Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Louise Pattison and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net Transcriber's Notes: The following characters which may be unfamiliar are used in this e-text: Þ, þ - upper and lower case thorn. Ð, ð - upper and lower case eth. Ȝ, ȝ - upper and lower case yogh. Footnotes have been numbered sequentially and moved to the end of each chapter. Minor corrections to punctuation and capitalisation have been made without note. Variant spelling, especially in Anglo-Saxon and middle English poems, is as per the original. The following corrections to typographical errors have been made: p.129: "I hope to get safely out of..." (had "... safety ...") p.401: "It cannot be said, however,..." (Had "In ...") p.457: "Lotos-Eaters" (Index entry, had "Lotus-Eaters") ENGLISH VERSE _SPECIMENS ILLUSTRATING ITS PRINCIPLES AND HISTORY_ CHOSEN AND EDITED BY RAYMOND MACDONALD ALDEN, PH.D. _Associate Professor in Leland Stanford Junior University_ [Illustration] NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY COPYRIGHT, 1903, BY HENRY HOLT & CO. TO my Father and Mother WHO HAVE GIVEN BOTH THE INSPIRATION AND THE OPPORTUNITY FOR ALL MY STUDIES PREFACE The aim of this book is to give the materials for the inductive study of English verse. Its origin was in certain university courses, for which it proved to be necessary--often for use in a single hour's work--to gather almost numberless books, some of which must ordinarily be inaccessible except in the vicinity of large libraries. I have tried to extract from these books the materials necessary for the study of English verse-forms, adding notes designed to make the specimens intelligible and useful.