Leave them alone
And they will come home.
This assonance is visible in the linking of wild wood and childhood, which many versifiers have proffered as tho it was a double rime; it is to be seen again in Whittier’s main land and trainband; and it is obvious in Mr. Bret Harte’s ‘Her Letter’:
Of that ride—that to me was the rarest;
Of—the something you said at the gate.
Ah! Joe, then I wasn’t an heiress
To the best-paying lead in the State.
Altho this substitution of assonance for rime is uncommon in the more literary lyrics, which we may suppose to have been composed with the pen, it is still frequently to be found in the popular song, born on the lips of the singer, and set down in black and white only as an afterthought. It abounds in the college songs which have been sung into being, and in the brisk ballads of the variety-show—which Planché neatly characterized as “most music-hall, most melancholy.” In one dime song-book containing the words set to music by Mr. David Braham to enliven one of Mr. Edward Harrigan’s amusing pictures of life among the lowly in the tenement-house districts of New York, there can be discovered at least a dozen instances of this use of assonance as tho it were rime:
De gal’s name is Nannie,
And she’s just left her mammie.
He can get a pair of crutches
From the doctor, it’s well known,
And feel like the King of Persia,
When he goes marching home.
One husband was a toper,
The other was a loafer.
’T is there the solid voters
Wear Piccadilly chokers.
On Sundays, then, the ladies
With a hundred million babies.
To the poor of suffering Ireland:
Time and time again;
We thank you for our countrymen,
And Donavan is our name.