Page:Modern poets and poetry of Spain.djvu/36

xxx than in English, where it seems only suited for the livelier strains of verse.

But in addition to the usual method of using rhymes, dependent in English and most other languages upon the consonants rather than the vowels, the Spaniards have a form of verse of which the rhyme is dependent on the vowel only, and the consonants may be entirely dissimilar. This form of verse they call Asonantes, in contradistinction to the other, which they call Consonantes, or full and perfect rhyme. Thus in the first stanza of the 'Alcazar of Seville,' the words prolijas and cornisas are Consonantes or full rhymes, but in the following verses miran and distintas are Asonantes, as also risa and evitan. The Spaniards conceive the Asonantes to be a form peculiar to themselves, but it is one common to many other nations, in the earlier stages of poetical composition. In the earliest Spanish poems, asonants and consonants were used together promiscuously, as may be observed particularly in the early poems in the Galician dialect; and it is curious to trace in this respect, as well as in many of their words, vestiges of their Celtic descent, this same form being also one of the prominent features of Celtic versification. In their modern asonante verse, the Spanish poets usually exclude consonantes, and that form continues in much favour, probably on account of the words in their language, as in the Latin, having generally so much the same sound as to make a variation pleasing to the ear, to break the monotonous effect of a too frequent recurrence of similar terminations. For this reason, no doubt, it was that the Latin poets did not adopt the system of rhymes, and for the same also it is common now in Spanish poems to have lines occasionally to which no other line presents a rhyme, giving thereby a pleasing effect to the whole. In our language, on