italicizing the adjectives which seemed to him need

less:

Achilles' wrath, to Greece the direful spring

Of woes unnumber'd, heav'nly goddess, sing!
That wrath which hurl'd to Pluto's gloomy reign
The souls of mighty chiefs untimely slain :
Whose limbs, unburied on the naked shore,
Devouring dogs and hungry vultures tore.

Scott said that "since it is true that by throwing out the epithets underscored, we preserve the sense without diminishing the force of the verses, and since it is also true that scarcely one of the epithets are more than merely expletive, I do really think that the structure of verse which requires least of this sort of bolstering, is most likely to be forcible and animated."

While Goldsmith inherited the heroic couplet from Pope and from the clouds of imitators who encompassed Pope about, he had more feeling than his witty predecessor; he was less obviously clever; he was gentler and more human; and as a result he modified the meter to suit his own needs. There is less striking antithesis; and the lines break with less monotony. There are fewer expletive adjectives thrust in to fill out the line. The couplet is still the unit of structure; and yet the narrative has a less jerky movement. Here is a passage from "The Deserted Village":

Near yonder copse, where once the garden smiled,
And still where many a garden flower grows wild,
There, where a few torn shrubs the place disclose,
The village preacher's modest mansion rose.

A man he was to all the country dear,
And passing rich with forty pounds a year;
Remote from towns he ran his godly race,

Nor e'er had changed, nor wished to change his place;

Unpractised he to fawn, or seek for power,
By doctrines fashioned to the varying hour;
Far other aims his heart had learned to prize,
More skilled to raise the wretched than to rise.
His house was known to all the vagrant train,
He chid their wanderings, but relieved their pain;
The long-remembered beggar was his guest,
Whose beard descending swept his aged breast;
The ruined spendthrift, now no longer proud,
Claimed kindred there, and had his claims allowed;
The broken soldier, kindly bade to stay,

Sate by his fire, and talked the night away ;
Wept o'er his wounds, or, tales of sorrow done,

Shouldered his crutch, and showed how fields were won.

The heroic couplet was employed by Johnson and by Byron in their satires; and they were content to leave it as they found it. Even Cowper, although he was no slavish follower of Pope, did not impress his individuality on the iambic pentameter. After Goldsmith the next poet to handle it with any freedom was Leigh Hunt, who blazed the trail for Keats and Shelley. In his "Story of Rimini" there is an abandonment of Pope's couplet-structure with its epigrammatic flavor and with its monotony of strict iambics. The rhythm is more fluid and the narrative runs over from line to line. The thought is no longer diked between two rimes. There is again a sense of freedom and of spontaneity, due partly to the avoidance of the self-conscious ingenuity of Pope:

But 'twixt the wood and flowery walks, half-way,
And formed of both, the loveliest portion lay,
A spot, that struck you like enchanted ground;
It was a shallow dell, set in a mound

Of sloping orchards, — fig, and almond trees,
Cherry and pine, with some few cypresses;
Down by whose roots, descending darkly still
(You saw it not, but heard), there gushed a rill,

Whose low sweet talking seemed as if it said,
Something eternal to that happy shade.

This harks back to Chaucer and points forward to Keats, in whose hands the iambic pentameter was to reveal itself again as a fit and flexible instrument for a true poet. Keats claimed the liberty of occasional double rimes, which helped him to avoid the temptation to end a majority of lines with bold monosyllables. He shifted the place of his pauses in the middle of his lines with exquisite skill, varying the movement to mate with his sentiment. Perhaps the passage that best exemplifies this new ease of the iambic pentameter is the well-known description of beauty, in Endymion":

66

A thing of beauty is a joy forever:

Its loveliness increases; it will never

Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep

Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing

A flowery band to bind us to the earth,
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o'er-darken'd ways
Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon,
Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon
For simple sheep; and such are daffodils
With the green world they live in ; and clear rills
That for themselves a cooling covert make
'Gainst the hot season; the mid-forest brake,
Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms;
And such too is the grandeur of the dooms
We have imagined for the mighty dead;
All lovely tales that we have heard or read :
An endless fountain of immortal drink,
Pouring unto us from the heaven's brink.

Shelley used this meter with similar ease; and the rigidity of the heroic couplet disappeared. The way was now made straight for the poets who were to come after. Browning found the iambic pentameter available for the narrative of "Sordello"; Swinburne employed it with large luxuriance in "Tristram of Lyonesse"; and Morris took it to tell the "Life and Death of Jason."

CHAPTER XI

BLANK VERSE

That which is the glory of blank verse, as a vehicle of poetry, is also its danger and its difficulty. Its freedom from the fetters of rime, the infinite variability of the metrical structure of its lines, the absence of couplets and stanzas, all assimilate it to prose. It is the easiest of all conceivable meters to write; it is the hardest to write well. Its metrical requirements are next to nothing; its poetical requirements are infinite. It was Byron, I believe, who remarked, that it differed from other meters in this, that whereas they required a certain proportion of lines, some more, some less, to be good, in blank verse, every line must be good.-SHADWORTH H. HODGSON: English Verse.

BLANK verse, the unrimed iambic pentameter, is the most characteristic and the most individual meter of English poetry. It has shown itself to be the best instrument for the expression of the essential energy of the English-speaking peoples in their loftiest flights of imagination. It is a nobler vehicle for the epic and for the tragic than the Alexandrine of the French encumbered as that is with its pairs of rimes, alternately masculine and feminine. It has proved itself a worthy rival of the supple and sonorous hexameter of the Greeks. It has a definite firmness of structure and, at the same time, an infinite variety within this framework. It can be swift, simple, and direct; or it may be elaborate and luxuriant. It lends itself to all moods, and it is adequate for every kind of poetry. It can tell a story; it can voice a purely lyric sentiment; it can convey at will the interpreta