agraphs of fluent melody, that the harmonies are wrought by subtle and most complex alliterative systems, by delicate changes in the length and volume of syllables, and by the choice of names magnificent for their mere gorgeousness of sound. In these structures there are many pauses which enable the ear and voice to rest themselves, but none are perfect, none satisfy the want created by the opening hemistich, until the final and deliberate close is reached. Then the sense of harmony is gratified and we proceed with pleasure to a new and different sequence. If the truth of this remark is not confirmed by the following celebrated and essentially Miltonic passage, it must fall without further justification: : And now his heart Distends with pride, and hardening in his strength, Glories; for never since created man Met such embodied force as named with these Of Phlegra, with the heroic race were joined After perusing this quotation, let the reader compare it with Claudio's speech on Death in Measure for Measure, and observe the difference between Shakspearian and Miltonic, between dramatic and epical blank verse. The one is simple in construction and progressive, the other is complex and stationary; but both are musical beyond the possibility of imitation. The one exhibits a thought, in the process of formation, developing itself from the excited fancy of the speaker. The other presents to us an image crystallized and perfect in the poet's mind, the one is in time, the other in space-the one is a growing and the other a complete organism. The whole difference between the drama and the epic is implicit in these periods. The one resembles Music and the other Architecture. In this again we find a proof that the structure of blank verse depends entirely upon the nature of the thought which it is meant to clothe. The thoughts of a dramatist-whether his characters converse or soliloquize-are, of necessity, in evolution; the thoughts of an epical poet are before him, as matter which he must give form to. The richness and melody and variety of his versification will, in either case, depend upon the copiousness of his language, the delicacy of his ear, and the fertility of his invention. We owe everything to the nature of the poet, and very little to the decasyllables which he is using. Milton was the last of the Elizabethans. With him the spirit of our literary renaissance became for the time extinct. Even during his lifetime the taste and capacity for blank verse composition had expired. It is said that Dryden wished to put Paradise Lost into couplets, and received from Milton the indifferent answer, "Let the young man tag his rhymes," Dryden, in his essay on dramatic poetry defended the use of rhyme, and introduced the habit of writing plays in heroics, to the detriment of sense and character and freedom. Yet there are passages in his later tragedies-All for Love, Cleopatra, King Arthur, and The Spanish Friar-which show that he could use the tragic metre of blank verse with moderate ability. The Elizabethan inspiration still feebly survives in lines like. these: The gods are just, But how can finite measure infinite? Fathom the vast abyss of heavenly justice. Since all things are by fate. But purblind man This is average thought expressed in average words. But Absalom and Achitophel is a work of the very highest genius in its kind, written, not under the influence and inspiration of another age, but produced as the expression of a different and no less genuine phase of national development. During the period of Dryden's ascendancy over English literature, very little blank verse was written of much moment. Yet, it must be remembered, that the passage of the Mourning Bride, which Johnson preferred to any single piece of English descriptive poetry, first saw the light in 1697. The lines begin-"How reverend is the face of this tall pile." They are dignified, melodious and clear; but we already trace in the handling of the language more of effort after neatness and precision, and less of nature than was common with the elder dramatists. After the death of Otway and Congreve, blank verse held the stage in the miserable compositions of the eighteenth century; but it had no true vitality. The real works of genius in that period were written in couplets, and it was not until the first dawn of a second renaissance in England, that blank verse began again to be practised. Meanwhile the use of the couplet had unfitted poets for its composition. Their acquired canons of regularity, when applied to that loose and flowing metre, led them astray. They no longer trusted exclusively to their ear, but to a mechanism which rendered accuracy of ear almost useless, not to say impossible. Hence it followed that when blank verse began again to be written, it found itself very much at the point where it had stood before the appearance of Marlowe. Even Thomson who succeeded so well in imitating Spenserian stanza, wrote stiff and languid blank verse with monsyllabic terminations and monotonous cadencesa pedestrian style. Cowper, in his translation of Homer, aimed at the Miltonic structure, and acquired a fine and solemn versification. The description of the Russian empress's ice-palace in The Winter