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La meilleur partie esleut-elle
Et la plus saine et la plus belle,
Qui ja ne luy sera ostee
Car par verite se fut celle
Qui fut tousjours fresche et nouvelle,
D’aymer Dieu et d’en estre aymee;
Car jusqu’au cueur fut entamee,
Et si ardamment enflammee.
Que tous-jours ardoit l’estincelle;
Par quoi elle fut visitee
Et de Dieu premier comfortee;
Car charite est trop ysnelle.’

The only law of metre, observed in this song, is that each line shall be octosyllabic:

Qui fut | tousjours | fresche et | nouvelle,
D’autre | ment vi | vret de | bien (ben) plaire,
Et pen | soit den | tendret | de taire

But the reader must note that words which were two-syllabled in Latin mostly remain yet so in the French.

La vi | –e de | Marthe | sa mie,

although mie, which is pet language, loving abbreviation of amica through amie, remains monosyllabic. But vie elides its e before a vowel:

Car Mar- | the me | nait vie | active
Et Ma- | ri-e | contemp | lative;

and custom endures many exceptions. Thus Marie may be three-syllabled as above, or answer to mie as a dissyllable; but vierge is always, I think, dissyllabic, vier-ge, with even stronger accent on the –ge, for the Latin –go.

Then, secondly, of quantity, there is scarcely any fixed law. The metres may be timed as the minstrel chooses–fast or slow–and the iambic current checked in reverted eddy, as the words chance to come.

But, thirdly, there is to be rich ryming and chiming, no matter how simply got, so only that the words jingle and tingle together with due art of interlacing and answering in different parts of the stanza, correspondent to the involutions of tracery and illumination. The whole twelve-line stanza is thus constructed with two rymes only, six of each, thus arranged:

AAB | AAB | BBA | BBA |

dividing the verse thus into four measures, reversed in ascent and descent, or descant more properly; and doubtless with correspondent phases in the voice-given, and duly accompanying, or following, music; Thomas the Rymer’s own precept, that ‘tong is chefe in mynstrelsye,’ being always kept faithfully in mind.[176]

Here then you have a sufficient example of the pure chant of the Christian ages; which is always at heart joyful, and divides itself into the four great forms, Song of Praise, Song of Prayer, Song of Love, and Song of Battle; praise, however, being the keynote of passion through all the four forms; according to the first law which I have already given in the laws of Fesole; ‘all great Art is Praise,’ of which the contrary is also true, all foul or miscreant Art is accusation, [Greek: diabole]: ‘She gave me of the tree and I did eat’ being an entirely museless expression on Adam’s part, the briefly essential contrary of Love-song.

With these four perfect forms of Christian chant, of which we may take for pure examples the ‘Te Deum,’ the ‘Te Lucis Ante,’ the ‘Amor che nella mente,'[177] and the ‘Chant de Roland,’ are mingled songs of mourning, of Pagan origin (whether Greek or Danish), holding grasp still of the races that have once learned them, in times of suffering and sorrow; and songs of Christian humiliation or grief, regarding chiefly the sufferings of Christ, or the conditions of our own sin: while through the entire system of these musical complaints are interwoven moralities, instructions, and related histories, in illustration of both, passing into Epic and Romantic verse, which gradually, as the forms and learnings of society increase, becomes less joyful, and more didactic, or satiric, until the last echoes of Christian joy and melody vanish in the ‘Vanity of human wishes.’

And here I must pause for a minute or two to separate the different branches of our inquiry clearly from one another. For one thing, the reader must please put for the present out of his head all thought of the progress of ‘civilisation’–that is to say, broadly, of the substitution of wigs for hair, gas for candles, and steam for legs. This is an entirely distinct matter from the phases of policy and religion. It has nothing to do with the British Constitution, or the French Revolution, or the unification of Italy. There are, indeed, certain subtle relations between the state of mind, for instance, in Venice, which makes her prefer a steamer to a gondola, and that which makes her prefer a gazetteer to a duke; but these relations are not at all to be dealt with until we solemnly understand that whether men shall be Christians and poets, or infidels and dunces, does not depend on the way they cut their hair, tie their breeches, or light their fires. Dr. Johnson might have worn his wig in fulness conforming to his dignity, without therefore coming to the conclusion that human wishes were vain; nor is Queen Antoinette’s civilised hair-powder, as opposed to Queen Bertha’s savagely loose hair, the cause of Antoinette’s laying her head at last in scaffold dust, but Bertha in a pilgrim-haunted tomb.