"With vers libre one experiences the mortification one sometimes feels in having roared out one's agony in perfectly fit terms. With rhymed poetry one feels the satisfaction of a wit who gives the nuance of his meaning by the raise of an eyebrow, the turn of a word."
[75] See a part of Margaritæ Sorori, page 43, above.
[76] From Sword Blades and Poppy Seeds, by permission of Houghton Mifflin Co.
[77] The advanced student should of course read carefully the paper on "Classical Metres in English" by W. J. Stone in Bridges' Milton's Prosody (2d ed.), pp. 113 ff. Mr. Stone regards the hexameters of Clough's Actæon and some specimen verses by Spedding (the biographer of Bacon) as the best he has seen.
[78] According to the commonest American pronunciation.
[79] The unaccented vowel sounds show the usual predominance of the obscure vowel e, with three occurrences of ĭ and ī.
[80] Reference to the text will identify the symbols.
[81] Rime occurs, however, here and there in Greek and Latin poetry, and is more frequent than perhaps we commonly suppose.
[82] In the 3182 lines of Beowulf, for example, there are sixteen exact rimes and many more approximate rimes. There is also in Anglo-Saxon the so-called Riming Poem, of uncertain date, composed probably under Scandinavian influence.
[83] See the whole of Ben Jonson's Fit of Rhyme against Rhyme.