according as occasion calls; and is compact and sufficient in himself for every turn of service. But the stanza is like a body of those foreign soldiers which the old Romans despised, and who, being individually ill-armed and ill-disciplined, find all their safety depend in keeping close together, and obeying nothing but one general movement: so that quick evolutions, rapid advance, sudden stop, are out of the question: all must be done by rule, with slow solemnity. And let the work to be done be that of one, or five, or ten men, the whole ten must do it. Again, the internal integrity of the stanza often requires an idea to be expanded through its whole extent, which ought to occupy little more than a half or two-thirds of it. And the overflow of a full stanza will often have to be expanded most thinly throughout the next. Hence heavy, unwieldy, and often weak prolixity, is the besetting fault against which its constructor has to be on the perpetual watch; and which the reader, if he grow fastidious, as through such monotony he naturally does, is very quick at detecting. Homer, with fifty of his impetuous and concentrated hexameters, sometimes does as effectual work as Tasso with fifty of his stanzas. Such is the high price paid for superior harmony. But music is

proverbially expensive.

162

CHAPTER XVIII.

ON LYRIC POETRY.

124. THE tune to which the hexameter was sung, though accompanied by the lyre, as we see in the example of Demodocus in the "Odyssey," must have been a plain and invariable chant. But instrumental music is too ambitious to be long confined to so narrow limits. In process of time it accomplished an air, and thenceforward became more a master than a servant to poetry. Verses were to be adapted to the turns of this varied tune. Hence, instead of the old uniformity, their lengths were different, and even their measure varied and as the air can be of but limited length, it was repeated again and again; hence, also, the verses were repeated again and again in the same order of length and measure. Thus originated the stanza. Not, however, that the stanza is universally employed in ancient lyric poetry: there are gradations, of course, from the repetition of one line, as in the first Ode of

Horace; through couplets, as in his Ode ii. 18, and in his Epodes; through quatrains, as the Alcaic and Sapphic measures, up to the diversified turns and solemn length of the Greek strophe.

Nor is the stanza indispensable to modern lyric poetry. The "Allegro" and "Penseroso" of Milton have been set to expressive music. But, as in the ancient, it is the common form, if the piece be really lyrical, that is, intended to be sung as a song, and not adapted to the artificial strains of the opera or oratorio. From the odes of Collins and Gray, to the songs of Glover and Gay, there is no piece which is not thus divided. The common form is naturally the quatrain, lying, as it does, about the middle between the simple line and the more complex forms. The extreme in the direction of these latter is more difficult to determine. It may contain about twelve or sixteen lines, if we take the Odes of Pindar and the dramatic choruses for examples. The more elaborate the music, so much the more easily would the ear, thus assisted, follow a long and diversified series of lines: but in proportion to its simplicity, the ear is thrown upon the naked relations of the lines among themselves, and for very clearness desires a shorter number of them. Our Pindaric odes are constructed upon an utter misapprehension of this principle: they have all

the intricacy of the Pindaric construction, without the slightest reference in the mind of the composer to the guidance of a musical accompaniment. Thus, in Gray's "Installation Ode," the rhymes are so distant as to determine nothing, especially in the two last stanzas. Seven lines occur between the rhymes hand and band. It was indeed written for music; but did he expect the music to last, and go every where together with it? And yet it is one of the most regular of our Pindarics. Can we wonder at their unpopularity? Perhaps in no case has pedantry shown its perverseness more manifestly.

125. Since every line is now a characteristic feature of the stanza, having to manifest a pointed similarity to its fellows in it, as in the case of the Sapphic, or a pointed difference, as in the main case of the Alcaic, it is plain that the substitution of equivalent feet must be abandoned, or at least very much curtailed in its extent of licence. What, for instance, would become of the Alcaic, if spondees were substituted for its dactyls? It can only occur where the peculiarity of the measure of the line does not lie in the very syllables of the foot, as it does in the case of the Sapphic, but simply in the whole foot, as it does in so many cases of the choral metres.

126. Rich indeed was ancient poetry in its

variety of lyrical measure. Coming from the enjoyment of it to the corresponding class of our modern poetry, we are struck with its exceeding poverty, and this poverty is the more provoking because it might in no small measure have been avoided; for our language is by no means incompetent to furnish us with trochaic, dactylic, anapæstic, and even other lively measures, peculiarly fitted to song. And yet with the exception of a few songs, all our lyrical poetry, from ballad up to strophe, is iambic in measure. It consequently wants character and spirit. A hymn, an ode, a drinking song, a funeral song, a love song, are all written in this one measure, which, too, comes nearest to prose of all. And the Odes of Pindar, as well as of Horace, have been indiscriminately done into this universal and therefore utterly unmeaning form.

127. An evil genius seems to have presided over our lyric poetry. It was not enough, it seems, to make the measure unmeaning—something more was wanting still: so the measure itself is debased. Here, above all, the aid of rhyme was most necessary to distinguish the lines from each other, and add some variety besides. But led by the example of the ancients, and blind through pedantry to the very superior means which they had of marking the difference of their lines, Milton