d slack the avenger’s brow,
That bends his rage thy providence to oppose.
More popular are stanzas of this kind consisting of three- or four-foot iambic, trochaic, and iambic-anapaestic verses, sometimes with alternate masculine and feminine rhymes. (For specimens see Metrik, ii, § 271.)
§ 237. Only very few examples occur of the sixteen-lined doubling of this stanza, according to the scheme a b a b c d c d e f e f g h g h2; it occurs, e.g., in Moore, When Night brings the Hour. Another form of eight lines (a b c d . a b c d3) is met with in Rossetti, The Shadows (ii. 249); it seems to be constructed on the analogy of a six-lined stanza (a b c . a b c), which is used pretty often. This stanza, which is closely allied to the tail-rhyme stanza described in § [238], consists most commonly of four-foot iambic verses; it occurs, e.g., in Campbell, Ode to the Memory of Burns (p. 19):
Soul of the Poet! whereso’er
Reclaim’d from earth, thy genius plume
Her wings of immortality:
Suspend thy harp in happier sphere,
And with thine influence illume
The gladness of our jubilee.