Thy forest, Windsor! and thy green retreats,
At once the monarch's and the muse's seats,
Invite my lays.
This use of the full stop commonly required that the sense should be carried on without a pause from the preceding line, whereas the theory spread that the close of the sense should coincide with the close of the rhymed sound, or in other words that the full stop should be always at the end of the couplet. To keep the rhyme predominant there was an increasing tendency to have at least the pause of a comma, even after the final word of the first line of the couplet. Thus from a license, which, as Prior says, "was found too dissolute and wild, and came very often too near prose," the writers of heroics arrived at a system which "produced too frequent an identity in the sound, and brought every couplet to the point of an epigram."[34] Denham, according to Johnson, was the chief reformer who "taught his followers the art of concluding their sense in couplets,"[35] but he retained much of the primitive freedom, and Prior says that to Dryden belongs the credit of perfecting the innovation, and the blame of pushing it to excess. Pope went further than Dryden. When once the change had commenced there was a constant movement towards uniformity till the utmost verge was reached, and a fresh reaction began. Bowles, with his fine ear, was a zealous advocate for diversified harmony, and tuneful strength. He felt that an occasional break, managed with skill, adds dignity to the couplet, while the toning down of the final syllables, by sometimes running one verse into another, is a grateful antidote to the cloying monotony of emphatic rhymes. Imperfect rhymes offend from the impression they give of imperfect art, but perfect rhymes softened by the continuous flow of the pronunciation, are a relief to the ear. As the rhymed sound should be diminished at intervals, so, at intervals, it may be advantageously increased by the introduction of triplets. Dryden often used them with admirable effect;[36] Pope employed them sparingly, and they were almost entirely laid aside by his immediate imitators. With them the taste for numerous verse was extinct.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Johnson was mistaken. Pope states in a note that the addition commenced at ver. 291.
When actions, unadorned, are faint and weak,
Cities and countries must be taught to speak;
Gods may descend in factions from the skies,
And rivers from their oozy beds arise.
[3] "Denham," says Johnson, "seems to have been, at least among us, the author of a species of composition that may be denominated local poetry, of which the fundamental subject is some particular landscape, to be poetically described, with the addition of such embellishments as may be supplied by historical retrospection or incidental meditation."
[4] Critics differ. "Nothing," says Warton, "can be colder and more prosaic than the manner in which Denham has spoken of the distant prospect of London and St. Paul's."
[5] Singer's Spence, p. 153.
[6] Autobiography of Mrs. Delany, vol. i. p. 20, 82.