herself. But if she had really read it she would have re-lived it, re-created it. Her reading would have been a form of living.

What this means you can see in part if you think of a story presented by motion pictures. You see a series of pictures; they constitute the story. Now if you really read such poems as "The Eve of St. Agnes" or "Atalanta's Race" (both of them are in Part I of this book), you not merely learn a series of imagined events, as if someone should tell you that such a series of events once took place; you actually see the scenes, the persons, and the experiences they represent, just as if you were sitting in a motion picture theater and looking at a story made concrete and visible by art. You create your story of Atalanta's Race, or the story of the lovers who fled away into the storm. Your story is different from mine. Its richness and strength depend upon what you bring to it.

"Richness and strength." There is the picture-making power; there is also a power of interpreting what lies beyond the picture. You read the story of Caesar and Brutus and Mark Antony, or you see it acted on the stage, or presented in motion pictures. But you remember when your class studied Shakespeare's play how you discussed the characters of these people. Was Caesar really a tyrant? Was Antony a sincere friend of the people? You studied every word they spoke. You were trying to determine what manner of men they were who did these things and who justified, or tried to justify, their actions. In this book you will have a similar opportunity in George Eliot's story about Silas Marner, the poor weaver of Raveloe. You will create in your imagi

nation the scenes of the story. You will also live with the people in the story so that you will seem to know them better than many of the people whom you know in real life. You will decide what manner of men and women they were who did and said these things. Thus this story will become your own, because you have really read it. To it you bring the experience of your reading of Julius Caesar and many another book; you bring also your own personal experience, and you bring the picture-making power of your imagination.

V

In a poem that you are to read shortly you will come upon the following passage: I am a part of all that I have met;

Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough Gleams that untraveled world, whose margin fades

Forever and forever.

The poet is not thinking of the world of books and reading, yet the words apply to that world. The experiences of life enter into a man's personality, become a part of himself. Yet no matter how rich and varied that experience, a new world yet untraveled beckons him on. It is so with the form of living that we meet in books. To the new poem, the new drama, we bring all that we have known and lived in the past. We bring this experience alive, breathing. It is not buried under the ashes of dead years. The richer this experience, the more glorious is the arch that bends over us, the untraveled world that the new poem embodies. Thus we shall always be learning to read. Life and the Book are but two forms of the same thing.

I

The poems that make up the first part of our book are not very old, but they illustrate one of the oldest of all the forms of poetry. Centuries before books were known, long before the development of writing into a medium for literary expression, verse-stories were made and handed down from generation to generation by oral tradition. With the development of the art of writing on parchment and other materials, some of these stories were preserved in manuscripts. Few people could own a library made up of such manuscripts; the minstrel or bard was all men's book. In the famous picture on the opposite page we have a view of a small group of people listening to a poet of ancient Greece who is reciting his own poetry. Sappho, who is seated and listening so attentively, is an even more famous poet. Beside her stands her daughter, and the others are her pupils. The poet needs no manuscript; he chants his story to the accompaniment of the lyre.

With some of the old Greek epics you are already familiar. You have also read some ballads, simpler and less formal types of verse-story. In modern poems like The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and The Lady of the Lake you have found illustrations of the fact that the old verse-stories are still imitated and still find an audience. Most of the poems in this part of our book, like the two last mentioned, were written within the last century. One of them was written only a few years ago, and though the novel and the short story are now the most popular methods of writing fiction, one still finds, in writers like John Masefield, Alfred

Noyes, Edgar Lee Masters, and others, the possession of the power to tell in verse a story that fascinates modern readers much as the Greek poets fascinated lovers of tales long centuries ago.

