[135]. Œuvres, Paris, 1810, IX. 227 ff., “De la Prose Mesurée.” See also pp. 185 ff.
[136]. See his Petits Poëmes en Prose, in Œuvres Complètes, Paris, 1869, IV. p. 2,—an interesting preface.
[137]. Young Ofeg’s Ditties, trans. Egerton, London, 1895.
[138]. Also Sprach Zaruthustra, III. “Das Andere Tanzlied.”
[139]. His defence is very fine and languid and aristocratic,—“inutile dispute de mots,” he protests at last: Œuvres Complètes, Paris, 1852, V. 84, 295 (“Examen des Martyrs”).
[140]. A foreigner is no judge in these things; but he may say how much more the lucidity of Mérimée, of M. Anatole France, appeals to him than the poetic prose of Flaubert’s Salammbô.
[141]. Has any one noted in the opening chapter of the Trionfo della Morte a prose refrain, “Gocce di pioggia, rare, cadevano,” repeated with considerable effect?
[142]. Ibid., p. 396. The structure is strophic and very artistic in its complication.
[143]. See D’Annunzio’s dedication of this romance, and his artistic creed, quite an echo of the preface to Baudelaire’s poems in prose.
[144]. There is often in these prose-poems, so much praised now, a startling reminder of the golden style of certain despised folk who wrote cadenced and coloured prose in their romances three centuries ago. And not only in romances; Tom Nash tried rimed prose, both with alliteration and with actual rime, by way of helping the antithetical clause. See the “Anatomy of Absurdity,” in Nash’s Works, ed. Grosart, I. 6 ff., 24: inferre: averre; praise: daies; nose: rose: and the lilt of “to play with her dogge, than to pray to her God.” The Arcadia is not so much a rimed or rhythmical prose, as swelling and sonorous. For mediæval rimed prose, see Wackernagel, Gesch. d. deutsch. Lit., 2d ed., I. 107 ff., and Sievers, Altger. Metrik, p. 49,—the latter for Germanic relations.