Thus much concerning the chief of our two most popular measures. The other, called octo-syllabic, or the measure of eight syllables, offered such facilities for namby-pamby, that it had become a jest as early as the time of Shakespeare, who makes Touchstone call it the ‘butterwoman’s rate to market’, and the ‘very false gallop of verses’. It has been advocated, in opposition to the heroic measure, upon the ground that ten syllables lead a man into epithets and other superfluities, while eight syllables compress him into a sensible and pithy gentleman. But the heroic measure laughs at it. So far from compressing, it converts one line into two, and sacrifices everything to the quick and importunate return of the rhyme. With Dryden, compare Gay, even in the strength of Gay,—
The wind was high, the window shakes;
With sudden start the miser wakes;
Along the silent room he stalks,
(A miser never ‘stalks’; but a rhyme was desired for ‘walks’)
Looks back, and trembles as he walks:
Each lock and every bolt he tries,
In every creek and corner pries;
Then opes the chest with treasure stor’d,
And stands in rapture o’er his hoard;
(‘Hoard’ and ‘treasure stor’d’ are just made for one another)
But now, with sudden qualms possess’d,
He wrings his hands, he beats his breast;
By conscience stung, he wildly stares,
And thus his guilty soul declares.
And so he denounces his gold, as miser never denounced it; and sighs, because
Virtue resides on earth no more!
Coleridge saw the mistake which had been made with regard to this measure, and restored it to the beautiful freedom of which it was capable, by calling to mind the liberties allowed its old musical professors the minstrels, and dividing it by time instead of syllables;—by the beat of four into which you might get as many syllables as you could, instead of allotting eight syllables to the poor time, whatever it might have to say. He varied it further with alternate rhymes and stanzas, with rests and omissions precisely analogous to those in music, and rendered it altogether worthy to utter the manifold thoughts and feelings of himself and his lady Christabel. He even ventures, with an exquisite sense of solemn strangeness and licence (for there is witchcraft going forward), to introduce a couplet of blank verse, itself as mystically and beautifully modulated as anything in the music of Gluck or Weber.
’Tis the middle of night by the castle clock,
And the owls have awaken’d the crowing cock;
Tu-whit!—Tu-whoo!
And hark, again! the crowing cock,
How drowsily he crew.
Sir Leoline, the baron rich,
Hath a toothless mastiff bitch;
From her kennel beneath the rock
She maketh answer to the clock,
Fòur fŏr thĕ qùartĕrs ănd twèlve fŏr thĕ hoùr,
Ever and aye, by shine and shower,
Sixteen short howls, not over loud:
Some say, she sees my lady’s shroud.