"The ploughman's labour hath no end, and he a churl will prove;
The craftsman hath more work on hand than fitteth one to love;
The merchant trafficking abroad, suspects his wife at home;

A youth will play the wanton, and an old will play the mome:
Then choose a shepherd."

This is but the lumbering dodeca-syllabic verse rendered more lumbering still by two fresh feet, it will be generally allowed. In fact, these lines of twelve and fourteen feet have only been used effectually as "Alexandrines," or single lines introduced to wind up, or heighten the force of passages, in the heroic or the octo-syllabic measure. Pope ridicules this practice, though it was a favourite one with Dryden:

"A needless Alexandrine ends the song,

That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along."

In Dryden's "Ode to Music," the following instances of the two kinds of Alexandrines occur:

"Could swell the soul to rage, or kindle soft desire."

"And thrice he routed all his foes, and thrice he slew the slain."

By giving lines of ten, twelve, and fourteen syllables in succession, as he occasionally does in his translation of Virgil, Dryden brings passages with artistic skill to a very noble climax. But the Alexandrine is now nearly obsolete in our poetry.

The most common features and peculiarities of English Versification have now received a share of attention. Measure and Rhythm, Accent and Pause, have all been duly noticed. There are yet other points, however, connected with the subject, which merit equal attention from the student of poetical composition. Every rule that has been mentioned may be preserved, and still most inharmonious verse may be the result. The greatest poets, either from experience or innate musical taste, adopted additional

means to arrive at perfect versification. some of these in his well-known lines:

Pope points to

"The sound must seem an echo to the sense.
Soft is the strain when zephyr gently blows,
And the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows;
But when loud surges lash the sounding shore,

The hoarse rough verse should like the torrent roar."

The poet, as all will of course see, here exemplifies the meaning of his lines practically in their structure. The Greek and Roman writers were quite aware of the effect of congruous sound and sense. Virgil has several famous lines constructed on this principle, as

"Monstrum, horrendum, informe, ingens, cui lumen ademptum." (A monster, horrid, formless, gross, and blind.)

To give a better idea of the efficient way in which the poet has roughened the above verse to suit the picture of a monster, one of his ordinary lines may be quoted:

"Formosam resonare doces Amaryllida silvas."

But it is wrong to call this an ordinary line, since Dr Johnson considered it to be the most musical in any human language. Ovid, again, has made the sense and sound (and also construction) agree finely in the following passage:"Sponte sua carmen numeros veniebat ad aptos,

Et quod tentabam dicere versus erat."

Pope has imitated these lines, and applied them to himself, the signification being simply

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"I lisped in numbers, for the numbers came."

Among our own great bards, Milton stands peculiarly distinguished for success in the use of this ornament of verse. The "Allegro" and "Penseroso" exhibit various exquisite instances.

"Swinging slow with sullen roar.'

"On the light fantastic toe."

"Through the high wood echoing shrill."

In the "Paradise Lost," again, there occur many passages rendered forcible in the extreme by the adaptation of sound to sense. Thus

"Him the Almighty power

Hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky,

With hideous ruin and combustion, down

To bottomless perdition."

Still more remarkable is the following passage, as expressive of slow and toilsome travel:

"The fiend

O'er bog or steep, through strait, rough, dense, or rare,
With head, hands, wings, or feet, pursues his way,
And swims, or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies."

The chief mean of attaining general harmony in verse is a free and happy distribution of the vowel-sounds. For producing a special harmony, consonant with special signification, other rules require to be followed. But, in the first place, let us look particularly to the means of rendering verse simply and aggregately melodious. It must not be supposed, as many are apt to do, that even the most illustrious poets considered it beneath them to attend to such minutiæ as the distribution of the vowels in their verses. Look at the grand opening of "Paradise Lost." It is scarcely conceivable that the remarkable variation of the vowels there, on which the effect will be found largely to depend, can have been the result of chance. No one line almost, it will be seen, gives the same vowel-scund twice.

"Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit

Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our wo,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the heavenly seat,
Sing, heavenly Muse."

The following stanza of Leyden was considered by Scott one of the most musical in the language, and it is rendered so mainly by its vowel variety:

"How sweetly swell on Jura's heath

The murmurs of the mountain bee!
How sweetly mourns the writhed shell,
Of Jura's shore, its parent sea!"

A passage from the "Laodamia" of Wordsworth may be pointed to as an equally striking illustration of the same rule:

"He

Spake of heroic arts in graver mood
Revived, with finer harmony pursued;

Of all that is most beauteous-imaged there
In happier beauty; more pellucid streams,

An ampler ether, a diviner air,

And fields invested with purpureal gleams;

Climes which the sun, who sheds the brightest day
Earth knows, is all unworthy to survey."

Wordsworth, who was in truth a perfect master of this species of melody, as the "Excursion" will prove to all those who look thereinto attentively, has scarcely once repeated the same exact sound in any two words, of any one line, in the preceding quotation. One more passage (from "Lycidas") may be given, to undeceive yet more completely those who have been wont to ascribe the rich Miltonic melody to mere chance:

"Alas! what boots it with incessant care

To tend the homely, slighted shepherd's trade,
And strictly meditate the thankless Muse?
Were it not better done, as others use,
To sport with Amaryllis in the shade,

Or with the tangles of Neæra's hair?'

This most melodious passage has often been quoted, but the source of its melody has not been generally recognised by ordinary readers. The key which unlocks the secret has here been given.

Let it be applied to our poetry at

large, and it will be found to explain the effect of many of its grandest and sweetest passages.

The proper distribution of the vowels, then, so effective in the hands of Milton and Wordsworth, may be decisively viewed as a main help to harmony of versification generally. But when the poet desires to make his language express particular meanings by sounds, he studies more specially, in the first place, the right disposition of accent and pause, and so advances partly to his object. Thus Milton, in describing the fall of Mulciber or Vulcan from heaven, leaves him, as it were, tumbling and tumbling in the verse, by a beautiful pause:

"From morn

To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve,

A summer's day."

A similar and not less exquisite pause is made in the famed passage, otherwise beautiful from variety of vowels, where, after swelling allusions to

"What resounds

In fable or romance of Uther's son
Begirt with British and Armoric knights,
And all who since, baptised or infidel,
Jousted in Aspramont or Montalbalm"

a dying and most melodious close is attained

"When Charlemain with all his peerage fell

By Fontarabia."

Often are similar pauses made effectively at the opening of lines:

"The schoolboy, wandering through the wood,

To pull the primrose gay,

Starts, the new voice of spring to hear,

And imitates thy lay."

"My song, its pinions disarrayed of night,
Drooped."

"The carvéd angels, ever eager-eyed,

Stared."