But to go on from this, as Dr Guest and some of his followers have done, to the subjection of the whole invaluable vocabulary of classical prosody to a sort of _praemunire_, to hold up the hands in horror at the very name of a tribrach, and exhibit symptoms of catalepsy at the word catalectic--to ransack the dictionary for unnatural words or uses of words like "catch," and "stop," and "pause," where a perfectly clear and perfectly flexible terminology is ready to your hand--this does seem to me in another sense a very childish thing indeed, and one that cannot be too soon put away. It is no exaggeration to say that the extravagances, the unnatural contortions of scansion, the imputations of irregularity and impropriety on the very greatest poets with which Dr Guest's book swarms, must force themselves on any one who studies that book thoroughly and impartially. When theory leads to the magisterial indorsement of "gross fault" on some of the finest passages of Shakespeare and Milton, because they "violate" Dr Guest's privy law of "the final pause"; when we are told that "section 9," as Dr Guest is pleased to call that admirable form of "sixes," the anapaest followed by two iambs,[104] one of the great sources of music in the ballad metre, is "a verse which has very little to recommend it"; when one of Shakespeare's secrets, the majestic full stop before the last word of the line, is black-marked as "opposed to every principle of accentual rhythm," then the thing becomes not so much outrageous as absurd. Prosody respectfully and intelligently attempting to explain how the poets produce their best things is useful and agreeable: when it makes an arbitrary theory beforehand, and dismisses the best things as bad because they do not agree therewith, it becomes a futile nuisance. And I believe that there is no period of our literature which, when studied, will do more to prevent or correct such fatuity than this very period of Early Middle English. [Footnote 104: His instance is Burns's-- "Like a rogue | for for | gerie." It is a pity he did not reinforce it with many of the finest lines in _The Ancient Mariner_.] CHAPTER VI. MIDDLE HIGH GERMAN POETRY. POSITION OF GERMANY. MERIT OF ITS POETRY. FOLK-EPICS: THE 'NIBELUNGENLIED.' THE 'VOLSUNGA SAGA.' THE GERMAN VERSION. METRES. RHYME AND LANGUAGE. 'KUDRUN.' SHORTER NATIONAL EPICS. LITERARY POETRY. ITS FOUR CHIEF MASTERS. EXCELLENCE, BOTH NATURAL AND ACQUIRED, OF GERMAN VERSE. ORIGINALITY OF ITS ADAPTATION. THE PIONEERS: HEINRICH VON VELDEKE. GOTTFRIED OF STRASBURG. HARTMANN VON AUE. 'EREC DER WANDERAERE' AND 'IWEIN.' LYRICS. THE "BOOKLETS." 'DER ARME HEINRICH.' WOLFRAM VON ESCHENBACH. 'TITUREL.' 'WILLEHALM.' 'PARZIVAL.' WALTHER VON DER VOGELWEIDE. PERSONALITY OF THE POETS. THE MINNESINGERS GENERALLY. [Sidenote: _Position of Germany._]