BALLADES AND RONDEAUS,
CHANTS
ROYAL, SESTINAS, VILLANELLES,
&c., SELECTED
BY GLEESON WHITE.

To
Robert Louis Stevenson.

The crowning pleasure in the compilation of thisbook is the permission to dedicate it to you, andthis token of personal admiration is not without specialfitness, since you were among the earliest to experimentin these French rhythms, and to introduce Charlesd'Orléans and François Villon to the majority ofEnglish readers.

"Those old French ways of verse making that have been cominginto fashion of late. Surely they say a pretty thing moreprettily for their quaint old-fashioned liberty! That TRIOLET—howdeliciously impertinent it is! is it not?... The varietyof dainty modes wherein by shape and sound a very prettysomething is carved out of nothing at all. Their fantasticsurprises, the ring of their bell-like returns upon themselves,their music of triangle and cymbal. In some of them poetryseems to approach the nearest possible to bird-song—to unconsciousseeming through most unconscious art, imitating the carelessnessand impromptu of forms as old as the existence of birds, andas new as every fresh individual joy in each new generation,growing their own feathers, and singing their own song, yetalways the feathers of their kind, and the song of their kind."—

"Home Again."—George Macdonald.

[Pg vii]

INDEX.

* An asterisk is attached to the titles of those not previouslypublished. Names of American Authors are in Italic type.