It seems to the author, if he may dare to hazard the remark, that the stanza in which he has attempted to write, has advantages over even the Spenserean stanzas. He understands the latter to be that in which the Fairy Queen, from whose author it takes its name––Beattie’s Minstrel, Thompson’s Castle of Indolence, Byron’s Childe Harold, &c. &c., are written. The following is a stanza of it, from Childe Harold:

The starry fable of the Milky Way
Has not thy story’s purity; it is
A constellation of a sweeter ray,
And sacred nature triumphs more in this
Reverse of her decree, than in the abyss
Where sparkle distant worlds. Oh! holiest nurse!
No drop of that clear spring its way shall miss
To thy sire’s heart, replenishing its source
With life, as our free souls rejoin the Universe.

Here, the reader will perceive that, in a stanza of nine lines, there is a necessity for the second, the fourth, the fifth, and the seventh lines to rhyme together; and that the sixth, eighth and ninth lines must, also, rhyme together. To make the stanza correct, with these complicated embarrassments of rhyme, must not only cause great trouble, sometimes, to the easiest versifier, but to succeed in doing so, critically, he must often sacrifice a happy expression, a striking phrase, or a beautiful line. “Words are things,” says Mirabeau; and, to the poet, they are things of potency. They are at once tools and materials in his headwork.

Any one who has read Childe Harold, must have observed that even the Lord of Poets, with all his powers of language, was often thus hampered, and that, for the sake of preserving the force of an expression, or a striking word, he used what are no rhymes at all, if Monk Lewis’ remark to Scott, “that a bad rhyme is no rhyme,” be true.

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Whereas, by making the stanza of but eight lines and having the first four lines to rhyme alternately, and the last four immediately, and by having the concluding line an Alexandrine, as in the Spenserean stanzas, the difficulty, arising from the necessity of having so many similar rhymes, would be obviated, and the poet would have much greater facilities in expressing himself well, without impairing the dignity or strength of what might still be called, from its many resemblances, the Spenserean stanzas; at the same time, the monotony would be avoided, of which criticism has complained so much in the works of Pope and Goldsmith.

Very few readers of poetry, in the first poems which they open, are fond of those, no matter how great their merits, which are written in the Spenserean stanzas. They have to acquire a taste for it. They delight in simpler styles: this is one reason of Scott’s great popularity with many persons who seldom read any other poet, except perhaps, Burns. And even to those who have a natural taste for poetry, but who have not much cultivated it, the Spenserean stanza seems complicated, and, I will even venture to say, at first untunable; and it is not at the first perusal that they perceive the beauties of those poems which are written in this style.

These remarks are hazarded very hastily. It would be much more difficult for the author to build the complicated verse of the Spenserean stanza, than this which he has attempted; and, therefore, perhaps, very rashly, he concludes that it would be more difficult for others; and, moreover, we easily persuade ourselves that what is most easily done it is best to do.

[NOTE II.]

“But thou art given by the good all-giver,
Blessing a land to be in turn most blest.”
Thou exulting and abounding river,
Making thy waves a blessing as they flow.
Byron.