Most of the poems in this section belong to the type of poetry that is called "metrical romance." The word romance dates from about the tenth century, when the languages of western Europe, which were derived from Latin (the "Roman" language), became sufficiently developed to be used for literary expression. Italian, Spanish, and French are all direct descendants of Latin, and are therefore called Romance Languages. At this time Latin was still the language of scholarship, of business. and state papers, and of diplomatic correspondence. English, originally a Teutonic tongue like the languages of Germany and Scandinavia, had become a literary language, before the Norman Conquest. (1066), in a form now known as AngloSaxon or Old English. After the Norman Conquest a considerable Romance element, chiefly French, came in and greatly modified it, so that modern English is very different from that of Anglo-Saxon times. Besides these two great language groups, Teutonic and Romance, there was a Celtic group, spoken by peoples living in Brittany and ancient Britain and, after the Teutonic conquests, in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland.

All these peoples contributed to the stories that have become a part of our inheritance. In Scandinavia and Germany, many sagas, or myths of the Teutonic gods or heroes, were handed down by oral tradition and later written in poetic form. The greatest contribution of the Celtic race has been the Arthurian legend, which

has exerted an influence on all succeeding literature comparable only with that of the stories told by Homer. It was the peculiar property of the Romance languages, and especially of French, to be able to assimilate these legends and folk tales from all races and to give them literary form. Many centuries ago a French writer, speaking of the different subjects used by poets of his race, said that there were three "matters," or sources, of material: the matter of France, the matter of Britain, and the matter of Rome the Great. The first of these refers to the legends about Charlemagne and his knights, and was of French origin. The second, of Celtic origin, refers to the Arthurian legend. The third includes the ancient classical stories retold in French verse.

We are now ready for a definition of "romance." We have seen that it frequently meant something written in one of the Romance languages, especially French; that each of the three great racial divisions of western Europe, Teutonic, Celtic, and the Romance peoples, possessed racial traditions and stories that were ready for literary expression; and that French, the leading Romance language, became the language in which many of these tales were written. Most of this material was fiction. Learned works and state papers, as already stated, were written in Latin. The courtly society that in the tenth century and later began to take delight in stories of love and adventure found the tales of the French poets the most delightful, and these tales soon came to be called romances. Thus the language gave its name to the literary type.

The subjects of these courtly poems or romances were love, religion, adventures in war and in the chivalric tournaments, marvelous and supernatural incidents of every variety. The plots of the tales were loosely constructed: a hero set out on a "quest," or search, for something, and met with all sorts of adventures. Unlike the ancient epics, the romance delighted in stories of love. Incident and adventure were the necessary elements; the tale had to be a thrilling one. Little

attention was paid to fine points of analysis of character; the personages of the romance were little more than types of bravery or beauty or cowardice. There was little conversation; the plot was narrated, not revealed through action and dialogue. The tournament in which knights contested before the king for the favor of fair ladies was as important in the life of the centuries from the twelfth to the fifteenth as the championship football match is today, and accounts of it were read as eagerly as we now read stories about our great national game. The heroes of the romances, such as Lancelot, Gawain, Percival, were as popular as movie stars today; therefore a poet who wished to gain fame would write long romances in which the popular hero of the time figured, and other poets would add adventures until romances of thirty or forty thousand lines had been written in beautifully decorated manuscripts. All ladies and gentlemen of the court read or listened to these romances and discussed them. They expressed the finest ideals of their time. Reverence for women, loyalty to friendship, religious devotion, fealty to some cause that entailed years of wandering and hardship, warfare carried on against monsters, Saracens, and other enemies these were subjects which gave delight and also helped to raise the level of civilization.

Later times have seen a continued interest in these old romances. In every century, including our own, the Arthurian stories have been retold. Part of their popularity has been due, of course, to the inborn love we all have for stories about an ideal world, a world of adventure and romance. Either prose or verse may be used by the writer of romances. If verse, or metrical language, is chosen it is convenient to call such tales "metrical romances" to distinguish them from romances in prose. Sir Walter Scott wrote both forms: prose romance in Ivanhoe; metrical romance in The Lady of the Lake.

II

The romance, then, may be written in either verse or prose. It may be on