Gird on thy sword, O man, thy strength endue, In fair desire thine earth-born joy renew. Live thou thy life beneath the making sun Till Beauty, Truth, and Love in thee are one. Thro' thousand ages hath thy childhood run: On timeless ruin hath thy glory been: From the forgotten night of loves fordone Thou risest in the dawn of hopes unseen. Higher and higher shall thy thoughts aspire, Unto the stars of heaven, and pass away, And earth renew the buds of thy desire In fleeting blooms of everlasting day. Thy work with beauty crown, thy life with love; Thy mind with truth uplift to God above: For whom all is, from whom was all begun, In whom all Beauty, Truth, and Love are one. POEMS IN CLASSICAL PROSODY [Illustration: decoration] _PREVIOUS PUBLICATIONS_ _Fp. I._ Daniel Press. 1903. _" II._ _Monthly Review. July, 1903, with an abstract of Stone's Prosody, as there used._ _No. 3._ _Printed by C. H. Daniel. 1903._ _" 8._ _In 'Pelican,' C.C.C., Oxford._ _" 9._ _English Review. March, 1912._ _" 21._ _New Quarterly. Jan. 1909, with an essay on the Virgilian Hexameter, &c._ /# These experiments in quantitive verse were made in fulfilment of a promise to William Johnson Stone that I would some day test his theory. His premature death converted my consent into a serious obligation. This personal explanation is due to myself for two reasons: because I might otherwise appear firstly as an advocate of the system, secondly as responsible for Stone's determination of the lengths of English syllables. Before writing quantitive verse it is necessary to learn to _think_ in quantities. This is no light task, and a beginner requires fixed rules. Except for a few minor details, which I had disputed with Mr. Stone, I was bound to take his rules as he had elaborated them; and it was not until I had made some progress and could think fairly well in his prosody that I seriously criticized it. The two chief errors that I find in it are that he relied too much on the quality of a vowel in determining its syllabic length, and that he regarded the _h_ as _always_ consonantal in quality. His valuation of the _er_ sound is doubtful, but defensible and convenient, and I have never discarded it. My earlier experiments contain therefore a good many 'false quantities', and these, where they could not be very easily (though _inconsistently_) amended, I have left, and marked most of them in the text: a few false quantities do not make a poem less readable. Thus a long mark over a syllable means that Stone reckoned it as long, and that the verse requires it to be so pronounced, but that I regard it as short, or at least as _doubtful_. For example on p.