall take occasion in the course of the following discussion to call attention to such matters, when the examples are before us.

My chief business in this article is to study the characteristic details in Otherworld descriptions, to see how widely they are used, and to discover any constant traditions in the use. A great deal of work, already done in this field, has made the material accessible; and since my paper is only by way of being a preliminary sketch, I shall frequently use the summaries offered by previous scholars in the case of particular documents. In general, the material with which I shall work is very well known and scarcely subject to any dispute.

It has been generally recognized by students of the mediæval drama, that certain of the moral tales found in collections of exempla and in commonplace books influenced indirectly the morality play. This inference seems to be drawn as much from evidence of the dramatic possibilities inherent in specific exempla as from evidence of their widespread popularity. An example of a didactic story with such dramatic adaptability is offered by the tale of the penitent usurer. Its theme, the struggle between demons and angels for the soul of man, seems to foreshadow the conflict-between-the-vices-and-virtues type of morality. The number of mss., moreover, which have survived, proves that the tale was disseminated throughout England and the Continent, and therefore would be easily accessible to playwrights in search of dramatic material. Furthermore, the same inference may be drawn from the analogy between plays embodying favorite miracles or fabliaux and morality plays probably based upon popular exempla. For, although no scholar has hitherto shown the dependence of any extant morality play upon a specific exemplum, yet it is almost inconceivable that well-known didactic tales, obviously suited to dramatic purposes and extensively circulated in collections of exempla and in commonplace books, should not have been used by the makers of moral plays.

Rather less attention has been paid to the later portion of Beowulf than to the earlier adventures; Grendel and his dam have, as it were, been more beloved of the commentators than has the dragon. There is every reason, however, why the fight with the dragon should receive careful attention. It is, despite some damaged and illegible passages, of great poetic beauty, with a dignity and a brooding atmosphere of impending fate which are quite its own. And it stands greatly in need of critical as well as of appreciative examination; for there is much which presents difficulty in the interpretation of the text, and in larger problems for the solution of which textual study is necessary.

Among the great English poets of the Romantic period Shelley was the poet of religious as well as of social and political revolt. His mind was preoccupied, especially in the formative years of his life, with the subject of religion, and it is significant that the piece of writing which first attracted any considerable attention to him was the essay The Necessity of Atheism, published in 1811 when he was eighteen and a student of Oxford. The essay not only is revolutionary in spirit, but also reveals a mind precociously occupied with religious problems.

In the winter of 1567–8 five gentlemen of the Inner Temple presented befor the queen a tragedy entitled Gismond of Salerne. In 1591–2 Robert Wilmot, author of the fifth act, publisht a revision of the entire work under the name Tancred and Gismund. This was reprinted by Dodsley. The erlier version has cum down to us in two ms. copies, both in the British Museum: Hargrave 205, knoen as H, and Landsdowne 786, knoen as L, the former dating from the third quarter of the sixteenth century, the latter from the end of the sixteenth or the beginning of the seventeenth century. L has been reprinted by Brandl in volume LXXX of Quellen und Forschungen and by Cunliffe in his Early English Classical Tragedies. Renewed study of the work finds a stimulus in the recent publication of a fotografic reproduction of H in Farmer's facsimile edition of The Old English Drama.

Mr. H. M. Chadwick departs from current views about the early settlers of Great Britain and challenges Bede's long-accepted classification of them as Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. He believes them to have been a homogeneous people, their dialectic differences having come about after the immigration and through political and geographical influences. He opposes the prevailing notion that the Anglo-Saxon organization at the time of the migration was “tribal,” and thinks that the invasion was accomplished by large organized bands, not by small groups of adventurers acting independently. The migration of the Angli Mr. Chadwick regards as exceptional. Although there was no external pressure, it was on a large scale and extended over a considerable space of time. And, he says, according to the constitution of military forces of the time, the warriors required to make up the forces of invasion were not all drawn from within the territories of the Angli, but came, many of them, from the surrounding regions.

The naturalistic reaction against Romanticism was a more or less conscious return to classical models. Romantic diffuseness was banished. The limpid prose of the classical conteurs came back to its own. The ideal of the naturalistic novelist was to maintain a classical, impersonal point of view, which rendered impossible the gushing of Romantic lyricism. Nineteenth-century science, heir to the raison of Rousseau's enemies, the philosophes, replaced Romantic emotion. Disdaining the fantastic plots of the Romanticists, the naturalists tended to make of their novels merely a series of scenes, like Le Sage, and like Marivaux.

The purpose of this brief paper is to study the characteristic and prevailing accentual rhythms of English prose in as far as these occur in phrases that can be detached from the context. Two types of such phrases have been examined. They may be distinguished as (1) phrasal idioms, and (2) titles. The first class embraces such examples as “in fact,” “of course,” “to be sure,” “ebb and flow,” “fits and starts”—the permanent “bromides” of the language, representing the most ordinary contacts of mind with mind, the most necessary aspects and currents of thought, and the homeliest logic. Stripped of every superfluity by incessant use, they exhibit with peculiar aptness the form and pressure of the language in its minuter elements.

At the very beginning of the nineteenth century, which has aptly been called “the century of the child,” a new sense of the sacredness of childhood found expression in Wordsworth's song written in 1802:

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

Of the British ballads not included in Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads one of the most interesting is that which, following the example of Professor Tolman's correspondent, I shall call The Bramble Briar. Altho in poetic quality it is inferior even to that broadside version of Chevy Chase the serious discussion of which in the Spectator provoked the raillery of Wagstaffe, yet I have ventured to deal with it here at some length; for it is interesting not only because of its possible relation to Boccaccio, Hans Sachs, and Keats, but in itself. It is a fairly clear instance of what to some expounders of ballad doctrine is a contradiction in terms: it is a traditional vulgar ballad.