Consider the sea's listless chime,
Time's self it is, made audible:
The murmur of the earth's own shell—
Secret continuance sublime
Is the sea's end; our sight may pass
No furlong further. Since time was
This sound hath told the lapse of time.
(The Sea Limits.)
[181] For instance, Coleridge has shown, in the Ancient Mariner, that the ballad or common measure of four lines, 8, 6, 8, 6, abab, can be extended to any number of lines up to nine (v. sup. p. [97]), with the number and order of each rhyme-end varied to suit, and yet without overrunning, or loosening the general grip and character of the stanza. Now the smallest knowledge of mathematics will show the enormous number of combinations—five-, six-, seven-, eight-, and nine-lined, with the a and b rhymes variously grouped—that would require tabulation even up to this limit. And it would argue utter insensibility to the qualities and capacities of English poetry to deny that, on the morrow of this classification, a poet might arise who would give the same solid effect to ten or more lines with still more endlessly varied rhyme-permutation. Instead, therefore, of attempting a hopeless and even mischievous task (for these classifications always generate the idea that whatsoever is outside of them is bad), it has seemed better to lay down, and to illustrate largely and variously, the principles on which all such legitimate combinations have been formed hitherto, but on which they may legitimately be formed anew ad infinitum. And this, it is hoped, has been done sufficiently here.
[CHAPTER IV]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
(The following list contains almost everything with which any student, who is not making the subject one of exhaustive and practically original research, need make himself acquainted; while it will carry him pretty far even in that direction. Further information will be found in the works of Mr. T. S. Omond, English Metrists (Tunbridge Wells, 1903), and English Metrists of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Oxford and London, 1907), as well as in the present writer's larger History of English Prosody. Several of the works hereinafter catalogued will be found collected in Professor Gregory Smith's Elizabethan Critical Essays (2 vols., Oxford, 1904), and extracts from not a very few of them in the present writer's Loci Critici (Boston, U.S.A., and London, 1903).)
Abbott, E. A. Shakesperian Grammar (London, 1869), and (with J. R. Seeley) English Lessons for English People (London, 1871). Reissued frequently.
Alden, R. M. English Verse (New York, 1904), and Introduction to Poetry (New York, 1909).