the language that are fit to go with it without naming them. I have tried them all so many times, I know all the polygamous words, and all the monogamous ones, and all the unmarrying ones the whole lot that have no mates as soon as I hear their names called. Sometimes I run over a string of rimes, but generally speaking it is strange what a short list it is of those that are good for anything. This is the pitiful side of all rimed verse. Take such words as home and world. What can you do with chrome or loam or gnome or tome? You have dome, foam and roam, and not much more to use in your pome, as some of our fellow countrymen call it. As for world, you know that in all human probability somebody or something will be hurled into it or out of it; its clouds may be furled or its grass impearled; possibly something may be whirled or curled or swirled."

Here Dr. Holmes is following in the footsteps of Pope, who asserted in his "Essay on Criticism" that the poetasters have little variety in their verse:

While they ring round the same unvaried chimes,
With sure returns of still expected rimes;
Where'er you find "the cooling western breeze,"
In the next line it "whispers through the trees":
If crystal streams "with pleasing murmurs creep,"
The reader's threatened - not in vain - with "sleep."

As yet no one has drawn up a complete catalog of what Dr. Holmes called the monogamous rimes, those which are fated to marry the same one again and again, because there is absolutely no other mate for them in our language, such as anguish, blackness, mountain, and winter. Of those words which are condemned to absolute celibacy, the old maids of poetry,

because there is not a single suitor for them, there must be two or three score at least. Here are some of them: April, August, chimney, coif, crimson, forest, kiln, microcosm, month, nothing, open, poet, rhomb, scarce, scarf, silver, statue, squirrel, temple, widow, window.

CHAPTER V

TONE-COLOR

We must not only choose our words for elegance, but for sound, · to perform which a mastery in the language is required; the poet must have a magazine of words, and have the art to manage his few vowels to the best advantage, that they may go the farther. He must also know the nature of the vowels which are more sonorous, and which more soft and sweet - and so dispose them as his present occasions require. - DRYDEN: Discourse on Epic Poetry.

THE province of rime is twofold; its primary purpose is to emphasize the architecture of the poem, to indicate the ends of the lines, and to bind up the couplet, the quatrain or the longer stanza into a harmonious unit; and it has the secondary duty of pleasing the ear by its own sound. The ear finds unending delight in the melody which is the result of the adroit commingling of rhythm and rime so as not merely to carry the meaning of the poet, but also to intensify this meaning by the choice and by the contrast of the sounds which convey it. As Pope asserted in his Essay on Criticism"

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True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
As those move easiest who have learned to dance.
'Tis not enough no harshness gives offence,
The sound must seem an echo to the sense.
Soft is the strain when zephyr gently blows,
And the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows;
But when loud surges lash the sounding shore,
The hoarse rough verse should like the torrent roar ;
When Ajax strives some rock's vast might to throw,
The line, too, labors, and the words move slow.

Not so, when swift Camilla scours the plain,

Flies o'er the unbending corn, and skims along the main.

Here Pope artfully conformed his practice to his preaching. This adjustment of the sound to the sense can be accomplished by a variety of devices; and it is now generally known as tone-color. It will be noted that Pope was careful in the selection of his rimes, ever the most salient words. Roar and shore, throw and slow, at the ends of two of his couplets are exactly the right words to convey the desired impression.

But it is not enough that the rimes shall be well chosen; they ought to be varied one from the other. A quatrain or a stanza has a weak, thin effect upon the ear if the vowel-sounds in the several rimes are either identical or too clearly akin. For example, sight and light, glide and abide would not be satisfactory rimes in the same quatrain, since the ear would have to strain to distinguish sharply between the two pairs of words. "The result," as Lanier declared, "is like two contiguous shades of pink in a dress; one of the rimes will seem faded." This is a defect which we can discover even in Swinburne, who is a master metrist, commanding sounds at will to work his magic:—

Where shall we find her, how shall we sing to her,
Fold our hands round her knees and cling?

O that man's heart were as fire and could spring to her,
Fire, or the strength of the streams that spring.

Here, in fact, there is not only identity of rime, but identity of the actual riming word in the third and fourth lines, spring to her and spring.

Set this with its monotony beside another chorus from the same dramatic poem, " Atalanta in Calydon,"

and observe how much force is gained by the opposition of the vowel-sounds in the rimes:

Before the beginning of the years,
There came to the making of man
Time, with a gift of tears;
Grief, with a glass that ran.

Strength without hands to smite;
Love that endures for a breath;
Night, the shadow of light,

And life, the shadow of death.

Sometimes the tone-color is aided by shortening one of the two successive riming lines so that the echo of the sound is more immediate. Here is an example in single rime taken from Browning's "Love among the Ruins":

Where the quiet-colored end of evening smiles
Miles and miles

On the solitary pastures where our sheep

Half asleep

Tinkle homeward through the twilight, stray or stop
As they crop.

And here is another example in double rime by Austin Dobson, written really in anapestic tetrameter, but so divided that it falls on our ears as alternating trimeter and monometer riming together, and gaining much of its buoyancy from the dexterity of its double rimes:

In our hearts is the Great One of Avon

Engraven,

And we climb the cold summits once built on
By Milton.

But at times not the air that is rarest

Is fairest ;