There she sees a damsel bright,
Drest in a robe of silken white,
That shadowy in the moonlight shone:
The neck that made that white robe wan,
Her stately neck and arms were bare:
Her blue-vein’d feet unsandall’d were;
And wildly glitter’d, here and there,
The gems entangled in her hair.
I guess ’twas frightful there to see
A lady so richly clad as she—
Beautiful exceedingly.
The principle of Variety in Uniformity is here worked out in a style ‘beyond the reach of art’. Everything is diversified according to the demand of the moment, of the sounds, the sights, the emotions; the very uniformity of the outline is gently varied; and yet we feel that the whole is one and of the same character, the single and sweet unconsciousness of the heroine making all the rest seem more conscious, and ghastly, and expectant. It is thus that versification itself becomes part of the sentiment of a poem, and vindicates the pains that have been taken to show its importance. I know of no very fine versification unaccompanied with fine poetry; no poetry of a mean order accompanied with verse of the highest.
As to Rhyme, which might be thought too insignificant to mention, it is not at all so. The universal consent of modern Europe, and of the East in all ages, has made it one of the musical beauties of verse for all poetry but epic and dramatic, and even for the former with Southern Europe,—a sustainment for the enthusiasm, and a demand to enjoy. The mastery of it consists in never writing it for its own sake, or at least never appearing to do so; in knowing how to vary it, to give it novelty, to render it more or less strong, to divide it (when not in couplets) at the proper intervals, to repeat it many times where luxury or animal spirits demand it (see an instance in Titania’s speech to the Fairies), to impress an affecting or startling remark with it, and to make it, in comic poetry, a new and surprising addition to the jest.
Large was his bounty and his soul sincere,
Heav’n did a recompense as largely send;
He gave to misery all he had, a tear;
He gain’d from heav’n (’twas all he wish’d) a friend.
Gray’s Elegy.
The fops are proud of scandal; for they cry
At every lewd, low character, ‘That’s I’.
Dryden’s Prologue to the Pilgrim.
What makes all doctrines plain and clear?
About two hundred pounds a-year.
And that which was proved true before,
Prove false again? Two hundred more.
Hudibras.
Compound for sins they are inclin’d to,
By damning those they have no mind to.
Id.
——Stor’d with deletery med’cines,
Which whosoever took is dead since.
Id.
Sometimes it is a grace in a master like Butler to force his rhyme, thus showing a laughing wilful power over the most stubborn materials:
Win
The women, and make them draw in
The men, as Indians with a fèmale
Tame elephant inveigle the male.
Hudibras.