But one more step, and we find rhyme supervening by what
seems the inevitable road--

"When the nightingale sings--the woods waxen.
Leaf and grass and blossom--spring in Averil, I ween;
And love is to my heart gone--with a spear so keen:
Night and day, my blood it drinks--my heart doth me tone." ¹

This asks to be interpreted by the tune to which it was sung;
but we are still aware in reading it of the Old Northern rhythm.
Another page and we feel the melic impulse strengthening in
the verse of Rolle of Hampole. Further north the old rhythm
went on influencing the folk-poets for generations to come.
There, as Schipper pointed out in the Teutonic stave, the
rhythmical ictus coincided with the word-accent, while the
southern and Latin verse was decided syllabically.

So in Scotland we come comparatively late upon proverbs
in rhyme with the old dependence on word emphasis--

"Full moon, high sea! Great man, s'alt thou be;
But ill death s'alt thou dee."

But to return to the main descent, we may take from the
Vernon MS. a fresh variety of the old music in Seemly Susan--

"In the season of summer--with Sybil and Joan
She begat her to bar garden--that growëd so green."

These lines rhyme o-e, o-e; and there we have the clear sug-
gestion of the ballad-melody that was direct heir to the old
stabreim.

The new music sounds out loud and sweet for the first time
in the best Spring song in all literature--the Cuckoo Song--

"Summer is y-comen in
Loud sing cuckoo,"

which we may date roughly, in order to get our European
bearings, between Dante and Aucassin et Nicolette; or at
home between Orm and the Cursor Mundi--that is to say,
the year 1280 or thereabouts. There is not room here to tell
at length its musical history as related in the Oxford History of
Music. The extreme beauty of the interlinked music, like
two tunes strung together on one chain, is only to be appreci-

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