frain. It is by the aid of a refrain also that Charles Lamb ties together his sequence of three-line stanzas:—

All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

I have had playmates, I have had companions,
In my days of childhood, in my joyful school-days,
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

I loved a love once, fairest among women;
Closed are her doors on me, I must not see her;
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

Tennyson succeeded in giving lightness and fluidity to an unrimed lyric arranged in stanzas of three lines each, which is supposed to be sung in "The Prin

O Swallow, Swallow, flying, flying south,
Fly to her, and fall upon her gilded eaves,
And tell her, tell her, what I tell to thee.

O tell her, Swallow, that thou knowest each,
That bright and fierce and fickle is the South,
And dark and true and tender is the North.

And in "Tears, Idle Tears," one of his loveliest lyrics, Tennyson again abandoned rime, but clung to the refrain as marking usefully the limit of the stanza:

Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.

Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,
That brings our friends up from the underworld,
Sad as the last which reddens over one
That sinks with all we love below the verge ;
So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.

Symonds held this to be a "perfect specimen of the most melodious and complete minstrelsy in words "; and he declared that the refrain with its "recurrence of sound and meaning is a substitute for rime and suggests rime so persuasively that it is impossible to call the poem mere blank verse."

A device not dissimilar is employed in a lyric by an American poet, untimely cut off in his youth, Charles Henry Lüders. This song is entitled the "Four Winds"1: and it must be given in full to show clearly how the several stanzas are kept separate and distinct, clearly perceptible to the listening ear, without the aid of the rime:

Wind of the North,

Wind of the Northland snows,

Wind of the winnowed skies and sharp, clear stars, —

Blow cold and keen across the naked hills,

And crisp the lowland pools with crystal films,

And blue the casement-squares with glittering ice,
But go not near my love.

Wind of the West,

Wind of the few, far clouds,

Wind of the gold and crimson sunset lands, -
Blow fresh and pure across the peaks and plains,
And broaden the blue spaces of the heavens,
And sway the grasses and the mountain pines,
But let my dear one rest.

Wind of the East,

Wind of the sunrise seas,

Wind of the clinging mists and gray, harsh rains, —

Blow moist and chill across the wastes of brine,

And shut the sun out, and the moon and stars,

And lash the boughs against the dripping eaves,
Yet keep thou from my love.

1 By permission from The Dead Nymph and other Poems by Charles Henry Lüders, copyrighted, 1891, by Charles Scribner's Sons.

But thou, sweet wind!

Wind of the fragrant South,

Wind from the bowers of jasmine and of rose,
Over magnolia glooms and lilied lakes

And flowering forests come with dewy wings,
And stir the petals at her feet and kiss
The low mound where she lies.

Although the refrain has served Lamb, Longfellow, and Tennyson to impress the form of an unrimed stanza upon the ear, other poets have done without its aid, perhaps because they did not feel any desire to isolate the successive units of construction. Thus William Watson has a sequence of quatrains in "England, My Mother," linked together by the continuity of the thought and flowing forward without any sharp division into stanzas:

In this poem of Watson's the stanzas are of uniform length and of uniform metrical construction; but they are not separate unities. The stanza is not insisted on; it is not integral to the movement of the ode-like lyric. Still less does our ear ask for rime when the succes

sive stanzas are not of uniform length or of uniform metrical construction.

In Matthew Arnold's "Strayed Reveler," there is no rigorous uniformity; indeed, the rhythmical movement is so free that the ear adjusts itself at once to this freedom and has to make no effort to seize any prescribed metrical scheme:

The Youth

Who speaks? Ah, who comes forth
To thy side, Goddess, from within?
How shall I name him?

This spare,

dark-featured,

Quick-eyed stranger?

Ah, and I see too

His sailor's bonnet,

His short coat, travel-tarnished,

With one arm bare!

Art thou not he, whom fame

This long time rumors

The favor'd guest of Circe, brought by the waves,
Art thou he, stranger?

The wise Ulysses,

Laertes' son?

I am Ulysses.

Ulysses

And thou, too, sleeper?

Thy voice is sweet.

It may be thou hast follow'd

Through the islands some divine bard,

By age taught many things,

Age and the Muses;

And heard him delighting

The Chiefs and the people

In the banquet, and learned his songs

Of Gods and Heroes,

Of war and arts,

And peopled cities,

Inland or built

By the gray sea. If so, then hail!

I honor and welcome thee.

Apparently it is only when the stanza stands out by itself that our ears expect the rime to indicate the metrical framework; and when the verse flows on avoiding equal subdivisions, our ears accept this without being in any way strained. Browning, for example, divides "One Word More," his epistle to his wife at the end of "Men and Women," into groups of lines, these metrical paragraphs containing sometimes only three or four lines and sometimes extending to more than twenty. Thus there is no suggestion of any stanzaic form, and therefore there is no need for rime or refrain or for any other device to guide the ear. Here is the first of these paragraphs, limited to four lines only:

There they are, my fifty men and women
Naming me the fifty poems finished !
Take them, Love, the book and me together;
Where the heart lies, let the brain lie also.

And here is another paragraph, the sixth, having three lines only: —

You and I would rather see that angel,

Painted by the tenderness of Dante,

Would we not? - than read a fresh Inferno.

Part of the ease and lightness of this poem is due to its trochaic rhythm. As we examine the most satisfying of the lyrics in our language which are not adorned with rime, we cannot help remarking how strong is the tendency of the poets to end their lines with short syllables. They are prone either to employ a trochaic rhythm, or to append an extra short syllable to their iambic lines. It is an unrimed iambic heptameter with this added short syllable which Newman chose for his translation of Homer.