with rimes; and Kipling, eschewing rime, made use of the dialect of Tommy Atkins for his "Sestina of the Tramp Royal." But rimed or unrimed, picturesquely lyrical or realistically prosaic, the sestina is never likely to win favor in the ears of listeners whose native speech is English. Its arbitrary artificiality is too subtle; and the difficulty vanquished is not here an adequate reward.

At the opposite extreme from the cumbersome restraint which is imposed by the laws of the sestina is the lawlessness which is found in the most of Walt Whitman's earlier poems. Many poets of our language have claimed the full freedom which results from rejecting the strict stanza and the exact metrical equivalence of corresponding lines. In Matthew Arnold's "The Strayed Reveler," for example, we cannot decide with certainty just what the meter may be, so large and sweeping is the rhythmical flow of the poem. Whitman went still further; he declared a revolt from all the accepted conventions of English versification. He proclaimed the right to be a law unto himself and asserted substantially that his formlessness was its own excuse for being. He believed that he had rejected all tradition, yet he had plainly come under the influence of Blake, and he had been impressed also by the mighty movement of the Hebrew rhapsodists as this had been carried over into English by the translators under King James. As a result of this theory, many passages of Whitman reveal themselves as only a little removed from prose; they fail to give us exactly the kind of pleasure which we have been in the habit of expecting from poetry. Whitman is most impressive when he comes nearest to shapeliness of structure

and when he approaches most closely to the flowing rhythm which delights us in Arnold's poem, for example, and in some of Blake's. Desiring to break away from all the restrictions, he has won his warmest welcome when his verse has been most in accord with our normal expectation. It is significant that the one poem of Whitman's which has been taken to heart by the American people, "O Captain! My Captain," is the lyric of his which unhesitatingly accepts the current conventions of English verse; it is in stanza and in rime, and it has a refrain. It is significant also that those of his other poems which are most admired are those in which he most widely departed from his own iconoclastic theories and in which he is most evidently following the broader current of English poetry. Consider, for example, "When Lilacs last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," one of his threnodies for Lincoln:

When Lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd,

And the great star early droop'd in the western sky in the night,

I mourn'd, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.

Ever-returning spring, trinity sure you bring,

Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west,
And thought of him I love.

Here is another fragment from the same lofty and aspiring lyric:

O, how shall I warble myself for the dead one there I loved? And how shall I deck my song for the large sweet soul that has gone?

And what shall my perfume be for the grave of him I love?

Sea-winds blown from east and west,

Blown from the Eastern sea and blown from the

Western sea, till there on the prairies meeting,
These and with these and the breath of my chant,

I'll perfume the grave of him I love.

This may seem irregular, but it is scarcely more irregular than Arnold's "The Strayed Reveler" or than Southey's "Thalaba." It is free and spontaneous, but it carries at least the suggestion of a definite form. It is the utterance of deep emotion, liberal and surging, but sustained and restrained by art. It has a technic of its own, not narrow and confined, not easily declared with precision, and yet felt and appreciated. Whitman's best poetry is the work of his maturity, when he had fully mastered his new form, which, as Professor Carpenter put it, "hovered between prose and verse." He had found his instrument at last; "it was living, musical, rhythmical, impassioned speech. If it had a prototype or an origin, it may be said to have been born of the rhythm which he heard in nature and of his memories of the arias and recitatives of the Italian opera."

"A man who finds that his gloves cripple him does right in drawing them off," said Stedman; "at first Whitman certainly meant to escape all technic. But genius, in spite of itself, makes works that stand the test of scientific laws." And the keen critic added that "unrimed verse, the easiest to write, is the hardest to excel in, and no measure for a bardling." What is too easy is not worth while; and the greatest artists are those who have most eagerly accepted the specific limitations under which a given piece of work had to be done; so far from rejecting technic, they have ever been athirst for new devices; and it has been their pride always to prove that although bound,

they could be free. And this Whitman came in time to feel, even though he may never have confessed it even to himself. Those move easiest who have learned to dance; and in "When Lilacs last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" Whitman proved he had devised a form, loose, large and free, exactly suited to his own needs.

CHAPTER X

THE COUPLET

With the substitution of heroic for unrimed verse, the theory and practice of harmony in English composition were altered. What was essentially national in our poetry—the music of sustained periods, elastic in their structure, and governed by the subtlest laws of melody in recurring consonants and vowels-was sacrificed for the artificial eloquence and monotonous cadence of the couplet. For a century and a half the summit of all excellence in versification was the construction of neat pairs of lines, smooth indeed and polished, but scarcely varying in their form. -JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS: Blank Verse. FOR the expression of lyrical sentiment, the poets have generally chosen some form of the stanza,—a single quatrain, an octave, a sonnet, a ballade, or a sequence of whatever unit they have deemed most fit for their purpose. For narrative, they have also employed not infrequently a succession of stanzas, notably in the ballad, which sets forth a story running over from one quatrain into another until the tale is told. But more often the poets have preferred not to cut up their narrative into equal parts and not to confine themselves within the narrow limits of any stanza-form.

If the poet decides that his story will profit by the aid of rime, he is likely to select one of three meters, anapestic tetrameter, iambic tetrameter, or iambic pentameter, generally riming in couplets. Of these three the iambic pentameter, commonly known as the "heroic couplet," has been most frequently employed. The heroic couplet has served not only for narrative, but also for contemplative, philosophic, descriptive