Alexandrine, gives a full round close to the stanza. Some of the greatest poems in English have been written in this exceedingly difficult measure, although it has been little used during the past hundred years. From The Faërie Queene, we quote the stanzas which describe the abode of Morpheus, the god of sleep. No finer example of onomatopoeia can be found in English poetry. Of nothing he takes keep means he pays no attention to anything.

He, making speedy way through 'spersed air,
And through the world of waters wide and deep,
To Morpheus' house doth hastily repair.
Amid the bowels of the earth full steep,
And low, where dawning day doth never peep,
His dwelling is; there Tethys his wet bed
Doth ever wash, and Cynthia still doth steep
In silver dew his ever-drooping head,

Whiles sad Night over him her mantle black doth spread.

Whose double gates he findeth lockèd fast,
The one fair framed of burnished ivory,

The other all with silver overcast;

And wakeful dogs before them far do lie,
Watching to banish Care, their enemy,
Who oft is wont to trouble gentle Sleep.
By them the sprite doth pass in quietly,

And unto Morpheus comes, whom drownèd deep
In drowsy fit he finds: of nothing he takes keep.

And more to lull him in his slumber soft,

A trickling stream from high rock tumbling down,
And ever-drizzling rain upon the loft,

Mixed with a murmuring wind much like the soun'
Of swarming bees, did cast him in a swoon.

No other noise, nor people's troublous cries,
As still are wont t' annoy the wallèd town,
Might there be heard; but careless Quiet lies
Wrapped in eternal silence far from enemies.

The messenger approaching to him spake;
But his waste words returned to him in vain:
So sound he slept that nought mought him awake.
Then rudely he him thrust, and pushed with pain,
Whereat he 'gan to stretch; but he again
Shook him so hard that forced him to speak.
As one then in a dream, whose drier brain

Is tossed with troubled sights and fancies weak,
He mumbled soft, but would not all his silence break.

James Thomson, a Scottish poet of the early eighteenth century, was a forerunner of the Romantic poets. His Seasons is one of the earliest of nature poems. Though a contemporary of Pope, Thomson wrote not in the almost universally used heroic couplet, but in Miltonic blank verse and the Spenserian stanza. The following passage from his Castle of Indolence is an excellent example of onomatopoeia. The language is archaic in imitation of Spenser. Drowsy-head means drowsiness; eke, also; and noyance, annoyance.

A pleasing land of drowsy-head it was:

Of dreams that wave before the half-shut eye;
And of gay castles in the clouds that pass,
Forever flushing round a summer-sky.
There eke the soft delights, that witchingly
Instil a wanton sweetness through the breast,
And the calm pleasures, always hovered nigh;
But whate'er smackt of noyance, or unrest,
Was far, far off expelled from this delicious nest.

After The Faërie Queene, the two greatest poems in the Spenserian stanza are probably Keats's "Eve of St. Agnes" and Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. We quote the opening and closing stanzas of Keats's poem. Seldom do we find a poem which so well strikes the right note in the opening line and sustains it to the very end.

St. Agnes' Eve-Ah, bitter chill it was!
The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;

The hare limp'd trembling through the frozen grass,
And silent was the flock in woolly fold:

Numb were the Beadsman's fingers, while he told
His rosary, and while his frosted breath,
Like pious incense from a censer old,

Seem'd taking flight for heaven, without a death,

Past the sweet Virgin's picture, while his prayer he saith.

And they are gone: ay, ages long ago
These lovers fled away into the storm.

That night the Baron dreamt of many a woe,
And all his warrior-guests, with shade and form
Of witch, and demon, and large coffin-worm,
Were long be-nightmar'd. Angela the old
Died palsy-twitch'd, with meagre face deform;
The Beadsman, after thousand aves told,
For aye unsought for slept among his ashes cold.

Byron's use of the Spenserian stanza differs greatly from Spenser's. He gives the measure a power and sweep which compensate for the melody and finish which his poetry lacks. Byron's verse is singularly uneven. Some of the following lines are poor, and one is actually ungrammatical; but the other lines are almost perfect of their kind. We quote the apostrophe to the Ocean,

probably the greatest of all the many fine passages in English poetry which deal with the sea.

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society where none intrudes,
By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more,
From these our interviews, in which I steal
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the Universe, and feel
What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal.

Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean-roll!
Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;
Man marks the earth with ruin-his control
Stops with the shore;-upon the watery plain
The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain
A shadow of man's ravage, save his own,
When for a moment, like a drop of rain,
He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan,
Without a grave, unknell'd, uncoffin'd, and unknown.

His steps are not upon thy paths-thy fields
Are not a spoil for him-thou dost arise
And shake him from thee; the vile strength he wields
For earth's destruction thou dost all despise,
Spurning him from thy bosom to the skies,
And send'st him, shivering in thy playful spray,
And howling, to his Gods, where haply lies
His petty hope in some near port or bay,

And dashest him again to earth-there let him lay.

The armaments which thunderstrike the walls
Of rock-built cities, bidding nations quake,
And monarchs tremble in their capitals,

The oak leviathans, whose huge ribs make
Their clay creator the vain title take

Of lord of thee, and arbiter of war;

These are thy toys, and, as the snowy flake,
They melt into thy yeast of waves, which mar
Alike the Armada's pride, or spoils of Trafalgar.

Thy shores are empires, changed in all save thee-
Assyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage, what are they?
Thy waters washed them power while they were free,
And many a tyrant since: their shores obey
The stranger, slave or savage; their decay
Has dried up realms to deserts:-not so thou,
Unchangeable save to thy wild waves' play-
Time writes no wrinkle on thine azure brow-
Such as creation's dawn beheld, thou rollest now.

Thou glorious mirror, where the Almighty's form
Glasses itself in tempests: in all time,

Calm or convulsed-in breeze, or gale, or storm,
Icing the pole, or in the torrid clime
Dark-heaving;-boundless, endless, and sublime
The image of Eternity-the throne

Of the Invisible; even from out thy slime
The monsters of the deep are made; each zone
Obeys thee; thou goest forth dread, fathomless, alone.

In terza rima, the difficult measure used by Dante in the Divine Comedy, the lines are grouped in divisions of three so that the middle rime of one stanza becomes the initial rime of the next. Each section of the poem closes with a couplet. As the stanzas are all interlocked by rime, the movement is not stanzaic but continuous, as in blank verse. Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" is one of the greatest of longer English lyrics. The west wind