REFRAINS.

CLOCKS and the sea and all rhythmic things can charm the mind or madden it, and all things that repeat them- selves can call on the fancy and be heard; for the human mind loves an echo, even as children do; it loves to expect recurrence and hear it and be satisfied. Therein lies, partly, the pleasure that metre gives. For all verse-forms are in substance this : a pattern of sound is built up, and then

repeated in an order fixed or varied cunningly, to engage and mock or satisfy the ear. The pattern must have clear identity, and one thinks of the " hexameter curling-crested," and that distinctive ending of dactyl and spondee which gave it pre- cedence over the old plain iambic—for the iambics had no true ending; they would come apart at any point. It is a pattern that can vary enormously and still be itself :—

" Then to him answer'd again great Hector heim'd with the light- ning,

' Alas, Telamon's son, god-born, that art lord of a people, Try me no more, but know I am not as a green lad strengthless Nor as a woman unlearn'd in the lore of the sword and the battle.' "

The thing is a rhyme of rhythm, invented a millennium before the rhyme of vowels that we know, but still a possibility in modern verse, though the new rhyming has really filled its place. Campbell uses such rhythm-rhymes like a drum: in " Hohenlinden " " By torch and trumpet fast arrayed

Each horseman drew his battle blade,

And furious every charger neighed To join the dreadful revelry.

Then shook the hills with thunder riven, Then rushed the steeds to battle driven, And louder than the bolts of Heaven Far flashed the red artillery."

and in the "Battle of the Baltic ":—

" And the prince of all the land Led them on.

And the boldest held his breath, For a time.

Here one sees also to some degree another form of pleasure which these repetitions may have for the ear. It is that expectation of ingenuity which is alternately aroused and satisfied as one listens to certain vulgar, cheerful, topical songs —that, for instance, wherein " Months and months and months,"

or, in a French parallel that is still more vulgar, "Tout, tout, tout dou-oucement," has to be fitted, in some way that will

make sense, to the end of every stanza. "How will he get to the ' months' this time P " questions the mind, or, "What will happen so very, very doucement' at the end of this verse?" And as the resource of the rhymester survives another test, the mind chuckles and applauds. Songs are no doubt the right place for refrains, and the mere presence of a refrain may add something of the song-quality to quite pedestrian verse. It indicates, at any rate, that something more than a prose emotion is meant by the poet to be felt, and the mind half-consciously attempts to fulfil the poet's wish. And so the gay songs of all ages have had refrains—from the joyous

Athenian catch :- iv at;pTov rams! Tb Voos ipophace Liarep `AppAibtos Nal 'Apio-royetTcor.

.—to Peacock's " Three Men of Gotham"

"Seamen three! What men be ye ?

Gotham's three wise men we be.

Whither in your bowl so free? To rake the moon from out the sea.

The bowl goes free. The moon (loth shine,

And our ballast is old wine—

And your ballast is old wine."

The desire of convivial audiences to have something manage- able to sing themselves has made a delightful addition to the resources of the cheerful lyrist.

On a higher plane a like concession has been made to the vocal, youthful cheerfulness of one part of our congregations. There is a fine joyousness, for example, in the chorus of " Onward, Christian soldiers " and in many a familiar friend of our church-going infancy, and, in a rather different form, this same exultation appears again in religious poetry of deeper tone. The "Benedicite Omnia Opera" is one of the moat stirring hymns of praise in the world, and it is almost one long refrain. Its bidding so often repeated— "Bless ye the Lord, praise Hint and magnify Him for ever"— as it strikes again and again on the mind moves it to an exultation which the music alone could not have given. Something the same is the effect of that great Psalm (the cxxxvi.), to whose refrain Milton added rhyme and a modern verse form, though it needed no remodelling to take rank as English poetry :—

"0 give thanks unto the Lord, for he is gracious, and his mercy endureth for ever.

O give thanks unto the God of all gods, for his mercy endureth for ever,

O thank the Lord of all lords, for his mercy endureth for ever."

The refrain alone even in English prose gives the lyric quality which the Hebrew rhyme of sense, however irregular, always gives, and there is added here, as in the " Benedicite." the cumulative magnificence of for ever heaped upon for ever When the theme is not exultation but sorrow, the lyric power of the Hebrew repetition is perhaps still greater, even where the refrain is no more than an unrhythmic echo :—

"Adah and Zillah, hear my voice ;

Ye wives of Lamech, hearken unto my speech :

For I have slairisa man to my wounding,

And a young man to my hurt."

The supreme example, of course, of this old lyrism felt through the veil of modern prose is that great chapter in Samuel, which in spite of its prose form is perhaps the noblest threnic poem in our tongue:— " The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places: how are the mighty fallen!

