Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
Shelley, To a Skylark.
The slender stream
Along the cliff to fall and pause and fall did seem.
Tennyson, Lotos Eaters.
Alexandrines were occasionally in the eighteenth century (and more frequently in the late seventeenth) inserted among heroic couplets for variety and special effect, as in Pope's
The huge round stone, resulting with a bound,
Thunders impetuous down, and smokes along the ground.
Odyssey, XI, 737-738.
But Pope himself condemned the 'needless alexandrine'
That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along.
Essay on Criticism, 357.
One of the oldest lines of modern English verse is the so-called septenary (septenarius), having had a nearly continuous tradition from the twelfth-century Poema Morale down (in its divided form) to the present. It began as a single line of seven stresses or fourteen syllables, and continued to be used as such through the Elizabethan period, and sporadically even later.[44] But on account of its customary pause after the fourth foot, it very early broke into two short lines of four and three stresses each, and thus the septenary couplet became the ballad stanza. For example,
And even the lowly valleys joy to glitter in their sight
When the unmeasur'd firmament bursts to disclose her light.
Chapman, Iliad, VIII.
is essentially the same metre, though printed differently, as