eye as five lines,much as Swinburne's stanza revealed itself as a couplet. In fact, both Swinburne's and Mrs. Browning's are not really in the five-line form, since they assume this outer shape only to the eye. To the ear Swinburne's is only a couplet of long lines, and Mrs. Browning's is only a triplet. In Mrs. Browning's case the absence of more than the absolutely necessary three rimes makes this fairly obvious, even to a careless ear; whereas the two pairs of rimes inside Swinburne's first line may be held to give his stanza more claim to be considered as actually made up of five lines, in spite of the metrical equivalence of the first four to the final one.

Longfellow employed an effective five-line stanza in his "Enceladus," a, b, b, a, b:—

Under Mount Etna he lies,

It is slumber, it is not death;
For he struggles at times to arise,
And above him the lurid skies

Are hot with his fiery breath.

Just as two quatrains can be combined into an eightline stanza, so two five-line stanzas can be united to make a ten-line type. Sometimes, indeed, the five-line stanzas may even be printed separately, although the rime goes over from the first to the second and from the third to the fourth, as in Longfellow's "The Goblet of Life," in which the rime-scheme is a, a, a, a, b, - c, c, c, c, b:

Filled is Life's goblet to the brim ;

And though my eyes with tears are dim,
I see its sparkling bubbles swim,
And chant a melancholy hymn

With solemn voice and slow.

No purple flowers, -no garlands green,
Conceal the goblet's shade or sheen,
Nor maddening drafts of Hippocrene,
Like gleams of sunshine, flash between
Thick leaves of mistletoe.

This is one of Longfellow's earlier lyrics and he did not employ this type again, probably feeling that the fourfold repetition of the rime in prompt succession was a little monotonous, and that the long wait for the rime of the fifth line to recur in the tenth was perhaps a little fatiguing to the ear.

The two five-line stanzas may be merely conjoined, as in Moore's "The Time I've lost in wooing," wherein the rime-scheme is a, a, b, b, a, c, c, d, d, c:—

A better arrangement of the ten-line stanza is that we find in Gray's "On a Distant Prospect of Eton College," wherein he ties together by a middle couplet two quatrains, the first with interlinked rimes and the last with rimes arranged, as in Tennyson's " In Memoriam,” a, b, a, b, c, c, d, e, e, d:

66

Ye distant spires, ye antique towers,
That crown the watery glade,
Where grateful Science still adores
Her Henry's holy shade;

And ye, that from the stately brow
Of Windsor's heights the expanse below

Of grove, of lawn, of mead survey,
Whose turf, whose shade, whose flowers among
Wanders the hoary Thames along

His silver-winding way.

There is an effective ingenuity in the ten-line stanza which Bret Harte employed in "Miss Blanche Says." The rime-scheme is a, b, a, b, c, d, c, c, c, d; and the quadruple repetition of one riming sound is relieved by the use of double rimes in four of the other lines:

And you are the poet, and so you want
Something what is it? -a theme, a fancy?
Something or other the Muse won't grant
To your old poetical necromancy;

Why, one half you poets—you can't deny —

Don't know the Muse when you chance to meet her,

But sit in your attics and mope and sigh

For a faineant goddess to drop from the sky,

When flesh and blood may be standing by

Quite at your service, should you but greet her.

It is needless to attempt to catalog all the possible forms of the ten-line stanza, since it is capable of unending variations in the rime-scheme. But no one of its several types is quite as large and sweeping as the nine-line stanza which Spenser employed in the "Faery Queen" and which is usually called the Spenserian :

So pure and innocent as that same lamb,
She was in life and every virtuous lore;
And by descent from royal lineage came

Of ancient kings and queens, that had of yore

Their scepters stretcht from east to western shore.
And all that world in their subjection held;

Till that infernal fiend with foul uproar

Forwasted all their land, and them expelled;

Whom to avenge she had this Knight from far compelled.

This Spenserian stanza is one of the most melodious instruments that ever a great poet played on, and we need not wonder that Byron and Burns, Keats and Hood borrowed it in turn and evoked delicious music from it. Holmes described it as

The sweet Spenserian, gathering as it flows,
Sweeps gently onward to its dying close,
Where waves on waves in long succession pour,
Till the ninth billow melts along the shore.

Lowell had the same figure of speech in one of those critical papers of his which were always informed with the insight of a poet into the mechanism of his art. "There is no ebb and flow in the meter more than on the shores of the Adriatic, but wave follows wave with equable gainings and recessions, the one sliding back in fluent music to be mingled with and carried forward by the next. In all this there is soothingness, indeed, but no slumberous monotony; for Spenser was no mere metrist, but a great composer. By the variety of his pauses now at the close of the first or second foot, now of the third, and again of the fourth — he gives spirit and energy to a measure whose tendency certainly is to become languorous. He knew how to make it rapid and passionate at need."

Three other nine-line stanzas may be mentioned here. One of them is Chaucer's, of which the rimescheme is a, a, b, a, a, b, b, c, c. A second is that which we find in Poe's "Ulalume," where the rimes are arranged a, b, b, a, b, a, b, a, b, the final a, b, consisting of a repetition of the riming words of the preceding a, b. The third is that employed by Tennyson in "The Lady of Shalott," a, a, a, a, b, c, c, c, b,

the two b rime-words being always Shalott and Camelot, which thus serve as a double refrain, so to speak. This nine-line stanza of Tennyson's may be compared with Longfellow's ten-line stanza in "The Goblet of Life":

On either side the river lie

Long fields of barley and of rye,

That clothe the wold and meet the sky;
And through the field the road runs by
To many-towered Camelot ;
And up and down the people go,
Gazing where the lilies blow
Round an island there below,

The island of Shalott.

Although many poets have written in stanzas of more than ten lines, few of these longer forms have justified themselves. Ten is apparently the utmost limit of the lines, the rimes of which the ear can receive without undue strain on the attention. Moore employed a thirteen-line stanza in "Fly not yet"; Francis Mahoney used sixteen short-lines in his " Bells of Shandon," ending every stanza with a refrain; and Swinburne, ever confident in his strength of wing, strove to soar aloft in a stanza of twenty-four lines in his "Last Oracle."

The consideration of the combination of quatrains into the eight-line stanza and of five-line stanzas into ten-line stanzas led to the temporary overlooking of a shorter stanza, which now demands consideration. This is the six-line stanza. It is found very early in English verse, as in this "Christmas Carol," where the rime-scheme is x, a, x, ɑ, x, a:

God rest you merry, gentlemen,
Let nothing you dismay,