Attention has been called in the preceding chapter to the fact that the short syllables of a foot may be omitted at the beginning of a line or at the end or even within the line. It may be well to adduce other examples. Especially in dactylic rhythm either one or both of the short syllables at the ends of the lines may be suppressed with the result of enriching the verse by a variety which pleases the ear. We may take, for example, this stanza of Hood's "Bridge of Sighs," written in dactylic dimeter:

One more Unfortunate,
Weary of breath, [~~]
Rashly importunate,
Gone to her death! [~~]
Take her up tenderly,
Lift her with care; [~~]
Fashioned so slenderly,

Young, and so fair! [~~]

The suppression of the two final short syllables which is only casual in Hood's poem may be consistent, as in this stanza of Austin Dobson's "On a Fan," written in dactylic trimeter:

Ah, but things more than polite []
Hung on this toy, voyez-vous ! [~~]
Matters of state and of might, [~~]
Things that great ministers do; [~~]
Things that, may be, overthrew [~]
Those in whose brains they began; [~~~]
Here was the sign and the cue,- [
This was the Pompadour's fan! [

Although the short syllables of the iambus and of the dactyl are those which are most likely to be suppressed, sometimes even the long syllable of the iambus may be omitted, its place being taken by an equivalent

rest. Of this as good an example as any may be found in one of Macaulay's stirring ballads:

And how can man die better [-] than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers, and the temples of his gods?

Another example, from Austin Dobson, shows the suppression of the long syllable in three lines out of four:

The ladies of St. James's [-]
Go swinging to the play;
Their footmen run before them, [-]
With a "Stand by! Clear the way!"
But Phyllida, my Phyllida!

She takes her buckled shoon,
When we go out a-courting [-]

Beneath the harvest-moon.

One frequently employed method of lightening verse is to add a short syllable at the end of an iambic line, thereby permitting a double rime, which relieves the monotony of the emphatic termination of the ordinary iamb. Sometimes this added syllable is at the end of the first and third lines, as in this stanza of Peacock's "Love and Age":

You grew a lovely roseate maiden,

And still our early love was strong;
Still with no care our days were laden,
They glided joyously along;

And I did love you very dearly —

How dearly, words want power to show;
I thought your heart was touched as nearly;
But that was fifty years ago.

Or the extra syllable which makes the double rime may be appended to the second and fourth lines, as in this stanza of Praed's "Belle of the Ball-room":

I knew that there was nothing in it!
I was the first -the only one

Her heart had thought of for a minute, -
I knew it, for she had told me so,

In phrase which was divinely molded;
She wrote a charming hand, — and oh !
How sweetly all her notes were folded!

The methods of avoiding monotony most often to be observed are the use of double and treble rimes, the shifting of the pause which occurs toward the middle of a line and the interchange of one foot for another at exactly that point in the line where the substitution helps to bring out the thought. Sometimes as we have already seen these substitutions may be so free and so frequent that we are almost in doubt whether a rhythm is really iambic or anapestic, as in this stanza from a ballad of Scott's: —

Oh! I lo❜e weel my Charlie's name,

Though some there be that abhor him;
But oh! to see the deil gang hame
Wi' a' the whigs before him!

[] Over the water, and over the sea,

And over the water to Charlie;

Come weal, come wo, we 'll gather and go,

And live and die with Charlie.

Here there is no question but that the result is pleasing to the ear; and while we may choose to mark off the iambs and the anapests for our own information, their intermingling matters little. As King James declared more than three centuries ago, 66 your ear must be the only judge and discerner." What the poet needs above all else is a natural ear for the tunes of verse. Without this, he will unceasingly blunder

and annoy us with the harshness of his lines. With it, he has the root of the matter in him; and he can then go forward resolutely to acquire an added skill in handling the subtleties of metrical technic. "For if Nature be not the chief worker in this art," to quote from King James once more, "rules will be but a band to Nature, and will make you within a short space weary of the whole art; whereas if Nature be chief and bent to it, rules will be a help and staff to Nature."

CHAPTER IV

RIME

Whate'er you write of, pleasant or sublime,
Always let sense accompany your rime;
Falsely they seem each other to oppose,
Rime must be made with reason's law to close;
And when to conquer her you bend your force,
The mind will triumph in the noble cause;
To reason's yoke she quickly will incline,
Which, far from hurting, renders her divine.

BOILEAU, Art of Poetry (as translated by Soame).

In all modern languages poetry is generally rimed; and even in English, in spite of our possession of blank verse, a metrical instrument of surpassing power and variety, most of our verse is in rime. Although there is not yet any absolute agreement upon its rules, we may venture to define rime in English as an identity of the vowel-sound in the last long foot and of all the sounds that follow it, preceded by a difference in the consonant sound that comes before this final long vowel. Thus charm and alarm are rimes, charming and alarming, charmingly and alarmingly. There must be a distinct difference in the consonant sound that precedes; cent and descent, meant and lament are not generally accepted in English as good rimes. Although it would not be difficult to cite from distinguished poets examples of the effort to pass off as rimes pairs of words in which there is no change in the consonant preceding the vowel of the final long syllable, there is an almost unanimous opinion that