[68] The main crux of this passage is "fit quantity of syllables." Quantity in such a context suggests syllabic length; and one recalls the sonnet to Lawes—
not to scan
With Midas' ears, committing short and long.
But, on the other hand, Mr. Robert Bridges has made it almost if not quite certain that Milton counted syllables, and therefore the phrase would mean "ten syllables to a line," proper allowance being made for elision. Since both interpretations agree pretty well with Milton's practice, one cannot be sure which he had in mind.
[69] J. W. Mackail, The Springs of Helicon, pp. 181 ff.
[70] Cf., for example. Paradise Regained, III, 68 ff.
[71] Browning's blank verse, like all his metres, is typically Browningesque; instead of moulding his verse to fit the idea perfectly, he too often effected the compromise between content and form by slighting the latter.
[72] Mr. Frost in some of his later work permits himself such laxness as—
Had beauties he had to point out to me at length
To insure their not being wasted on me.
The Axe-Helve.
[73] Strongly to be deprecated is the frequent confusion not only of the different varieties of English free-verse, but of the fundamentally distinct phenomena of free-verse as commonly understood and French vers libre. Vers libre itself has many aspects, from the literally freer use of rime and the mute-e than the traditional French prosody allowed and an escape from the old principle of syllabification to what superficially corresponds with English free-verse, that is, a substitution of prose for verse; but only superficially, since the French language is phonetically different from English, and its ordinary prose has a naturally greater song potentiality. Since the phenomena differ they should not be called by the same name. The English term 'free-verse' is wholly adequate.
[74] "In the effort to get rhyme, 'the rack of finest wits,'" says a pseudonymous newspaper writer, "and in the struggle, writhing, and agony of trying to get the wrong words to say the right thing, one sometimes achieves the impossible, or, rather, from the flame of frantic friction (of 'Rhyming Dictionary' leaves) rises, phoenix-like, another idea, somewhat like the first, its illegitimate child, so to say, and thus more beautiful.