It must be borne in mind that our modern pronunciation can hardly fail in other cases as well to injure the melody of the verses.

The modern reader will often find it difficult to get a rhythm out of some of them.  This may arise from any of several causes.  In the first place many final e’s were then sounded which are now silent; and it is not easy to tell which of them to sound.  Again, some words were pronounced as dissyllables which we treat as monosyllables, and others as monosyllables which we treat as dissyllables.  I suspect besides, that some of the old writers were content to allow a prolonged syllable to stand for two short ones, a mode not without great beauty when sparingly and judiciously employed.  Short supernumerary syllables were likewise allowed considerable freedom to come and go.  A good deal must, however, be put down to the carelessness and presumption of the transcribers, who may very well have been incapable of detecting their own blunders.  One of these ancient mechanics of literature caused Chaucer endless annoyance with his corruptions, as a humorous little poem, the last in his works, sufficiently indicates.  From the same sources no doubt spring as well most of the variations of text in the manuscripts.

The first of the poems is chiefly a conversation between the Lord on the cross and his mother standing at its foot.  A few prefatory remarks in explanation of some of its allusions will help my readers to enjoy it.

It was at one time a common belief, and the notion has not yet, I think, altogether vanished, that the dying are held back from repose by the love that is unwilling to yield them up.  Hence, in the third stanza, the Lord prays his mother to let him die.  In the fifth, he reasons against her overwhelming sorrows on the ground of the deliverance his sufferings will bring to the human race.  But she can only feel her own misery.

To understand the seventh and eighth, it is necessary to know that, among other strange things accepted by the early Church, it was believed that the mother of Jesus had no suffering at his birth.  This of course rendered her incapable of perfect sympathy with other mothers.  It is a lovely invention, then, that he should thus commend mothers to his mother, telling her to judge of the pains of motherhood by those which she now endured.  Still he fails to turn aside her thoughts.  She is thinking still only of her own and her son’s suffering, while he continues bent on making her think of others, until, at last, forth comes her prayer for all women.  This seems to me a tenderness grand as exquisite.

The outburst of the chorus of the Faithful in the last stanza but one,—­

  When he rose, then fell her sorrow,

is as fine as anything I know in the region of the lyric.

  “Stand well, mother, under rood;[1] the cross.
  Behold thy son with glade mood; cheerful.
    Blithe mother mayst thou be.” 
  “Son, how should I blithe stand? 
  I see thy feet, I see thy hand
    Nailed to the hard tree.”