Thou glorious mirror, where the Almighty's form Dark, heaving, boundless, endless, and sublime, Of the Invisible; even from out thy slime The monsters of the deep are made; each zone Obeys thee; thou go | est forth, | dread, fath | omless, | alone. Byron. Note the additional syllable at the beginning of this last Alexandrine. The longest poems in this measure is Chapman's translation of the Iliad; Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome, and Tennyson's May Queen, furnish recent specimens. The verses of it are sometimes broken up and printed in alternate four and three feet Iambics, thus forming Ballad metre. And none will grieve when I go forth, or smile | when I return, Or sit beside the old man's bed, or weep upon | his urn. Macaulay. There's not a flower on all the hills; the frost is on the pane; ¿ I only wish to live till the snowdrops come again. I wish the snow would melt, and the sun come out on high; I long to see a flower so before the day I die. Tennyson. No marvel that the lady wept, it was the land of France, This metre is very rare. Webbe, in his “Discourse of Poetry," says, "The longest verse which I have seen used in English consisteth of sixteen syllables, each two verses rhyming together; thus—- 'Where virtue wants and vice abounds, there wealth is but a baited hook, To make men swallow down their bane, before on danger deep they look.'" This species, therefore, did once exist, in form and show, as a single verse; but, in fact, it was two; "for," says he, "it is commonly divided each verse into two, whereof each shall contain eight syllables, and rhyme crosswise, the first to the third, and the second to the fourth," forming the Long metre of our psalms. When in the night I sleepless lie, My soul with heavenly thoughts supply; No powers of darkness me molest. Ken. A few modern specimens of it may be seen in the poems of Owen Meredith. 2. TROCHAIC MEASURE. The rhythm of Trochaic verse has a distinctive flow from that of Iambic; it is more sprightly and lively, and therefore suited for the dress of cheerful themes and the description of quick-moving action. Milton's L'Allegro-the cheerful man-is written for the most part in this measure, while the sombre Il Penseroso is mostly Iambic. It is often called the Tripping measure. This one-foot verse is only met with mixed with longer verses, l.g: It is difficult, if not almost impossible, to find suitable specimens of exact verses in all the trochaic measures, because our poets avail themselves so freely of licences. It has been already pointed out that extra unaccented syllables are frequently used at the end of a verse, making it hypermetrical; it is now necessary to add farther that an additional unaccented syllable is allowed before the first foot of a trochaic line, to which the term anacrusis has been applied, e.g. : The Queen was in the garden. Besides this, truncated lines, as they are called, are frequently met with, i.e. verses shorn of their last unaccented syllables, e.g.: Gray's Liliputian ode is almost entirely in this diminutive metre. In a maze, Can our eyes Nearly all verses in this measure are truncated in the last foot. In the annexed passage from The Passionate Pilgrim, only the 2nd, 3rd, and 6th verses are perfectly symmetrical. Tennyson's Maud furnishes an example of twentyeight consecutive lines of the same measure : Go not, happy day, From the shining fields; Go not, happy day, Till the maiden yields. Rosy is the west, Rosy is the south, Rosy are her cheeks, And a rose her mouth. Tennyson. |