Coleridge.
But the influence of Coleridge, independent of that indirectly applied through Scott, was the most important of all. It was indeed not (as it should have been) exhibited, at once and in bulk, by the simultaneous publication of The Ancient Mariner and Christabel, the latter of which, though, at least in great part, written at the same time as the former, was separated from it in publication by nearly twenty years. The Ancient Mariner itself is in ballad metre, but ballad metre treated in the freest possible fashion, not only with equivalence used at pleasure in individual lines, but with the four lines of the strict quatrain extended to five, or any number up to nine—thereby increasing and varying the stanza-effect in the widest possible manner, though never expanding it into positive paragraphs. More important still, because more apparently novel, though it had been in fact preluded both by Chatterton and Blake, and had been recognised by Gray in the work of Spenser, was the use, in Christabel, of continuous octosyllabic couplets, only sometimes, and rarely, broken into stanza, but constantly equivalenced and frequently varied by shorter lines. Of these, Coleridge himself gave in his preface a curiously inadequate account, regarding them—or at least giving them out—as constructed on the principle of counting only the accents. They, however, in fact follow the strictest foot-division, and have been the pattern of all similar verses, with equivalent substitution, since.
Moore.
Moore, who comes in point of date between this group and the second great trio of Byron, Shelley, and Keats, is very important prosodically. Since the earlier seventeenth century at latest, music, though it had had much and rather deleterious influence on theories of English prosody, had had little on its practice, a few light things excepted. But Moore was an accomplished musician both in theory and practice, in composition and in execution; he belonged to a race distinguished for song-gift; and the great majority of his almost innumerable lyrics were directly composed for old airs or adapted to new. The consequence was, almost inevitably, that they present a variety of cadence and rhythm which had hardly ever before been seen. Occasionally this variety oversteps the bounds of pure prosody, allowing, as in the well-known "Eveleen's Bower,"[104] a syllable which, corresponding to an appoggiatura in music, requires, in strict scansion, to be slurred or else to be considered extra-metrical, as in the "Song to a Portuguese Air,"[105] and others, further licences. He was himself aware of this, and it did little harm; while the tunefulness of his trisyllabic measures, and the great range of "broken and cuttit" line-arrangements which his work presented, were both of the first importance in promoting variety and freedom of metrical arrangement.
Byron.
His expertness in the two arts, however, and his constant combination of them, as well as perhaps his inferiority (though this is only relative) in strictly poetical power, somewhat reduce Moore's importance as compared with that of Byron, Shelley, and Keats. The first-named was the least of the three in prosody, as in poetry; but his prosodic merits have, as a rule, been far undervalued, even by his adorers as a poet. He affected, and perhaps really to some extent felt, much greater admiration for the eighteenth-century poets, and for those who mainly or partly followed them in his own time, than for the innovators of the Romantic school; and he himself wrote the stock couplet with correctness and vigour. But he chose for his principal serious poem, Childe Harold, the Spenserian, which "regular" classical critics had always disliked; and, though he never achieved its proper character, did finely in it sometimes, and undoubtedly restored its popularity. Again, he chose for his greatest serio-comic pieces, Beppo and Don Juan, the ottava; while his minor tales were in Scott-Christabel octosyllables. In lyric, too, he showed varied power, and once turned[106] what had been a burlesque before in its exact, and a very sing-song metre in its restricted, form into a thing of remarkable prosodic beauty, to be made more beautiful still by Praed and Mr. Swinburne. His most consummate prosodic achievement is undoubtedly the above-mentioned octave of Don Juan, which can hardly be surpassed, either in suitability to its subject, or in the way in which the particular characteristics of the metre itself are brought out.
Shelley: his longer poems.
But the greatest poets are naturally, and almost inevitably, the greatest prosodists; and this was well seen in the case of the two whom we have yet to mention, Shelley and Keats, who also present a valuable and interesting contrast in this as in other ways. It is probable that in all cases Shelley began with direct though not studious imitation. His early and almost worthless poems were based on "Monk" Lewis and others of that type; his first striking thing, the opening of Queen Mab, is a sort of variation on that of Southey's Thalaba; and his first great poem, Alastor, had Wordsworth evidently before it; while Laon and Cythna (The Revolt of Islam) would probably not have been in Spenserians if Childe Harold had not adopted them, nor perhaps The Witch of Atlas in octaves but for Beppo. Yet, as soon as he has attained poetic gift, he goes off from his models entirely, and, without much apparent care for preconceived forms, achieves the most marvellous beauty in whatever he touches. In Prometheus Unbound especially, the blank-verse dialogue, and the abundant lyrical choruses and interludes, not only exhibit wholly astonishing variety and individual excellence, but adapt themselves to each other, as nowhere else in drama. The Spenserians of Adonais, taking some liberties, attain, at their best, absolute perfection; of the octosyllabic couplets, shortened or not in several minor poems, almost as much may be said; and the octaves of The Witch of Atlas (with the very best of Keats's Isabella) are the greatest examples of that metre in English for serious use. He even tries the often failed-in terza rima, and does beautiful things in it, though perhaps not such beautiful examples of it.
His lyrics.
But it is in his lyrics that Shelley's prosodic, like his poetic, power shows highest. Those in Prometheus Unbound have been spoken of; but the numerous and glorious short and separate pieces defy enumeration or specification here. The two popular favourites, "The Cloud" and "The Skylark," would each serve as a text for an exemplary lecture on English prosody, and a dozen others, with dozens more added to them, would do the same. None is ever really "irregular": to say, as has been said of "The Cloud," that it defies ordinary scansion, is simply to say that the speaker does not understand either the poem or ordinary scansion, or both (see above, Book I. p. [100]). But almost all exhibit, in endless variety of relief and colour, the great laws of equivalence and substitution, and the enormous advantage of varied and even complicated metre, rhyme, line-length, and stanza-arrangement. Shelley never seems to have studied metre much, and, as has been said, his first pattern is the merest starting-point for him. But he touches none that he does not adorn; none that he does not make matter of delight; and none, likewise, in which he does not supply a text for infinite technical instruction as well.