Morning Walk, proves how he had imbued himself with the language of the Paradise Lost, and how naturally he adapted it to his own thoughts. Coleridge's blank verse has a kind of inflated grandeur, but not much of Elizabethan variety of music, sublety of texture, and lightness of movement. His lines written in the Valley of Chamouni are sonorous; but they want elasticity, and are inferior in quality to his lyrics. Heaviness of style and turgid rhetoric deface his verse and prose alike. Wordsworth again could not handle blank verse with any certainty of success. Wildernesses of the Excursion extend for pages and pages barren of any beauty. We plod over them on foot, sinking keee-deep into the clinging sand; whereas the true master of blank verse carries us aloft as on a winged steed through cloud and sunshine in a yielding air. Wordsworth mistook the language of prose for that of Nature, and did not understand that natural verse might be written without the tedious heaviness of common disquisitions. One of his highest efforts is the poem on the Simplon Pass, introduced into the Prelude. This owes its great beauty to the perfect delineation which he has succeeded in producing by suggestive images, by reiterated cadences, by solitary lines, by breathless repetitions, by the perfect union in short which subsists between the poet's mind and the nature he is representing. Byron again is uncertain in his blank verse. The lines on the Coliseum, in Manfred, are as good as a genuine Elizabethan passage, because they are spoken from the fullness of a poet's heart, and with a continuity of thought and copiousness of language which insured their organic vitality. But they are exceptional. Byron needed rhyme as an assistance to his defective melody. He did not feel that inner music which is the soul of true blank verse and sounding prose. In Keats at last we reach this power. His Hyperion is sung, not written; governed in all its parts by the controlling force of imagined melody. Its music is fluid, bound by no external measurement of feet, but determined by the sense and intonation of the poet's thought, while like the crotalos of the Athenian flute-player, the decasyllabic beat maintains an uninterrupted undercurrent of regular pulsations. Keats studied Milton and strove to imitate him. But he falls below the majesty and breadth of Milton's manner. He is too luxuriant in words and images, too loose in rythm and prone to description. In fact, he produces an Elizabethan poem of even more wanton superfluity than those which he imitates. The entrance of Phoebus into his desecrated palace is a gorgeous instance of the plasticity of language in a master's hand. But it smacks of a degenerating taste in art. Some of Shelley's blank verse is perhaps the best which this century has produced. In Alastor he shows what he can do both without imitation and by its help. The lines on Egypt are written with a true Miltonic roll and ponderous grandiloquence of aggregated names. But in the last paragraph of the poem we find the vernal freshness, elasticity, and delicacy that are Shelley's own. It is noticeable that both Keats and Shelley make an Elizabethan use of the so-called heroic couplet. Epipsychidion and Lamia are written, not with the metre of Dryden, Churchill, Pope, and Crabbe, but in that of Marlowe and Fletcher. Nothing proves more significantly the distance between the Elizabethan spirit and the taste of of the eighteenth century, than the utter dissimilarity of these two metres, syllabically and in point of rhyme identical. The couplets of Marlowe, Fletcher, Shelley, and Keats follow the laws of blank verse, and add rhyme ;-that is to say, their periods and pauses are entirely determined by the sense. The couplets of Dryden and his followers resemble Ovid's elegiacs in the permanence of their form and the restriction of their thought. Mr. Browning, who is one of the latest and most characteristic products of the Elizabethan revival, has made good use of this loose rhyming metre in Sordello. Among the few intelligible passages of that poem may be found the following: You can believe Sordello foremost in the regal class The whole structure of this period, in its pauses and utter disregard of the rhymed system, is that of blank verse. The final couplet completes the sense and satisfies the ear with regularity. Browning by fits and starts produces passages of fine blank verse, blowing out bubbles of magnificent sound as glass is blown. from red-hot matter by the fierce breath and fiery will. Swinburne, with more extravagance, sweeps the long purple, blows the golden trumpet, and intones the sacrificial chaunt of the Elizabethan hierarchy. Yet with him it is " song of little meaning, though the words are strong." He is an artist in words; they obey him as the keys obey an organist, and from their combination he builds up melodious palaces of vacuous magnificence. How different is the art of Tennyson, the greatest living writer of blank verse. Here all is purity and elegance, and skill. We trace design and calculation in his style. The linea labor is perceptible. The classical beauty of the Idylls of the King, the luxuriant eloquence of the Princess, the calm majesty of Ulysses, the idyllic