All the long day,

In sunshine would I sit near some old tree,
Dreaming o'er Tasso's gorgeous minstrelsy,
Of towers, and silver lutes, and ladyes gay,
Of tilt and tournament, and knightly fray,
And songs, old songs, the music of the soul-
Those thoughts across my busy brain would roll
All the long day.-E. V. KENEALY.

(8.) Besides the forms reserved as better coming in under following sections, there are a certain amount of variants from groups already given, caused by having one line or more longer or shorter than the rest, of which it seems proper to instance a selection.

Variation on triplet from this cause:

Whoe'er she be,

That not impossible She

That shall command my heart and me;
Where'er she lie,

Locked up from mortal eye

In shady leaves of destiny.-R. CRASHAW,

Variation on quatrain from ditto, last line cut short :

All thoughts, all passions, all delights,

Whatever stirs this mortal frame,

All are but ministers of Love,

And feed his sacred flame.-S. T. COLERIDGE.

Another form ditto:

(5)

Thou in the moon's bright chariot, proud and gay

(4)

Dost thy bright wood of stars survey,

And all the year dost with thee bring

(6)

Of thousand flowery lights thine own nocturnal spring.

COWLEY.

The variations on longer pieces are infinite, but a few must

suffice.

Loudly through the wide-flung door

Came the roar

Of the sea upon the skerry,

(4)

(5)

(4)

(3)

(2)

And its thunder loud and near

Reached the ear,

Mingling with their voices merry.-LONGFELLOW.

Living child or pictured cherub,

Ne'er o'ermatched its baby grace;
And the mother moving nearer,
Looked it calmly in the face,
Then with slight and quiet gesture,
And with lips that scarcely smiled,
Said 'A portrait of my daughter

When she was a child.'-JEAN INGELOW.

Out of the bosom of the Air,

Out of the cloud-folds of her garments shaken,
Over the woodlands brown and bare,

Over the harvest-fields forsaken,

Silent and soft and slow

Descends the snow.-LONGFELLOW.

The next has the same general structure, only instead of shortening the closing couplet runs out.

THIS chapter is a continuation of the last, divided from it on account of the length of the subject more than from any other cause, but as a whole the forms treated are longer.

(1.) The five-lined stave. In this length the first, third, and fourth lines generally rhyme together, or as here the first remains unrhymed.

Othere the old sea-captain

Who dwelt in Helgoland,

To King Alfred, the Lover of Truth,
Brought a snow-white walrus tooth,

Which he held in his brown right hand.

His figure was tall and stately,
Like a boy's his eye appeared;
His hair was yellow as hay,

But threads of a silvery grey

Gleamed in his tawny beard.-LONGFELLOW.

If the rest of the lines are of four feet the last one most usually falls to three beats only.

The gorse is yellow on the heath

The banks with speedwell flowers are gay,

The oaks are budding, and beneath

The hawthorn soon will bear the wreath,

The silver wreath of May.-CHARLOTTE SMITH.

In the following, lines two and five are alike short.

How sweet the answer Echo makes

To music at night,

When roused by lute or horn she wakes,

And far away o'er lawn and lakes

Goes answering light!-T. MoORE.

Another arrangement is this, with the short commencing.

Go, lovely Rose !

Tell her that wastes her time and me,

That now she knows,

When I resemble her to thee,

How sweet and fair she seems to be.-WALLER.

In the following we have reduplication of the second line, the result resembling out-about with an additional line.

Palaces with golden domes,

Marble fanes, and silver towers,
Gardens glittering with flowers,
Where sweet Aphrodite roams

All the livelong summer hours.-Kenealy.

Many of these forms are again found as components of longer stanzas.

(2.) Among other methods conclusion of a stave is in a few cases made to consist of one or more unrhymed lines, contrasting with the others.

Oh, come and see this lovelet,
This little turtle-dovelet,
The maidens that are neatest,
And tenderest and sweetest,
Should buy it to amuse 'em,
And nurse it in their bosom.

The little pet! young loves to sell!
My pretty loves who'll buy ?-AYTOUN.

Though the above is a direct exception to the contrary, lines so circumstanced are generally odd-over, which tends greatly to obviate rhyme tendency.

Thora of Rimol! hide me! hide me!
Danger and shame and death betide me!
For Olaf the King is hunting me down,

Through field and forest, through thorp and town!

Thus cried Jarl Hakon

To Thora, the fairest of women.-LONGFELLOW.

In the roundel form also the single lines are in rare instances left unrhymed.

And up came the goblins that moment, and they
Look ghostly and grewsome, and ghastly and grey,
Yet they revel and riot it roundly.

The beer it has vanished, the pitchers are bare,
Then whooping and hooting away through the air,
O'er hill and dale clatter the weird ones.

THEODORE MARTIN.

So also in triplets Campbell's piece entitled 'Hohenlinden.' In the following we have a two-foot quick measure closed by a line of three feet unrhymed in.

And the pedlar answered,
From beneath his load,
At noon they went streaming
Right o'er my road.

From the farmsteads the lassies

Rushed out to see

How they skimmed like swallows

Over plough and lea.

As they went to the hills

What a head they bare!

Like a snowdrift scudding

On the stormy sea,

And where were the steeds could o'ertake them ?-SHAIRP.

(3.) Longer stanzas consist very generally of unions of the shorter forms previously passed in review; thus this, a quatrain between two couplets.

'Tis evening on Abruzzo's hill
The summer's sun is lingering still,
As though unwilling to bereave

The landscape of its softest beam ;—
So fair,-one can but look and grieve,
To think that like a lovely dream
A few brief fleeting moments more

Must see its reign of beauty o'er !—ALARIC WATTS.

Gray's 'Ode on a distant prospect of Eton College,' consists of a quatrain and roundel conjoined. Again, we find others composed of two quatrains differently rhymed, and so on. But by no means are stanzas always put together in parts like these, though as in the next a single line doing duty in common at the supposed junction is often the sole cause otherwise.

Weighed in the balance, hero dust
Is vile as vulgar clay;
Thy scales, Mortality, are just

To all that pass away.

But yet methought the living great

Some higher sparks should animate,

To dazzle and dismay;

Nor deemed contempt could thus make mirth
Of these the conquerors of the earth.-BYRON.

The following arrangement is one found with tolerable frequency.

And yet, the soul-awakening gleam,

That struck perchance the farthest cone

Of Scotland's rocky wilds, did seem

To visit me and me alone;

Me unapproached by any friend,

Save those who to my sorrows lend

Tears due unto their own.-WORDSWORTH.

A stanza of good presence and repute is that used by Byron in his Don Juan,' five-foot march, three rhymes of a sort alternated together, closed by a couplet.