ments" of the national genius, as expressed in time-honored forms, (he frankly admitted that there were some things in rhyme which he did not like. One was "these continual cadences of couplets used in long and continued poems," which he found "very tiresome and unpleasing, by reason that still, methinks, they run on with a sound of one nature, and a kind of certainty which stuffs the delight rather than entertains it." To pass over the rhyme, when the violence of the matter will break through, "is rather graceful than otherwise." Tragedies, too, best comport with blank verse and dispense with rhyme, save in choruses, or "where a sentence shall require a couplet.” Daniel's own experiments in putting rhymes more than one line apart he hardly regarded as successful, "alternate or cross rhymes holding still the best place in my affection." Feminine rhymes should not carelessly or at random be mixed with others; they are best for ditties. Yet there can be no absolute law in these matters. All things change; and poets are proverbially self-willed and self-satisfied. Even good satisfactory English words are displaced by poor foreign substitutes. "But this is but a character of that perpetual revolution which we see to be in all things that never remain the same: and we must herein be content to submit ourselves to the law of the time, which in a few years will make all that for which we now contend Nothing." This was the end, save that sixty years later Milton himself Milton, the "mighty-mouthed inventor of harmonies" - in the preface to his masterpiece, ranged himself with the opponents of rhyme, and against his own triumphant practice as one of the greatest masters of rhyme who ever lived. The rhymed English stanza had never been brought to higher excellence than in the ode On the Morn of Christ's Nativity; no sonnets had spoken in mightier music than that of "Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones while L'Allegro and Il Penseroso had shown the capabilities of the four-stressed rhymed measure to turn with infallible effectiveness from iambic to trochaic and back again, according to the demands of the thought, and had forever created a new genre in English: that of the idyllic combination of description and reflection. His other triumphs in rhyme need no new chronicle here, nor his work in the two foreign languages most concerned in the rhyme-controversy, namely, the Italian and the Latin. It is enough to cite the definite words which he prefixed to our great blank-verse epic: 'The measure is English heroic verse without rhyme, as that of Homer in Greek and of Virgil in Latin, rhyme being no necessary adjunct or true ornament of poem or good verse, in longer works especially, but the invention of a barbarous age, to set off wretched matter and lame metre; graced indeed since by the use of some famous modern poets, carried away by custom, but much to their own vexation, hindrance, and constraint to express many things otherwise, and for the most part worse, than else they would have expressed them. Not without cause therefore some both Italian and Spanish poets of prime note have rejected rhyme both in longer and shorter works, as have also long since our best English tragedies, as a thing of itself, to all judicious ears, trivial and of no true musical delight; which consists only in apt numbers, fit quantity of syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another, not in the jingling sound of like endings, a fault avoided by the learned ancients both in poetry and all good oratory. This neglect then of rhyme so little is to be taken for a defect, though it may seem so perhaps to vulgar readers, that it rather is to be esteemed an example set, the first in English, of ancient liberty recovered to heroic poem from the troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming.") But we must remember that nobody had denied the majesty or the necessity of blank verse in English, which was neither a novelty nor a heresy; and it is significant that Milton never put himself on record as favoring or practising the "quantitative" writing of the hexametrists.1 He was a free inheritor and user 1 Landor, in one of his Imaginary Conversations, makes Milton say to Marvel: "My nephew reads Latin to me; and he reminded me one day that Sir Philip Sidney tried his hand at turning our English into Latin hexameters. Some of the Germans have done likewise. English and German hexameters sound as a heavy cart sounds bouncing over of English as it had been used by his predecessors who were true and great poets: by Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare. The rhythm in Paradise Lost itself is not more important than in the rhymed Ode on the Nativity; if the monosyllabic blank verse "Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death' needs no supporting rhyme, neither does the sonnet-line "They also serve who only stand and wait." Whether Milton was rhyming or writing blank verse, he was simply making the best use of means toward ends. Thoughtrhyme and end-rhyme in the splendid "Ring out, ye crystal spheres, Once bless our human ears, If ye have power to touch our senses so; And let your silver chime Move in melodious time; And let the base of heaven's deep organ blow; And with your ninefold harmony Make up full consort to the angelic symphony" were one in his creating mind. Omitting many technical points, I must call attention, in this Ode, to a few important indications of contemporary pronunciation: unsufferable: council-table; began: ocean; alone: union; said: made; great: set; sweat: seat; fast: haste. In Lycidas, which is rhymed throughout, the effect is curiously rhymeless until the closing passage-doubtless because of the variant line-lengths in an essentially slow movement, and the frequency of run-on lines, such as "Comes the blind fury with the abhorred shears This has a distinctly Shakespearean swing, and so does boulders." "And when they list, their lean and flashy songs Crump's ed., VI, 39. - Elsewhere Landor said of the hexameter (writing in the measure itself): "Latin and Greek are alone its languages. We have a measure fashioned by Milton's own hand, a fuller, a deeper, a louder." Milton, in the chorus of Samson Agonistes, used lines of different stresses and lengths (sometimes almost unscannable recitative), with rhymes at random, and apparently accidental assoSuch freedom is roughly suggestive of Greek choral nances. methods. VIII FORMAL RHYME One two, three four, five six, seven eight, nine ten, Start with a trochee, and your couplet 's wrought. SOME such formula as this was the rule of most English verse from Dryden's Religio Laici, at the close of the seventeenth century, to the Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth and Coleridge, at the end of the eighteenth. The history of the heroic couplet has been traced many times; never better than in Gosse's From Shakespeare to Pope. In one sense Waller was its earliest promoter; in another sense Donne. There is a curious priority in Donne's "How sits this city, late most populous, (The Lamentations of Jeremy.) it is a sort of reminiscence of Wyatt and anticipation of Dryden. Donne — who always, it is evident, pronounced his verses very slowly — rhymes humorist: chest; here: philosopher; tye: body; earnest: best; gone: dissolution; there: tear. he has the assonance other: lover. Once But in a truer sense nobody can be picked out as the chronological leader of the procession. The iambic pentameter rhymed couplet was nothing new in our poetry. It was Chaucer's vehicle for the greater part of the Canterbury Tales; it formed an integral element in Shakespeare's earlier plays; it closed the Shakespearean sonnet. Yet the "heroic couplet" from Waller |