sweetness of Enone, the grandeur of the Mort d'Arthur, are monuments to the variety and scientific grasp of his genius. Subtle melody and self-restrained splendor are observable throughout his compositions. He has the power of selection and of criticism, the lack of which makes blank verse timid or prosaic. It may be noticed that Tennyson has not only created for himself a style in narrative and descriptive blank verse, but that he has also adapted this Protean metre to lyrical purposes. Three songs in the Princess, "Tears, idle tears," "Now sleeps the crimson petal," and "Come down, O maid," are perfect specimens of most melodious and complete minstrelsy in words. We observe that the first of these songs is divided into periods of five lines, each of which terminates with the words, "days that are no more." This recurrence of sound and meaning is a substitute for rhyme, and suggests rhyme so persuasively that it is impossible to call the poem mere blank verse. The second song is less simple in its construction: it consists of a quatrain followed by three couplets, and succeeded by a final quatrain, each group of lines ending with the word 66 me." The lines are so managed, by recurrences of sound and by the restriction of the sense to separate lines, that the form of lyric verse is again imitated without aid of rhyme. Theocritus, in his Amæbean Idylls, had suggested this system; and Shakspeare, in the Merchant of Venice (Act v. sc. 1), had shown what could be made of it in English. But the third song which I have mentioned depends for its effect upon no artificial structure, no reiterated sounds. The poet calls it an idyll: I think it may be referred to as a most convincing proof that the English language can be made per fectly lyrical and musical without the need of stanzas or of rhyme. I have now passed in brief review the greatest writers of blank verse, and have shown that this metre, originally formed for dramatic elocution, became epical, idyllic, lyrical, didactic, according to the will of the poets who made use of it. In conclusion, I may repeat some of the points which are established with reference to the scope and purpose of the metre. It seems adapted specially for thought in evolution; it requires progression and sustained effort. As a consequence of this, its melody is determined by the sense which it contains, and depends more upon proportion and harmony of sounds, than upon recurrences and regularities of structure. This being its essential character, it follows that blank verse is better suited for descriptions, eloquent appeals, rhetorical decla mations, for all those forms of poetry which imply a continuity and development of thought, than for the setting forth of some one perfect and full-formed idea. The thought or "moment" which is sufficient for a sonnet would seem poor and fragmentary in sixteen lines of blank verse, unless they were distinctly understood to form a part of some continuous poem or dramatic dialogue. When, therefore, blank verse is used lyrically, the poet who manipulates it, has to deceive the ear by structures analagous to those of rhymed stanzas. The harmony of our language is such as to admit of exquisite finish in this style; but blank verse sacrifices a portion of its characteristic freedom, and assimilates itself to another type of metrical expression, in the process. Another point about blank verse is that it admits of no mediocrity; it must be either clay or gold. Its writer gains no unreal advantage from the form of his versification, but has to produce fine thoughts in vigorous and musical language. Hence, we find that blank verse is the metre of genius, that it is only used successfully by indubitable poets, and that it is no favorite in a mean, contracted and unimaginative age. The freedom of the renaissance created it in England. The freedom of our own country has reproduced it. Blank verse is a type and symbol of our national literary genius-uncontrolled by preceNEW SERIES-Vol. VI., No. 1. dent or rule, inclined to extravagance, and apt to degenerate into nonsense, yet reaching perfection at intervals by an inner force and vivida vis of native inspiration. The Saturday Review. THE ELASTICITY OF TIME. THE variations in the length of an hour as judged by sensation are so great and so constantly felt, that every one must be used to considering his own days as composed of an elastic material. It is only in calculating the length of other people's days that this property of time is apt to be forgotten. But the fact, though sufficiently familiar, is one which depends upon such complicated and obscure conditions, and which exercises such a subtly disturbing effect uponpeople's lives, characters, and works, that it is worth a little investigation. Each individual in course of time acquires an estimate of the average length of one of his own days which is sufficiently accurate for practical purposes. How much this estimate varies according to circumstances-among other things, according to the age of the person-we all know. It is commonly said that time goes. faster and faster as we get older, and, as a rough outline of ordinary experience, this is on the whole true. But this progress is not uninterrupted, and is clearly