— How are the mighty fallen in the midst of the battle! 0 Jonathan thou wast slain in thy high places.

— How are the mighty fallen, and the weapons of war perished!"

But the massed effects of the " Benedicite " and the Psalm that Milton made a hymn are really little more than an affair of quantity, for mere reiteration has a kind of hammerlike efficacy that strikes fire from the soul on which it beats long enough. The mysterious and beautiful " Pervigilium Veneris" has an echo even within its oft-repeated musical refrain :—

"Ora); amet qui nunquam amavit, Quique amavit eras amet."

and the mere numerical frequency with which the chime of eras amet returns has the assertive power of an English curfew-bell. The thought of love is burned into the brain as the song runs on, and every verse seems to ring and echo with the name of it. Perhaps, too, it is only this emphasis of repetition that makes so horrible the refrain of certain ballads and songs whose theme is horror :—

" Why does your brand sae drop wi' blude,

Edward, Edward ?

Why does your brand sae drop wi' blude, And why sae sad gang ye, 0?'

— '0 I hae kill'd my father dear,

Mither, Hither ; O I has kill'd my father dear, Alas and wae is me, 0 ! ' "

—and there is also, of course, the pause, the moment of waiting, the hanging back of the tale on its march ; but there is something moving merely in the repetition of those vocatives, and, where the poem ends on a curse, Edward's deliberate " Mither, Mither " is, dramatically, also terrible.

"The curse of hell free use sail ye bear,

Mither, Hither; The curse of hell frae me salt ye boar: Sic counsels ye gave to me, 0 !"

Horror may come, too, by a device that is more obvious, by the re-emphasis of a background or a striking circumstance. Again and again the mind is bidden to pause and listen to a storm without, or look at the gay staging of a dreadful scene. Tennyson, archaizing in " The Sisters," uses the first of these effects :-

"— I rose up in the silent night:

I made my dagger sharp and bright,

The wind is roaring in turret and tree.

— I curl'd and comb'd his comely head; He looked so grand when he was dead. The wind is blowing in turret and tree."

and Leconte de Lisle the second in "Les Elfes," wherein each stanza closes on the lines

Couronnes de thym et de marjolaine

Les elfes joyeux dansent sur In plain."

It is a troubadour tale, and the refrain adds somehow to the suggestion of romance and the fragrance of a Celtic fairyland, but chiefly it adds, by a kind of ruthless irrelevance, to the pathos of the little tragedy. For here it is pathos rather than horror, the plain pathos of the ballad stories where facts are stated and feelings left to be supposed. And where poetry becomes introspective, too, some refrains aim at reflecting a pathos of mere sentiment that is sometimes almost tearful. There is a kind of wail in Tennyson's " (Enone," where the

burden of— "0 Mother Ida, many-fountained

Dear Mother Ida, hearken ere I die."

is repeated (to the horror of the magazine critics of '33, who thought it was done to fill up space) not far short of twenty times. The effect here is partly to enhance the poem's wonderful musical sweetness, which leaves so strong a flavour in the memory that many who know Tennyson well will answer to an unlooked-for question that " CEnone " is in rhyme; but partly the effect is of a recurring cry that fills the whole poem with the sound of weeping. For when people weep they do repeat themselves ; a word or a phrase comes back and back when a sobbing woman tells her woes; and repentant children are ever tautological.

The Latin refrain was a fashion of the fifteenth century. Dunbar had a fondness for it; Dunbar that was trebly a Latinist—Scotsman, Franciscan, courtier—and he seems to use the Latin mostly for its association with Church singing. The delightful poem that begins:—

" Borate coeli desuper !

Nevins, distil your balmy schouris!"

ends each verse with the Latin line :— "Et nobis peer status est."

One hears the organ there. A new music breaks in with the refrain, as in Tennyson's great ode the choir comes in upon "Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust.' It is the device that Shelley uses in the "Hymn of Pan," for there, too, a new music returns with the refrain.

" From the forests and highlands We come, we come; From the river-girt islands Where loud waves are dumb, Listening to my sweet pipings.

Liquid Penens was flowing, And all dark Tempe lay On Pelion's shadow outgrowing Th light of the dying day, Speeded by my sweet pipings."

Pan is singing aloud to a rippling tune, and suddenly, as the rhythm changes, the pipe seems to break in upon the human voice.

It may be that there is overmuch guess-work in all this.

Perhaps there is no such change of music in the "Hymn of Pan," and what one fancy acknowledges another may deny. To one a refrain seems charged with tears which to another

rings mechanical ; some hear the pipe where others still hear the singer's voice, and to some all such imaginings arc foolish- ness. But they say that no two minds read a musician's thought alike, and yet music, ill or well interpreted, is still a