With sweet musk-ro´ses, and with eglantine."
It is unnecessary to multiply examples of this sort. The decasyllabic line of Shakspeare is varied in structure, as said, almost unlimitedly, the seat of the accent and pause being shifted from the first word to the last, as if at random, but often, in reality, with a fine regard to the sense. Ben Jonson, and indeed all our older writers, indulge in the like free variations of the heroic measure; and the poets of the present day, in imitating their higher qualities, have also followed their example in respect of mere versification. Wordsworth and Keats, perhaps, may be held as having excelled all the moderns, their contemporaries, in the art of "building the lofty rhyme." Both attended specially to the subject, deeming it by no means beneath them to meditate well the melody of single lines, and the aptitude even of individual words. Hence may Coleridge justly praise Wordsworth for "his austere purity of language," and "the perfect appropriateness of his words to the meaning"—for his "sinewy strength" in isolated verses, and "the frequent curiosa felicitas of his diction." But Wordsworth himself owns his artistic care and toil in composition even more strongly:—
"When happiest fancy has inspired the strains,
How oft the malice of one luckless word
Pursues the Enthusiast to the social board,
Or haunts him lated on the silent plains!"
The beauties of the Bard of Rydal are, at the same time, too widely spread to render him the best example for our present purpose. Keats attended more closely to the minutiæ of pure versification in single passages, and may furnish better illustrations here. The subjoined Arcadian picture displays exquisite ease and freedom of composition:—
"Leading the way´, young damsels danced along,
Bearing the burden´ of a shepherd's song;
Each having a white wicker´, overbrimm'd