perceptible only at the two ends of life. In childhood, time seems infinitely long, just as the world seems infinitely big; in youth, it begins to be reducible to some sort of measurement, but the irregularity of its pace is probably greater than at any other period. Then comes a sort of table-land, in which such variations as may occur in the length of the years are due chiefly to external causes; and towards the close of life the years begin to slip away with a rapidity which appears to increase to the end. But there are many other causes which affect the apparent length of our days and years. It is well known that sooner or later, in the course of every novel " a lifetime" will be 66 compressed into those few moments" in which some startling event takes place. In real life there are many 8 days and hours which appear for similar reasons to assume gigantic proportions, though it is chiefly in looking back that this is felt, for at such moments people do not take account of the flight of time. It is only when they are over that the ordinary routine of life is discovered to have been broken off but a very little while ago by the clock or the almanac, while to the mind it seems to have retreated into the dimness of the far-away past. In moments of great anxiety or suspense everybody knows how all the clocks seem to have entered into a conspiracy to move only at a snail's pace. Whenever the end of any period is anxiously looked for, there is some degree of suspense, and corresponding slowness in the apparent movement of time. But when the strain of expectation ceases, time recovers its natural speed, and monotony then serves only to hasten its flight. Prisoners who have been kept for many years in the most monotonous and trying kinds of confinement have agreed in saying that after the first few months they have subsided into a quiescent state, in which the months and years seemed to pass away unheeded and with incredible rapidity. Mos people have experienced. this with regard to a monotonous succession of quiet cheerful days, with no exciting event immediately in prospect. At such times any marked period (Sunday, for instance) seems to recur with a frequency which is sometimes absolutely startling. Thus the fact that monotonous days very often look long in the future, and oppress the mind in passing with a sense of endlessness, appears to be due rather to something depressing and distasteful in the circumstances under which they are spent, than to their monotony in itself. But the fact is that in speaking of the apparent length of time, we use the word "long" in several different senses. By calling any particular period long, we may mean that it occupies a large space in our memory or anticipation as compared with other similar periods; or we may mean that a certain time has seemed, or will seem, to pass slowly; or again (which is quite a different thing), that the furthest point of it looks distant. Thus the same period may look long in the future, and short in the past, or vice ver sa; the apparent size of the future is complicated in every possible way by hope and fear, that of the past by the uncertainties of memory. In looking back upon a monotonous period it may seem as nothing, while yet we may well remember to have felt it almost endless' in its tediousness as it passed. The fact that a certain time has seemed long in passing is one which from its very commonness we soon forget, and in looking back the mind is apt to dwell only on the salient points. In looking forward, the necessity of adjusting the mind to the demands likely to be made upon its powers of endurance prevents our passing in this summary manner over the intermediate spaces, and may even tend to magnify the monotonous days which lie before us. Leaving out of account those tricks of hope and fear and forgetfulness which are too subtle to be reduced to any rule, let us consider what are the conditions which affect, 1st, our sense of duration in passing through any period; 2ndly, the space which it occupies in our minds; and, 3rdly, the apparent distance of any point in it. It is difficult to say by what standard the lapse of time is unconsciously reckoned-what are the beads upon our mental rosaries by which we measure its duration as it passes through our hands. They consist probably in part of physical sensations, and in some kind of mechanical tendency to the recurrence of certain states or actions at fixed periods. There are people in whose constitutions there is so much of this mechanical regularity, that they can tell as by instinct, without consciously making any kind of calculation, what o'clock it is whenever you ask them. They are popularly said to have been born while the clock was striking, and to naturally unpunctual people this power seems to be a privilege as enviable as it is astonishing. It seems to be clear, from the extraordinary, almost unlimited, expansion and contraction to which, in cases of illness, the sense of duration is liable, that the more ordinary variations in the apparent length of the hours depend in a great measure upon physical causes; and, accordingly, in health, when the only disturbing causes are external, the hours seem longest are always those which which |